Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
DNA is a double edged sword – how the genes which map our survival also make us vulnerable to disease, aging and death.
What’s the fundamental difference between Darwinian medicine and conventional medicine?
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.
Yes, why do we age?
Because evolution doesn’t bother with the damage we do to ourselves once we’ve reproduced.
I’ve had this argument with my wife for a while now. She believes what you’ve just said. That death is the negative consequence of reproduction. That once we’ve reproduced we stop being important and we die. But I say, death is actually a positive necessity, because if we didn’t die, we’d get in the way and clutter things up. I say death is essential to evolution.
No, no. If you didn’t die and were still reproducing well things would be fine.
Then why don’t we just go on reproducing endlessly?
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?
It kills the virus or bacteria that’s making you sick?
Oh rubbish!
(Laughs) Not true?
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.
And we wouldn’t want them to work that hard all the time?
No, because it’s energy consuming. But that’s only a thought. It’s not a solved problem.
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Lewis Wolpert is Emeritus Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine at University College, London. His research interests are in the mechanisms involved in the development of the embryo. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1980 and awarded the CBE in 1990. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. His books include “Malignant Sadness - The Anatomy of Depression”; “The Unnatural Nature of Science”; “Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast – The evolutionary origins of belief”; and most recently, “How We Live, and Why We Die - the secret life of cells”.
