Human-Centric Functional Modeling and Evolutionary Biology

The newly emerging science of Human-Centric Functional Modeling provides an approach towards modeling biological and other systems that is hypothesized to maximize human capacity to understand and navigate complexity in those systems. This paper provide an overview exploring how Human-Centric Functional Modeling might be applied in evolutionary biology, and how this increase in capacity to understand the complexity that organisms have evolved into might be achieved. The broader usefulness of Human-Centric Functional Modeling is that it provides a simple mathematical definition of what constitutes a biological system, defines the problem-solving domain of any biological system in terms of abstract mathematical spaces, and provides an expression defining general problem-solving ability in any such domain. This enables it to be seen that all systems with general problem-solving ability in their own domain are potentially an abstraction of a single mathematical pattern of adaptive problem-solving that might apply to all domains. From this perspective nature has already potentially solved problems in biological organisms that can be represented in some abstract functional state spaces as the same general problem that must be solved to address problems in a wide range of other systems, including existential challenges from poverty to climate change, where Human-Centric Functional Modeling enables it to be seen that not only can nature’s solutions be copied, but that nature has demonstrated its solutions to have worked for hundreds of millions of years.

新兴学科以人为中心的功能建模（Human-Centric Functional Modeling）提供了一种对生物系统及其他系统进行建模的方法，该方法被假设可最大化人类理解与驾驭此类系统复杂性的能力。本文概述了以人为中心的功能建模在进化生物学中的应用路径，以及如何提升人类理解生物体演化形成的复杂系统的能力。以人为中心的功能建模的核心价值在于，它为生物系统的界定提供了简洁的数学定义，以抽象数学空间的形式划定了任一生物系统的问题求解域，并给出了可定义此类域内通用问题求解能力的表达式。这一特性使得我们得以发现：所有在自身域内具备通用问题求解能力的系统，本质上都可抽象为一种适用于所有领域的自适应问题求解的单一数学模式。从这一视角出发，自然界已在生物有机体中潜在地解决了诸多问题——这些问题可在某些抽象功能状态空间中被表征为一类通用问题，而解决这类问题正是应对诸多其他系统（从贫困到气候变化等生存挑战）中各类问题的必要前提。借助以人为中心的功能建模，我们不仅可以借鉴自然界的解决方案，还能证实这些方案已在数亿年间被证明行之有效。