Darwinian Medicine's Drawn-Out Dawn
Ever since Darwin, physicians have wondered why humans haven't evolved to be healthier. Blame natural selection itself, says Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
CREDIT: B. STRAUCH/SCIENCE
Twenty years ago, Nesse and evolutionary biologist George Williams attributed our vulnerability to disease to our evolutionary history. The most widely propagated versions of genes are those that made more babies possible, irrespective of their effect on health and well-being, they noted. Evolution, in other words, didn't always favor prolonged good health. Viewed through an evolutionary lens, disease symptoms such as fever and diarrhea were likely imperfect weapons in the body's defenses against infection, they argued. They also pointed out that our immune systems could not evolve fast enough to keep ahead of germs, and that other mismatches have developed between our bodies and modern environments.
In their 1991 paper in The Quarterly Review of Biology, Williams and Nesse urged medicine to embrace evolutionary thinking. Aptly titled “The Dawn of Darwinian Medicine,” it called the dearth of evolutionary biology in medical schools “unfortunate” and asked physicians to be “as attuned to Darwin as they have been to Pasteur,” as that would be the only way to truly understand why we get sick and could lead to changes in medical practice./.../
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