Evolution and medicine: the long reach of "Dr. Darwin"
Niall Shanks1 and Rebecca A Pyles2
1Departments of History and of Philosophy, Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas 67260, USA
2Honors College and Department of Biological Sciences, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, Tennessee 37614, USA
Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 2007,
2:4doi:10.1186/1747-5341-2-4. Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.
Abstract
In
this review we consider the new science of Darwinian medicine. While it
has often been said that evolutionary theory is the glue that holds the
disparate branches of biological inquiry together and gives them
direction and purpose, the links to biomedical inquiry have only
recently been articulated in a coherent manner. Our aim in this review
is to make clear first of all, how evolutionary theory is relevant to
medicine; and secondly, how the biomedical sciences have enriched our
understanding of evolutionary processes. We will conclude our review
with some observations of the philosophical significance of this
interplay between evolutionary theory and the biomedical sciences.
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