Empirical evolutionary medicine

Abstract

Medicine and evolutionary biology have crossed path several times since the publication of On the Origins of Species but the “new science of Darwinian medicine” dates back only to the early 1990s (Nesse & Williams, 1994). For psychiatrist Randolph Nesse and evolutionary biologist George C. Williams, the founders of Darwinian medicine, “there is no branch of medicine that cannot benefit substantially from an evolutionary approach in its research and, sometimes, its current clinical practice” (Nesse & Williams, 1997, p. 664). Though evolution did not have the profound transformative effect on medical research and practice envisaged at the outset by Nesse and Williams, there is a growing interest for evolutionary explanations of health and disease among biomedical researchers (Gluckman, Beedle, & Hanson, 2009). Robert L. Perlman’s Evolution and Medicine builds on this interest and offers a series of examples that beautifully illustrates the relevance of evolutionary thinking in medicine. After describing how an evolutionary perspective currently informs our understanding of genetic diseases, senescence, and cancer, the bulk of the book is devoted to understanding the dynamics of infectious diseases and hostepathogen coevolutionetwo of the most successful loci of interaction between evolutionary and medical concernse and closes with a chapter on gene and culture coevolution and another on man-made pathologies. Throughout eleven engaging chapters, Perlman carefully treads between evolutionary biology and medicine and successfully brings out the connections between the two fields that often go unnoticed. The prime aim of the book, however, is not to demonstrate that medicineeas a wholeeneeds to be embedded into an evolutionary framework. Indeed, one of the lessons of the book is that evolutionary medicine should be empirical. That is, one should first look at cases where evolution is likely to inform medicine