Nothing in Medicine Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution
My post title comes from a 2012 Journal of Molecular Medicine article [1] by physician, scientist and UC San Diego professor Ajit Varki [2] in which he stresses the critical importance of evolutionary biology for medicine to the point where he argues it needs to be included in the medical curriculum as one of the basic clinical science, a view that others such as psychiatrist Randolph Nesse have also made. [3] Ignoring the clinical applications of evolutionary biology in areas ranging from epidemiology to oncology, a mastery of evolutionary biology allows one to make sense of the bizarre, maladaptive features of the human body from the gross anatomical down to the genomic which make perfect sense given the vagaries of an evolutionary process that only selects for what works at the moment, withougt thought for how those initial choices will impact the descendant of that organism. More importantly from a theistic perspective, as evolutionary biologist John Avise [4] has pointed out...
