Question

This question is based on the Anello et al. reading and will be graded later. Briefly explain one projected benefit of applying Evolutionary Medicine to disease, or teaching about Evolutionary Medicine in Life Science courses.

Answer 1

An Evolutionary approach to medicine can help us deal with the pathogens by increasing our understanding of the pathogen and facilitating the development of appropriate responses.

Evolutionary technologies like population genetics,serial transfer and production of the live vaccines, and phylogenetic analysis, have been widely applied. Other areas, such as infectious disease and aging research, illustrate the dramatic recent progress made possible by evolutionary insights. In still other areas, such as epidemiology, psychiatry, and understanding the regulation of bodily defenses, applying evolutionary principles remains an open opportunity. In addition , an evolutionary perspective fundamentally challenges the prevalent but fundamentally incorrect metaphor of the body as a machine designed by an engineer. Evolutionary biology and medicine in ways that will benefit public health.

Evolutionary medicine is emphasizing the mismatch of human's slowly evolving bodies with rapidly changing modern environment,providing access to new toxins, such as tobacco, alcohol and other psychotropic substances, as well as to high calorie, high fat diets ​along with an increasingly sedentary and physically less active lifestyle. Also,environmental pollution, excessive population growth producing social stress, the introduction of effective methods of birth control, and the changing patterns of exposure to infectious agents have all left their marks on our bodies and continue to do so. The conditions that may arise from such mismatch is long, including obesity, metabolic syndrome and Type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, Crohn’s disease, renal failure, osteoporosis, stroke, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, Atherosclerosis, asthma, cancer, chronic liver disease or cirrhosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and sexually transmitted infections, to mention just those ranking high on the WHO ‘hit-list’ of diseases that are causing disability.

A point to be noted is that, Cancer and aging are not adaptive, so why do they exist? A trade-off conveyed by antagonistic pleiotropy is one of the key concepts which include that idea.It concerns the action of genes that have beneficial effects at early stages of development ,whereas the same genes exert deleterious effects as the organism ages.

Now , evolutionary medicine has been around for almost 20 years, we all stron believe the time is ripe for the field to engage in translational research. This encompasses research into evolutionary developmental biology , which studies the developmental mechanisms that control body growth, shape and form the alterations in gene expression and function that lead to such phylogeny and issues pertaining to the role of gene-environment interaction in the health and disease .