Implementation of Evolutionary Medicine

Already two centuries ago, Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather, observed that “to conduct the practice of medicine … as a great number of unconnected facts are difficult to be acquired, and to be reasoned” there was the need for a “theory founded upon nature, that should bind together the scattered facts of medical knowledge, and converge into one point of view the laws of organic life, …” (Darwin, 1794-1796). This need has not disappeared and indeed has increased enormously with the growth of medical knowledge: “Many general medicine textbooks now tend to be so large and structured in such a way that no one can realistically be expected to read one from cover to cover. Yet, at the same time, there is a strong onus on the author - or frequently, teams of authors - to include, as far as is possible, everything of practical relevance. … However easy access to information becomes, a certain sense of explication is missing; while the ‘whats’ and ‘hows’ abound, the ‘whys’ and ‘wherefores’ are relatively few. If the latter constitute the framework within which the detail can be better understood and remembered, than it is questionable whether the way in which medical information is currently approached is ideal. … Certainly, having the right intellectual framework within which to understand something is one of the best aids to mastering a subject. The best teachers are not necessarily those who know the most about a given subject; rather, they are the ones who, among other things, can reveal meaning amid a mass of data.” (Lewis, 2008). A possible rational response to this need is the deep-rooted integration of current medicine with the concepts of evolutionary medicine, i.e., the necessary transformation of current medicine into evolutionary medicine.