Fresh Wallaby Juice

One of the odder ideas associated with evolutionary theory is the notion that it should be used to direct and inform biological research. Actually, the oddity is that it should (or simply is, in the strong form of the notion) direct and inform all research in biology and medicine.

The odd part of this is that evolutionary theory is really just an attempt to explain and understand history - how what we see now developed in the past. (I’m drawing the usual line between “macro” evolutionary explanations and “micro”, which is what can actually be observed in a human timescale.) Why is it odd that such an explanation should provide insight for medical research?

Take, for instance, a letter in this week’s issue of C&E News. The writer makes the point that “understanding how the body works at the molecular level is key to accepting donor body parts”. So everyone who receives a blood transfusion has to first understand all of molecular immunology? More likely he meant “key to understanding why donor body parts sometimes work and sometimes fail”. That’s just nit-picking, though, and so far so good. Then he goes off on a surprising tangent:

“So for me the insights of Darwin and Mendel, which led to the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick, then to huge advances in medicine and all biosciences in the past 50 years, allowed me … to walk out of the hospital eight days after … a crash that would have left me … dead if it happened earlier in my life.”

It’s interesting speculation to wonder when DNA would’ve been discovered without Mendel, but the rest of that sentence is even more surprising. There’s a big difference between understanding how to repair broken bones and nerves, and understanding how bones and nerves came to be in the first place.

“… in addition to thinking rejection of modern science is crazy, I also think it is very bad manners. I would respect those who believe in science-rejecting young-earth creationism more if, consistent with their beliefs, they lived in caves and refused all of the technology that comes directly from science in the past century.”

Now he’s firmly crossed over into the ridiculous. There are any number of scientific discoveries that had absolutely nothing to do with “the insights of Darwin and Mendel”. I have never heard that Edison developed the electric light bulb through a theory of natural selection, breeding one filament with another to achieve greater fitness in the progeny. Chemistry and physics also owe little to the idea.

So that leaves medical and biological research. Thousands of pages a year are written to tie nearly every bit of biological research to evolution somehow; it really seems that papers that describe how some gene or protein works cannot be published unless they end with speculation about how it could’ve developed. (Hopefully I’m wrong. I’ve never written for a medical journal and I’ve read very few.) Otherwise - well, much can be understood about the function of something without knowing what it was like a million years ago. And I can’t imagine that the surgeons who put the writer of that letter back together did so through understanding the ultimate origins of their patient’s life. It was a detailed knowledge of how his body was intended to work, and how to restore it to that condition with the greatest chance of permanent success.

For a totally practical analogy… which is the better mechanic? A historian of the Ford Motor Company, or someone who knows an F-150 inside and out?

Tags: advances in medicine, biology, evolution, medical research, papers, science