What is Evolutionary medicine?
'''Evolutionary medicine''' or '''Darwinian medicine''' is a way to think about how and why [[evolution]] changed human bodies over time to make people sick or healthy. People use [[Darwinism|Darwinian]] [[medicine]] to study [[biomolecule]]s. It is used understand how these small [[molecule]]s work together through something called [[Physiological mechanism|physiological mechanisms]]. Physiological mechanisms are things that bodies do that make people feel either sick or healthy. People who study Darwinian medicine use these ideas to learn how those mechanisms have changed over time. Understanding these changes can be important to know why some people are more likely to be sick than others. ==History== Darwinian medicine comes from ideas that came from [[Charles Darwin]]. Charles Darwin had many ideas. The ideas that helped form Darwinian medicine came from his work on [[germ theory of disease]]. Many [[biologist]]s learned of these ideas and quickly saw how they could help people think about how [[pathogen]]s evolve and how people change to protect themselves from these pathogens. Scientific papers that have been written about the field of Darwinian medicine. They include a paper by Paul Ewald, in 1980, named “Evolutionary Biology and the Treatment of Signs and Symptoms of Infectious Disease”.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Ewald|first=Paul W.|date=September 1980|title=Evolutionary biology and the treatment of signs and symptoms of infectious disease|url=https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/0022519380900739|journal=Journal of Theoretical Biology|language=en|volume=86|issue=1|pages=169–176|doi=10.1016/0022-5193(80)90073-9|pmid=7464170 }}</ref> Another paper written by Williams and Nesse, “The Dawn of Darwinian Medicine” (1991), was also important to the growth of the field.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Williams|first1=George C.|last2=Nesse|first2=Randolph M.|date=March 1991|title=The Dawn of Darwinian Medicine|url=https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/417048|journal=The Quarterly Review of Biology|languag