Saturday, December 15, 2007


The need for medical professionals to study evolution

Evolution has a significant rule in human lives which makes it an important fact for medical professionals to understand evolution. The entire basis of evolution started “millions of years a go when life began spontaneously in a pond, and became more complex and it came to the point of the survival of the fittest”. Those who were less fit, injured or unable to adapt did not accompany evolution. Humans are the result of this process. Humans too adapt to certain environment and these days medical professionals are not really taught evolutionary explanations for “why our bodies are vulnerable to certain kinds of failures.” Existence of wisdom teeth, having genes that cause bipolar disease, and not knowing why appendix is still there?

There are lots of reasons where there is a need for understanding evolution in terms of medical field. Cancer is a good example of natural selection among cells in human body. Antibiotic resistance in today’s world also has brought up a lot of issues and concerns in medicine and showing evolution of microorganisms. Understanding spread of antibiotic resistance and its origin is another question of evolution. The more medical doctors and personals are aware of this issue there is a better chance to stop the abuse of antibiotics.

There are many reasons why it is hard to convince medical practitioners to embrace evolution in the nature of science. “Evolutionary hypotheses about human physiology are notoriously hard to investigate, given humans’ long generation times” thus giving a hard time to medial professionals.

I believe that every body especially doctors need to understand evolution to be able to help humans to stop antibiotic abuse, know the evolution process of other animals and how close we are related to other animals to find cures for diseases, evolution of our immune system is part of population genetics and natural selection.

This is a very broad topic with lots of other reasons that all needs to be reviewed and learned by our fellow medical precisionist for the hope of better care, cure and understanding human evolution.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nesse/EMN/editorial.pdf

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/01/why_do_so_many.html

http://www.evolutionandmedicine.org/


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