Darwinian Medicine

When Randolph Nesse was 20 years old, he was perplexed by the notion that Darwin’s evolutionary theory of natural selection failed to eliminate the aging process in humans, animals and microbial biology, which led Nesse along with George Williams and Steven Sterns to found a new branch of medicine in the early 1990s. Known as Evolutionary Medicine or Evo Med or Darwinian Medicine, while conventional western medicine addresses the proximate causes of a disease or a degenerative condition, Darwinian Medicine looks at the broader and higher-level mechanisms behind each condition, known as ultimate causes in the language of Evolutionary Medicine.

The Study of Trade-offs

Darwinian Medicine also looks at trade-offs, when a benefit in one area or during a particular period of an organism’s life can often lead to some sort of harm or disadvantage in another area or time of life, for instance, the evolution of cells designed to optimize growth and survival through the early reproductive years, may lead to cancers in later life, when the same cellular growth function continues beyond reproductive age. Evo Med also focuses on mismatches, where an adaptation designed for one environment becomes maladaptive or irrelevant when the organism moves into a new or different environment, suggesting, for instance, that the marked rise in allergies and autoimmune conditions in recent decades, may be the result of human’s obsessive removal of certain microbes that may be beneficial to our immune systems.

Evo Med & Cancer Patients

By way of an example of Evo Med in applied medicine, the Center of Excellence for Evolutionary Therapy at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa Florida has been employing Evo Med-based Adaptive therapies for cancer patients, thereby containing but not completely eliminating certain cancer tumors, but rather, arresting the cancer’s spread before employing other forms of Extinction Therapies, such as Adoptive Cell Transfer Therapy, Antibody Drug Conjugates, Click Chemistry and CAR T Cell Therapy. “What we’re dealing with here is a whole new basic science that has not been applied to medicine,” say Dr. Nesse. “It’s a very large enterprise to completely upend what we think about what the human body is and how it works,” making Darwinian Medicine, yet another advance in the fight against disease.