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Evolutionary medicine or Darwinian medicine is the application of modern evolutionary theory to understanding health and disease. Modern biomedical research and practice have focused on the molecular and physiological mechanisms underlying health and disease, while evolutionary medicine focuses on the question of why evolution has shaped these ...
He is the author of Evolution of Infectious Disease (1994) and Plague Time: The New Germ Theory of Disease (2002), and is currently director of the program in Evolutionary Medicine at the Biology Department of the University of Louisville.
Evolutionary therapy is a subfield of evolutionary medicine that utilizes concepts from evolutionary biology in management of diseases caused by evolving entities such as cancer and microbial infections. [1]
Evolutionary theory has many applications in medicine. Many human diseases are not static phenomena, but capable of evolution. Many human diseases are not static phenomena, but capable of evolution. Viruses, bacteria, fungi and cancers evolve to be resistant to host immune defences, as well as to pharmaceutical drugs .
Evolution is the principal scientific theory that biologists use to understand life and is used in many disciplines, including medicine, psychology, conservation biology, anthropology, forensics, agriculture and other social-cultural applications.
Evolutionary biology, in particular the understanding of how organisms evolve through natural selection, is an area of science with many practical applications. [1] [2] Creationists often claim that the theory of evolution lacks any practical applications; however, this claim has been refuted by scientists.
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
Evolutionary physiology is the study of the biological evolution of physiological structures and processes; that is, the manner in which the functional characteristics of organisms have responded to natural selection or sexual selection or changed by random genetic drift across multiple generations during the history of a population or species. [2]