Talk:Evolutionary medicine

Criticism and scientific plausibility
This article lacks a section for criticism of this new kind of approach to medicine. At least the section "Diseases of civilization” reads like advertisment for the paleolithic diet, which is not scientific plausible or proven in its efficacy. - Anon — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.216.86.100 (talk) 11:52, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Three years later it looks like the above has been remedied, but under the subheading Diet after the heading "In contrast to the diet of early hunter-gatherers, the modern Western diet often contains high quantities of fat, salt, and simple carbohydrates, which include refined sugars and flours. These create health problems.[18][19][20]" I see a list whose first two points are indeed health problems but then continues with 'High GI foods' and a long-winded reference to the paleo-diet. Are those two health problems? I don't think so. Then a bit further down under the subheading Cleanliness it says: "This [lack of intestinal parasites] causes problems in the proper development of the immune system although hygiene can be very important when it comes to maintaining good health.". In my opinion this is too strongly worded, can someone find corroboration for whichever wiki-editor's opinion this apparently is? Anon 10:22, 18 October 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.211.115.30 (talk)

Merge proposal
Why not put parts of this page on the evolution page, I don't think it merits itself as a 'field' of study Evoluu

As on the Moalem page this does not even appear to be a "field" of study. I think that this page should be marked for delete Evoluu 23:54, 30 December 2006 (UTC)


 * There seems to be some legitimacy to the term: 7,540 Google hits for "darwinian medicine", 5,860 for "evolutionary medicine". Not so sure about the "discords" stuff, which does not appear to be a technical term in this theory. -- Anon.

Neutral Point of View
Evolution is not yet universally recognized. I think that we should be careful by suggesting the term "theory of evolution" at least in the opening paragraph.

The notability of Moalem is being challenged elsewhere in Wikipedia. There seems to be evidence of notability as a published author, but to say that he is a leader in any field is not yet established. As to that, there is no documentation referenced from this article which demonstrates notability for any of the researchers mentioned.

Hopefully this is a matter of documentation rather than lack of accuracy.

--Kevin Murray 16:16, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

And there are still people that claim the world is flat. That doesn't mean Wikipedia must be filled with hedges and doubts every time the shape of the Earth gets mentioned. NPOV does not require that statements lacking universal recognition be hedged with weasel words. MayerG 14:16, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Bad-faith AfD nomination
For the record, I removed the incomplete, bad-faith AfD nomination by User:Evoluu, a SPA imposter spoofing User:Evolu. SWAdair | Talk 08:25, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Adaptationist only?
I don't think it's correct to say that Darwinian medicine is an application of the adaptationist prgram. Equally important in Darwinian medicine is a recognition of the historicity of evolution, and how historical paths of evolution constrain adaptation to current conditions. For example, much of what goes wrong with people's backs has to with the fact that an originally horizontal vertebral column braced at two ends has been shifted into a vertical position supported off-center at the bottom only. Although George Williams first became known for his work on adaptation, he has recently written about these historical constraints (e.g. in The Pony Fish's Glow).MayerG 14:00, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Rewrite
Evolutionary medicine is a major topic that is particularly suited for future portal treatment because evolutionary adaptation is an “umbrella” approach that covers so many diverse processes, conditions and medically relevant issues. I have recreated this page with this in mind.

There is a need elsewhere in wikipedia for sections in other medical conditions pages to be created discussing the role of evolution in them.

Where possible, I have retained the contents of the previous page in a summary form. I am slightly dyslexic so some copy editing might be needed. --LittleHow (talk) 11:48, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Excellent work! Cheers, Phenylalanine (talk) 03:19, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

I think this article needs to be seperated into Evolutionary Medicine and Darwinian Medicine. Darwinian Medicine places the emphaysis only on the role of adapatation, and largely consists of interesting, but speculative, anicodes about the possible adaptive value of different traits related to medical conditions. Evolutionary medicine makes the use of modern genomics to assess how all the evolutionary proccess of selection, mutation, drift, and gene flow affect medical conditions. This approach attempts to link evolution to practical treatements. For example, the mutational patterns in different cancers may be usefull for determining if different types of cancer are caused by the same carginogens. This article currently talks only about Darwinian medicine and incorrectly uses the term synonymously with Evolutionary Medicine. Chris 92.9.190.0 (talk) 18:48, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Such adaptations concern:
The sentence: Such adaptations concern: is dislocated, because there is no mentioning of adaptations in the sentence before this one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Enruit (talk • contribs) 08:44, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Suggestions
It is vitally important for this article's quality to improve. I suggest the following changes: First, continue with the current format of Key Concepts that are further detailed in sections below. The "Tradeoffs," "Pathogens," and "Defenses" sections have been started well. The next section will be "Environmental Mismatch;" nuanced balance will be particularly vital given the faddiness of the Paleolithic diet. Next will be "Path Dependence," which explains how our phylogenetic history as an organism is fundamentally different from the design of a machine. Examples included will be low-back pain and choking. "Somatic Evolution" is a rapidly emerging field with review articles published in research journals of the highest notoriety on an annual basis. These reviews will be briefly summarized in this section and the main article will be linked to. Next, "Current Human Evolution" will include the importance difference between socially-constructed and biologically-based race. This section will also explain how the normal laws of evolution still apply to modern populations and evidence of recent natural selection, e.g., Tibetan changes in hemoglobin structure and heterozygote advantage for anti-malarial changes to hemoglobin and the most common cystic fibrosis mutation (delta508). "Gene-Environment" interactions will be discussed using three examples: the influence of red meat intake on colorectal cancer risk depends on one's hydrocarbon detoxification alleles, HLA-phenotypes and risk of Type 1 diabetes mellitus, and the influence of major adverse events in childhood on risk of depression depends (statistically) on one's allele-status of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor gene. "Developmental Plasticity" is another exploding field, that is often referred to as "Developmental origins of adult disease." Reviews on the topic will be summarized, using the epidemiologic data from humans in the 3rd trimester of in utero development during the Dutch Famine near the end of World War II. Much of the text contains references without an appropriate amount of context or explanation. The section "Specific Explanations" illustrates this problem nicely. This will be changed. The section on evolutionary psychology will be drastically reduced to focus on how an evolutionary perspective helps explain (a) the utility of emotions, (b) the difficulty of distinguishing defenses from disease when it is cultural-defined, (c) evidence for how environmental mismatch contributes to the burden of mental illness in the modern world. BrandonHidaka (talk) 12:59, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Feedback on Suggestions
Somatic evolution sounds Lamarckian so you'll want to dispel that idea quickly. How about introducing with Cancer and Evolution or Immune System and evolution instead?

"Current human evolution" should definitely not include biological race. The concept is outdated and not useful for understanding human variation either current or past.

Also within "Current human evolution", the Tibetan adaptation is for the concentration of hemoglobin (relatively low) rather than hemoglobin structure (which is normal among Tibetans). A lovely and informative example of current evolution is lactase persistence. Sanetti (talk) 15:05, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Rename
Nothing in this article is about medicine - about how we actually treat people who are sick. The content is all about how we might use what are mostly speculations about human evolution, to better understand current human physiology and psychology, and about efforts to use those understandings to try to develop new treatments. What this article is really about, then, is something like "Research into human health based on speculations about evolution". That is an unwieldy name, though. I am open to suggestions. But from my perspective, "Evolutionary medicine" is not the right name for this article. I'll be doing some thinking about names, but wanted to open this discussion. Jytdog (talk) 23:14, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

"get sick"
This phrase (used twice in the opening paragraph) sounds very slangy to me, as a Brit. Is it appropriately formal for an encyclopedia at least in the US? Equinox ◑ 15:10, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

ELs
Per WP:EL we restrict these links to sites that (for example) "contain further research that is accurate and on-topic, information that could not be added to the article for reasons such as copyright or amount of detail, or other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article for reasons unrelated to its accuracy."

These two links:
 * The Evolution and Medicine Review
 * Randolph M. Nesse Website

Do not meet those criteria and are essentially spam for Nesse and the program at ASU. Many academic groups try to add links to EL for their websites on various topics, and there is no end to what we could list there, if we do that. We have the professional society (valid!) and folks can follow links there from there to sites like the ASU ones. Jytdog (talk) 04:46, 26 April 2017 (UTC)