Toward a modern interpretation of emergence concept

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K12433
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Sociology/History of science and technology
• Research Institution: The University of Tokyo
• Principal Investigator: Sato Naoki 東京大学, 大学院総合文化研究科, 教授 (40154075)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: 生命概念 / 創発 / メカニスム / 生物学史 / 文献データベース / クラスタリング解析 / 細胞内共生説 / 生物対流

Outline of Final Research Achievements

As an approach to the problem related to rational understanding of emergent phenomena in life sciences, we analyzed the contemporary history of molecular biology by clustering all the terms in the titles and abstracts of all articles published from 1965 to 2014 in selected 32 major biological journals available in the PubMed database of NCBI, USA. The results suggested that the 40-years period is divided in three phases, and that the notion emergence became abundant in the third phase beginning from 2000, or genomic era. We also analyzed emergent phenomena, such as endosymbiotic origin of organelles and bioconvection.

Free Research Field

生命基礎論