Health and Evolution

I know that many people object to Darwinian evolution for various reasons.
I can only suggest that if you do feel this way, take a moment to consider the usefulness of evolution as a thought process in understanding the human condition.
New scientific approaches embrace evolution and have made interesting headway.

Evolutionary psychology for example has this to say about depression.
A period of low mood in fact depression, is natures way of telling you to let go of unattainable goals.

In fact one misconception about evolution is that we expect the most evolved organisms to be the most perfect. Looking at the flawed design of the human body and our vulnerability to disease, we should realize that there is nothing divine in the creation of human beings.


Evolution and Healing, Darwinian approach to medicine.

The book starts by explaining the essentials of Darwinian natural selection and then embarks on showing how these ideas illuminate the reasons why we become ill. Probably the most important notion here is that of the perpetual war that goes on between host and parasites. Like other organisms, we are constantly under attack from bacteria and viruses; we have evolved complex defence systems against them and they, in their turn, have evolved ever more sophisticated weapons of offence. A continual evolutionary arms race is under way. It is our genes which enable us to respond in this way, but there is an inevitable cost; the defence mechanisms can cause disease as well as prevent it. Autoimmunity, in which the body's defence mechanisms are turned against its own tissues, is an example of this. Another may be allergy, for it is thought that allergy may be part of the defence mechanism against cancer. (Cancer cells can be thought of as parasites that are produced internally by the body instead of invading from outside.) Psychological disorders may also have an evolutionary origin: anxiety, for example, may be an exaggeration of the fear mechanism that protects us from dangerous situations. Aging occurs because natural selection has no need for us once we have passed reproductive age, so mechanisms for very prolonged survival have not evolved.