sensitivity and specificity; false positive, false negative; biological specificity

In medical contexts, the concept "sensitivity and specificity" refers to the two ways of correctly identifying people who are ill:

• sensitivity: the proportion of positives that are correctly identified, e.g., that a diagnostic test is highly sensitive to signs of the disease,
• specificity: the proportion of negatives that are correctly identified, e.g., that a diagnostic test is highly specific to the disease in question and is not triggered by extraneous factors or other diseases.

Likewise, a diagnostic test is said to be highly sensitive if there are few false negatives, that is to say the test correctly identifies all or almost all people who are sick. A diagnostic test is said to be highly specific if there are few false positives, that is to say the test correctly identifies healthy people as not-sick. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity

In historical, philosophical, and social studies of biology and the biomedical sciences, biological specificity is a much broader and somewhat more difficult concept to define, but generally refers to the discriminative effect of biological processes as well as the selectivity of action and reaction. Typical examples include the specificity of an enzyme to a substrate, species of sperm to species of egg, and the specificity of immune response. On biological specificity see:

• Judson, Horace Freeland. The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology. Commemorative Edition. Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2013.
• Mazumdar, Pauline M. H. Species and Specificity: An Interpretation of the History of Immunology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Mertens, Rebecca. The Construction of Analogy-Based Research Programs: The Lock-and-Key Analogy in 20th Century Biochemistry. Bielefeld: Transcipt Verlag, 2019.
• Silverstein, Arthur M. A History of Immunology. 2nd ed. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2009. 
• Weiss, Paul A. “The Problem of Specificity in Growth and Development.” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 19, no. 3 (1947): 235–78.