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Evrimsel Tibbin Ilkeleri
Evrimsel Tibbin Ilkeleri
300 pages, Paperback
First published June 25, 2009
11 people are currently reading
229 people want to read
About the author
Peter Gluckman
15 books8 followersSir Peter Gluckman is University Distinguished Professor and Director of the Centre for Science in Policy, Diplomacy and Society at the University of Auckland and Chief Scientific Officer for the Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences. He is president of the International Network for Government Science Advice. He was the chief science advisor to the prime minister of New Zealand from 2009 to 2018.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 16, 2012
This is a pretty great resource on how evolutionary theory can be used to evaluate human health and disease, taking into consideration population-specific human variation. Why are the causes for our morbidity and mortality in a developed, western world so different from the morbidity and mortality of individuals in hunter-gatherer societies? From our hunter-gatherer ancestors? Natural selection does not select for traits that would result in a longer lifespan, natural selection selects for traits that maximizes reproductive fitness - the ability for us to successfully pass on our genes. Furthermore, evolution does not have a direction. It cannot start from scratch. Natural selection can only act upon what is already there. That is why we have the blind spot in our eye and why we have back pain later in life from standing upright. The high incidence of modern diseases could be due to 3 things:
1. It is simply a product of our longer lifespans - our cellular machinery has to break down eventually.
2. Antagonistic pleoitropy - a tradeoff/balancing act of evolution; a trait that benefits us developmentally is comes at a cost later on in life (e.g. the same hormones that allow us to develop normally early on are the same hormones that can lead to cancer later on)
3. Environmental mismatch. We have traits that are best adapted for fitness in a certain environment. Once we are removed from that environment and placed into a different one, that trait becomes maladaptive. An example would be the inability for humans to synthesize vitamin C. Perhaps, because our hominin ancestors had a diet so rich in fruit and other foods in vitamin C, it became unnecessary for our bodies to expend energy synthesizing a compound that we could just get from our diet. It wasn't until we started building ships and had people going out to sea for months at a time that diseases due to vitamin C deficiency became a problem.
Anyway, this was really interesting to me coming from a biomedical life sciences background emphasizing the mechanisms of disease. It makes sense to take into consideration evolutionary processes that result in population specific variation that shapes those mechanisms that cause disease. THUMBS UP.
1. It is simply a product of our longer lifespans - our cellular machinery has to break down eventually.
2. Antagonistic pleoitropy - a tradeoff/balancing act of evolution; a trait that benefits us developmentally is comes at a cost later on in life (e.g. the same hormones that allow us to develop normally early on are the same hormones that can lead to cancer later on)
3. Environmental mismatch. We have traits that are best adapted for fitness in a certain environment. Once we are removed from that environment and placed into a different one, that trait becomes maladaptive. An example would be the inability for humans to synthesize vitamin C. Perhaps, because our hominin ancestors had a diet so rich in fruit and other foods in vitamin C, it became unnecessary for our bodies to expend energy synthesizing a compound that we could just get from our diet. It wasn't until we started building ships and had people going out to sea for months at a time that diseases due to vitamin C deficiency became a problem.
Anyway, this was really interesting to me coming from a biomedical life sciences background emphasizing the mechanisms of disease. It makes sense to take into consideration evolutionary processes that result in population specific variation that shapes those mechanisms that cause disease. THUMBS UP.
August 25, 2020
Not a perfect book. Has a good deal of PC nonsense on race and eugenics, but these are minor parts of the book. It has a lot of interesting content. Unfortunately, it usually cites studies as "showing" something without giving any indicators of how much we should trust this or that study. This is quite important given the replication crisis.
August 9, 2021
I give the book 5 stars for content, the metric that matters most. If you want a book on evolutionary medicine, this is it, with close to 400 large two-column-format pages. The range of concepts covered is impressive. Since I've read a number of books on evolutionary biology, genetics, and so on, I had some familiarity going in, but I still found the going heavy. This would probably be a challenging book for someone who had never read in the life sciences. However, the field seems a bit short on treatment breakthroughs so far. Evolution can inform a lot more conditions than it can cure. But as the saying goes, the first step in fixing a problem is to understand it.
(The book stands in contrast to one you'll never see, a Principles of Intelligent Design Medicine.)
The writing style of the book could be better. Some of it can't be helped: a medical book will have a lot of medical jargon. You just have to learn the words. But this book needs an edit by someone who heard of the plain language movement. The book is full of clunky sentences that read like the "before" examples in a book such as Clear Technical Writing or the Oxford Guide to Plain English. This is typical of academic writing, but that's no excuse.
I found this omission puzzling: the book describes the increase in antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, along with the slowing rate of new antibiotics becoming available. But it says nothing about phage therapy which might come into fashion as antibiotics lose effectiveness. Given that bacteriophages are products of evolution, their omission seems odd to me.
The book struggles with the topic of science and religion, with what seems like too much wishful thinking. To their credit, the authors cite Jerry Coyne's Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible (do yourself a favor and read it), but their mention is so brief as to nearly constitute straw-manning. For example, the authors mention some prominent scientists who are also religious, as if Coyne didn't explain how this no more proves religion and science are compatible than married adulterers prove marriage is compatible with adultery. Coexistence is not the same as compatibility. The body text of the book finishes with the almost-deepity: "Religion and evolutionary medicine need not be in opposition." On a superficial level the statement is true, just as people need not crash their cars, get cancer, or commit crimes. After all, some people manage to avoid those things. But in the real world, things like car crashes, cancer, crime, and conflicts between religion and science happen at predictable rates. Pointing out that they need not happen ignores that they do happen and gets us no closer to understanding why.
It would help to clarify the conditions under which religion and evolutionary medicine can sing kumbaya. It would probably require a substantial change in religion: religion would have to avoid making a testable claim. However, religions in the real world make testable claims routinely. What person of faith doesn't pray, asking for their God or gods to interfere with the natural order? If prayer works, as the holy books claim it does, then science can't be done. Science depends on controlled studies, and no scientist controls what every human prays for. Fortunately for science, and unfortunately for religion, prayer has never detectably disturbed a scientific observation or experiment. Therefore no scientist ever thinks to control for prayer. Science is unavoidably opposed to any belief system that claims we have the power to override natural law. Now, maybe a minority of sophisticated theologians have neutered that capacity out of their religion, but that's not the vernacular religion of the masses. All those common people with their prayers and amulets and St. Christopher medals seem to believe in their effectiveness, by which they implicitly claim science is bunk. Would the authors similarly claim that science and astrology need not be in opposition? Presumably some working scientists read their horoscopes, but they need to keep those two parts of their cognitive lives as separate as possible.
(The book stands in contrast to one you'll never see, a Principles of Intelligent Design Medicine.)
The writing style of the book could be better. Some of it can't be helped: a medical book will have a lot of medical jargon. You just have to learn the words. But this book needs an edit by someone who heard of the plain language movement. The book is full of clunky sentences that read like the "before" examples in a book such as Clear Technical Writing or the Oxford Guide to Plain English. This is typical of academic writing, but that's no excuse.
I found this omission puzzling: the book describes the increase in antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, along with the slowing rate of new antibiotics becoming available. But it says nothing about phage therapy which might come into fashion as antibiotics lose effectiveness. Given that bacteriophages are products of evolution, their omission seems odd to me.
The book struggles with the topic of science and religion, with what seems like too much wishful thinking. To their credit, the authors cite Jerry Coyne's Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible (do yourself a favor and read it), but their mention is so brief as to nearly constitute straw-manning. For example, the authors mention some prominent scientists who are also religious, as if Coyne didn't explain how this no more proves religion and science are compatible than married adulterers prove marriage is compatible with adultery. Coexistence is not the same as compatibility. The body text of the book finishes with the almost-deepity: "Religion and evolutionary medicine need not be in opposition." On a superficial level the statement is true, just as people need not crash their cars, get cancer, or commit crimes. After all, some people manage to avoid those things. But in the real world, things like car crashes, cancer, crime, and conflicts between religion and science happen at predictable rates. Pointing out that they need not happen ignores that they do happen and gets us no closer to understanding why.
It would help to clarify the conditions under which religion and evolutionary medicine can sing kumbaya. It would probably require a substantial change in religion: religion would have to avoid making a testable claim. However, religions in the real world make testable claims routinely. What person of faith doesn't pray, asking for their God or gods to interfere with the natural order? If prayer works, as the holy books claim it does, then science can't be done. Science depends on controlled studies, and no scientist controls what every human prays for. Fortunately for science, and unfortunately for religion, prayer has never detectably disturbed a scientific observation or experiment. Therefore no scientist ever thinks to control for prayer. Science is unavoidably opposed to any belief system that claims we have the power to override natural law. Now, maybe a minority of sophisticated theologians have neutered that capacity out of their religion, but that's not the vernacular religion of the masses. All those common people with their prayers and amulets and St. Christopher medals seem to believe in their effectiveness, by which they implicitly claim science is bunk. Would the authors similarly claim that science and astrology need not be in opposition? Presumably some working scientists read their horoscopes, but they need to keep those two parts of their cognitive lives as separate as possible.
December 25, 2025
The book deserves its status as the major introducing book to the emerging and fascinating field of evolutionary medicine. It presents the major principles of evolutionary biology with relevance to medicine as many medical proffessionals may not be very established in evolutionary biology then presents the major contributions of evolutionary biology to understanding the ultimate causes of diseases ( Why are we vulnerable to diseases ? ) like the mismatch between current environment and that in which our ancestors evolved, the co-evolution between us and microbes and the importance of it to understanding infectious diseases and immunity, the evolutionary dynamics in understanding camcer, evolutionary explanation for behaviour and mental diseases and much more. It also presents a guide to the social issues regarding evolutionary biology that a medical proffessional is 100% going to face due to the socializing nature of medicine. Highly recommended for anyone with interest in healthcare or biology !!
May 15, 2021
superb!!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews