Media release
03 November 2009
Evolution essential knowledge for medical students
Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, former Director of The University of Auckland’s Liggins Institute, is one of a number of
eminent international medical scientists and educators calling for evolutionary biology to be a core subject in medical
schools.
The recommendation, published in the latest issue of the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, follows from the Academy’s Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium on ‘‘Evolution in Health and Medicine’’ held in April
2009 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC.
The paper’s authors say “Better education about evolutionary biology and its applications in medicine will have
substantial benefits for physicians, their patients, public health workers, researchers, and other health
professionals.”
It concludes that it is as necessary for medical students to study evolutionary biology as it is for engineers to study
physics. “One hundred and fifty years after publication of The Origin of Species, new advances demonstrate the utility
of evolutionary biology in medicine, but few physicians and medical researchers have taken a course on evolutionary
biology, and no medical school teaches evolutionary biology as a basic science for medicine,” claim the authors.
The paper recommends specific learning objectives for both premedical and medical curricula. It counters claims that
courses are already overloaded by suggesting that evolutionary biology provides a framework that integrates the
disparate knowledge students already learn from other basic sciences. The authors believe that this would encourage
students to see the human body as the result of evolutionary processes and minute variations built up over hundreds of
millions of years rather than as a simplistic “designed machine”. In turn, this more holistic view, appreciating the
role of natural selection, would foster an understanding of why our bodies are vulnerable to disease.
Professor Gluckman heads the Centre for Human Evolution, Adaptation and Disease at the Liggins Institute. His research
group uses concepts from evolutionary and developmental biology to inform and interpret experimental and clinical
research performed at the Institute and by its international collaborators.
Gluckman describes evolution by natural selection as the fundamental organising principle of biology. Without it, he
says, it is not really possible to understand how an organism works, how its parts fit together. “Yet despite this,
medicine has been slow to recognise its importance.”
Professor Gluckman says that he is keen to see evolutionary biology incorporated into local medical curricula alongside
those at leading US universities such as Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins. To assist with this he has co-authored
Principles of Evolutionary Medicine, the first text on this subject written specifically for medical students, which was
published by Oxford University Press in July this year.
The paper’s leading author, Professor Randolph M. Nesse, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, was a guest of the Liggins
Institute in February, when he delivered a popular public lecture entitled “Medicine without evolution is like
engineering without physics.”
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ENDS