Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Darwinian medicine and proximate and evolutionary explanations

This post is a continuation of my reply to Jerry Coyne's post on Darwinian medicine.

Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr asserted that there are two ways to understand biology: proximate explanations and evolutionary explanations.



Evolutionary explanations are speculation about how a disease came to be. For example, the malaria parasite (eukaryotic protists of the genus Plasmodium) insinuates itself in the hemoglobin of red blood cells. The abnormal hemoglobin of people with sickle cell trait is less hospitable to the malaria parasite, thereby giving people with the genetic trait some protection from malaria. Homozygous sickle anemia is often fatal, but the carrier state may confer benefits in an area in which malaria is endemic. This implies that it is possible that sickle cell anemia is an evolutionary adaptation to malaria.

The theory about sickle cell anemia and malaria is perhaps the most established application of evolutionary reasoning to disease. Other speculations, such as the speculation that malaria makes people prostrate so that mosquitoes can more easily land on their skin and transmit the disease to others, is a less accepted theory.

The difficulty with evolutionary explanations in medicine is:

1) All of the relevant pathophysiology is provided by the proximate explanations, which are the only explanations useful for treatment.

2) Evolutionary explanations are based on proximate explanations-- scientists understand a disease, and then, based on the detailed proximate explanation for the disease, evolutionary biologists concoct speculations as to how the disease evolved. Evolutionary explanations are always dependent on proximate explanations, not the other way around.

3) Evolutionary explanations do not provide a substantial basis for therapy. Even in situations in which evolutionary biologists claim that an evolutionary explanation has provided therapeutic insight, actual scientific confirmation of the effect of the therapy (i.e.- the proximate explanation) is needed to actually implement the theory.

4) Evolutionary explanations by themselves are worthless to medicine. All medical treatments are based on detailed proximate explanations

5) Even in areas of medicine in which evolutionary insight is claimed to be important (such as the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria), the necessary expertise-- microbiology, cell biology, molecular biology, molecular genetics, population biology, pharmacology, pathology, etc.-- is already an integral part of medical education and research. Evolutionary biology has contributed nothing of substance in the past, except to point out that bacteria that are not killed by antibiotics are not killed by antibiotics, which is sole insight provided by 'natural selection' to antibiotic resistance.

6) As evolutionary biologists readily acknowledge, there are very few evolutionary biologists in medical schools, and modern medicine has progressed rapidly and far without evolutionary speculations about disease.

7) Evolutionary speculations about disease belong in departments of evolutionary biology, not in medical schools. Any genuine insight provided by such evolutionary speculation can be communicated to medical researchers through the normal process of communication (a brief e-mail, a paper presented at a scientific meeting, etc)

8) The incorporation of evolutionary biology in medical school curricula is a waste of valuable resources. It is the actual proximate scientific explanations for disease that guides medical research. Speculation about biological origins already has a scientific home, and provides little help to medicine.

More to come.


  1. The term Darwinism is often used in the United States by promoters of creationism, notably by leading members of the intelligent design movement, as an epithet to attack evolution as though it were an ideology (an "ism") of philosophical naturalism, or atheism.[17] For example, Phillip E. Johnson makes this accusation of atheism with reference to Charles Hodge's book What Is Darwinism?.[18] However, unlike Johnson, Hodge confined the term to exclude those like Asa Gray who combined Christian faith with support for Darwin's natural selection theory, before answering the question posed in the book's title by concluding: "It is Atheism."[19][20][21] Creationists use the term Darwinism, often pejoratively, to imply that the theory has been held as true only by Darwin and a core group of his followers, whom they cast as dogmatic and inflexible in their belief.[22] Casting evolution as a doctrine or belief, as well as a pseudo-religious ideology like Marxism,[23] bolsters religiously motivated political arguments to mandate equal time for the teaching of creationism in public schools.

  2. Where is the science in the previous response. This is one of the issues of the neo-darwinist agenda. Instead of addressing the science, they offer rhetoric.

  3. Interesting post. In a discussion several years ago, someone told me that by not accepting the entirety of neo-Darwinian Evolution (i.e. its ability to account for drastic increases in biological complexity and major changes at the macro level), I was turning my back on all scientific development for the past 150 years, and especially in the field of medicine. This post explains in much more detail what I pointed out to her rather simply back then, which is that, when it comes to medicine, the often laughable speculations of Darwinian theory (Malaria making you lie down so you're easier for mosquitoes to bite being a good example) have had virtually nothing of practical value to offer that wasn't better addressed through a scientific medical approach that mostly ignores Darwinian evolutionary theory.

    That said, Egnor has already pointed out the less than benign effect that Darwinian theory has had on medicine in the form of Eugenics. But isn't there a more recent example? Perhaps I'm mistaken on this, but didn't evolutionary theory lead to and support the interpretation that the portions of DNA that don't code for proteins were junk and that they weren't worthy of much study? And yet, with the discoveries in recent years showing that junk-DNA is not really junk and the more recent realization that there seems to be a correlation between the deregulation of certain of these non-coding regions and the development of, at least, cancer and diabetes, it seems to me that we may be decades behind where we might have been in the fight against these and any number of other diseases had the people in the relevant scientific fields not bought into this myth of junk-DNA being a conglomeration of evolutionary holdovers from common ancestors.