Specific

Specific is a term that is used in various meanings.

  1. Specific as a medicinal substance. Medicines may have a specific effect on certain processes in the body and be used to treat specific diseases. For example, insulin is a specific substance that is used to treat diabetes.

  2. Specific to the disease. Some diseases are caused by specific microorganisms. Such diseases are called specific because their development is associated with a specific pathogen. A classic example is syphilis, which is caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum.

  3. Specific as pertaining to a particular species. This may mean a characteristic characteristic only of a given type of organism. For example, the presence of mammary glands is a specific feature of mammals.

One of the most well-known specific diseases is AIDS, caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This virus attacks the immune system, leading to the development of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. AIDS is a specific disease because it is caused by a specific HIV virus. It is transmitted sexually, through blood and from mother to child. AIDS leads to decreased immunity and the development of secondary infections. This is a currently incurable disease that represents a serious global problem.



Specific (Specific)

There are many descriptions of the term “specific”. This may seem strange, but they correspond to different contexts and areas of knowledge. Some may be surprised, because the concept of specificity seems so simple: a specific object, something separated from another. But, as journalist and author Daniil Freink suggested, this is a degeneration of the special. The chief etymologist of the Russian Academy, Dmitry Eliasson, identified six sources for the term “specific”. It is important for us to know that this word, derived from the Latin “spēcificus” (decree, pointer), means definite, precise, characteristic, species-specific, local, special, distinct, specific.

But time passed, the world developed, and the Latin word penetrated into other languages. Gradually, the term “specificity” began to denote the typical features of a certain group or community. For example, for mathematicians, the term specifically refers to a specific element characterized by a property. Further: for biologists this is a specific animal (for example, a whale or a giraffe), for ethnographers - a specific culture of a people, for sociologists - social communities. When Carl Linnaeus finally came up with binary nomenclature and introduced the classification of natural objects in 1766, a new field of science emerged. Biologists have decided to classify taxonomic organisms into specific species. This gave new meaning to the term “specific”: it is attributed to a unique species, such as a bumblebee. Today, specific is everything that consists of specific components and has certain properties, characteristics, qualities, characteristics, functions, and functionality.

Probably the first thing that comes to mind is that a special person is someone who exists in a separate area, usually in mountainous areas (for example, among gnomes or elves). Such a stereotype could be a legacy of the tradition of noticing a certain alienation or even hostility towards the artificial community of other worlds. In fact, mystical creatures lived here before, perhaps even often came into contact with people, but some peoples preferred to fence themselves off from them with rocks and steep slopes, believing that the place for the inhabitants of other planets was not here, but somewhere higher. Subsequently, unusual creatures began to be perceived as natives of distant lands, where there was no need to strive. People are more willing to believe that supernatural beings are out there somewhere, because it is easy to understand which one is good or bad, where God's law applies.

The topic of specificity is broad, because the term also refers to specific cases, events, actions and what is reflected in them, types, phases, varieties, separately - motives, characteristics, details. It is possible to provide a general picture of how terminology has changed over time using examples from biomedicine. First, the idea of ​​similarity appeared (based on the chitin-glucose shell of viruses from which life emerged, there is a hypothesis that the DNA of all living beings in general goes through approximately the same path of origin, development and death), for example, specificity - biomorphology,