The relevance of the evolutionary approach for understanding health and disease of the human body and mind

Abstract

Ultimate and proximate levels of analysis offer synergistic explanations can improve the search for causes of disease and their cures. Here we review how several principles of evolutionary biology such as historical contingencies, mismatches, trade-offs, sexual selection and genomic conflict are applied to problems in medicine and psychiatry. The application of evolutionary principles to many other domains of medicine, among them mental disorders, have not received the same reception from preclinical and clinical researchers. The lack of a well-coordinated interdisciplinarity may be one reason for the slow application of evolutionary principles to biomedicine and psychiatry. This is exemplified by the case of ethopharmacology, an evolutionary approach to psychopharmacology strongly proposed and applied by ethologists but apparently unknown to many evolutionary minded scholars. Another reason has to do with the lack of efforts from many medical schools to integrate evolution and its principles in their curriculum studiorum. Interestingly, this Darwinian approach is generating an important evolutionary epistemology for the study of body and human mind health and diseases.