If natural selection is capable of shaping the eye, you would think it would be able to do better than to leave us with the appendix, wisdom teeth, a perilous birth route, narrow coronary arteries and an enormous vulnerability to depression. Many people, even physicians, have the mistaken notion that the body is a machine and that its flaws result because natural selection is not powerful enough to prevent them. A genuinely evolutionary view reveals, however, that the body is not a machine at all but a soma shaped by natural selection whose many vulnerabilities arise not just because of the vagaries of selection, but also for five other good reasons. Explaining why the body is so vulnerable to disease is just one of the many contributions evolutionary biology offers to medicine. Randolph Nesse , M.D. is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, and Director, Evolution and Human Adaptation Program, The University of Michigan and coauthor (with George C. Williams) of Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine. His research focuses on evolutionary psychology and Darwinian medicine, as well as the evolutionary origins of emotions and how natural selection shapes the capacity for mood. Links: |
Please see the suggested reading list
and other speakers:
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
