Evolution-based medicine
- Evolution-based medicine ››
- Nesse and friends have written a stirring Science editorial (Science 2006 311(5764): 1071) calling for the teaching of evolution to biomedical researchers and clinicians. How better to understand how the body works and interacts with its environment? Dobzhansky was right and the larger part of medicine is applied biology. The evolved epigentics of foetal nutrition stress as a factor in adult metabolic disease (including obesity) ought to be the poster-child for this kind of thing and is rightly mentioned; cancer and antibiotic resistance and pathogens and environmental toxins are name-checked too; oddly missing is evolutionary psychology!
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…John Torday said:
Like Nesse et al, I too firmly believe in the value of an evolutionary perspective for biology and medicine in the post-genomic era. We must broaden our perspective now that we have the elements (see Torday JS. A Periodic Table for Biology. The Scientist, June 21,2004), but we must find new algorithms to determine how genes fit into the contexts of health and disease. Systems Biology, as presently practiced, will not provide such an algorithm because it is stochastic and evolution is not (random).
09-Oct-06 (0959)
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