Evolution and Healing

"I was introduced to the book by Randolph Nesse, who is one of its authors, and I even taught it at University College London. It’s really thinking about medical issues in evolutionary terms. So for example, if you have a gene for sickle cell anemia, it prevents you from having malaria, and so there are lots of people with sickle cell anemia in areas afflicted with malaria. But there are all sorts of evolutionary aspects to do with why one gets fat, mental illness, cancer and so on. It’s a very interesting book and a very important book, I think. But it’s not a subject sufficiently taught in this country. You treat the patients the same way, but on the basis of a different understanding. You can begin to understand why things have gone wrong in evolutionary terms. You can only understand aging, for example, in evolutionary terms. Because evolution doesn’t bother with the damage we do to ourselves once we’ve reproduced. No, no. If you didn’t die and were still reproducing well, things would be fine. Because the cells get damaged as we age. They accumulate damage. But evolution is useful for understanding a variety of medical problems. You can think about different illnesses and understand them better in evolutionary terms. One unsolved problem, which I simply don’t understand, is what the advantage is of having a fever when you get ill? Oh rubbish! But why? Why should raising the temperature make any difference? I think that’s all crap. I just don’t think the problem’s solved. Or perhaps it’s because the things that are helping you recover work better at a higher temperature, or are working harder. No, because it’s energy-consuming. But that’s only a thought. It’s not a solved problem."