Incorporating Evolutionary Theory Into The Field Of Biomedical Science

Biomedical science is a continually growing field with new treatments and medicines being developed at a rapid rate. Incorporating evolutionary theory into the field of biomedical science has allowed us to slow down pathogenic evolution as pathogens have been acquiring resistance to medicine at an alarming rate. We can learn about the evolutionary origins of diseases which may provide the answers we require to treat them and possible reasons why certain recessive conditions have still not been filtered out by natural selection. However, it has been argued that evolutionary theory has hindered science by assuming that parts of the human body have simply been left over from evolution and therefore have no purpose.

Natural selection works by

Davies & Davies (2010) suggests that by applying evolutionary theory to bacteria, we knew that when a selective pressure was introduced (antibiotics) the bacteria would evolve and understanding this enabled biomedical scientists to invent strategies such as not using antibiotics to treat viral infection because antibiotics will not destroy the viruses present but will introduce a selective pressure on the bacteria within your body causing some of them to develop an antibiotic resistance which could be a problem if they cause an infection one day, another strategy would be to avoid using mild does of antibiotics of a long period of time as this would leave a small number of bacteria, who would have survived the antibiotics, who could potentially develop a resistance to the antibiotic so using a stronger selective pressure over a shorter space of time would eliminate all the illness-causing bacteria and not enable them to evolve into their resistant forms also make sure that all the prescription is taken because if the course is not complete then the bacteria that have a selective advantage will survive and then will pass on this advantage to other bacteria. The “preventative” use of antibiotics within livestock and crops is unnecessary as this leads to

Human populations have been exposed to many plagues over time which has lead the human genome to be littered with past remnants of these plagues, there is one remnant which may lead researchers to discover a new treatment for HIV, a mutation in the gene CCR5, as the allele for the mutant CCR5 gene confers resistance to HIV and the allele for the mutant CCR5 gene has been left over from a past plague that ravished northern Europe where it conferred some resistance to the plague and therefore increased in frequency which is why the mutation in the CCR5 is rare in the rest of the world. Evolutionary theory has shown us that there is a “trade off” for resistance to a drug and it has been shown that if resistant and non-resistant