Possible Causes of Instability of Reproduction of Heliobiological Results

Abstract

One of the main reasons why the existence of the effect of the influence of space weather on living organisms has caused skepticism among representatives of academic science for many years is the insufficient, according to the criteria of modern physics, the stability of the reproduction of the heliobiological effect. Signs of instability are the strong variability of the characteristics of the results obtained: amplitude, time lag, and even the sign of the effect. The paper formulates and substantiates the hypothesis that this instability is primarily due to methodological reasons: existing approaches, traditional for physics and biology of the XX century, are poorly suited for the study of a complex multilevel system of solar-biospheric connections. Using concrete examples, it is shown that new methodological principles, both already included in heliobiological research in the last 10 years, and newly formulated in this work, can significantly reduce the percentage of unexplained non-reproducible results. It is shown that it is necessary to take into account such specific features of the heliobiological effect as the individual nature of the reaction to space weather, the dependence of the effect on the phase of the cycle of solar and geomagnetic activity and on the sampling scale of experimental data, taking into account the possible contribution of meteorological factors, as well as the existence of different types of response of the biological system at different time scales.