Inflammaging and Its Role in Ageing and Age-Related Diseases

Evolution in medicine?! Never heard of it! This quote, in essence, sums up the reaction of a medical doctor who kindly accepted to review the proposal for this book. Far from substantiating the received idea according to which doctors are against any new approach to their field, it shows that health professionals know little about the relevance of evolutionary thinking for medical practice. At first, this may be surprising: the idea that evolution can inform medicine is not new— Erasmus Darwin, Darwin’s grandfather and a medical practitioner, hinted at this conceptual breakthrough more than 200 years ago—and evolutionary biologists have pleaded for more evolution into medicine for about two decades. In addition, medicine is repeatedly confronted to evolution: practitioners have to deal with antibiotic resistance, the rapid changes of a virus, or the evolution of tumour cells. Yet, evolution is not part of the medical curriculum of most universities and what is more, most medical students and doctors have just “never heard of it”. At second glance, however, this is not surprising.