 Beginning in the 1990s he explored the implications of evolutionary biology for biomedical research and was actively involved in this until his death.Shanks was also interested in the history of medicine and the role played by medicine in the scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Shanks early work was focused on so-called hidden-variables theory of non-relativistic elementary quantum mechanics, and the problem of the construction of classical models (models exhibiting the properties of determinateness and determinism) for quantum measurement statistics.