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Why does evolution matter now? Human Health and Medicine Evolutionary biology can help the scientists research the human health and medicine. By studying the natural phenomena and evolutionary mechanisms, the scientists will be able to understand the cause if some human disease and create medicine to prevent these diseases. There are several examples of how evolution contributes to human health and medicine. Firstly, evolution could help us avoid the bad effect of antibiotics. Though we may take antibiotics for curing our diseases, overusing antibiotics could bring negative effects to our body health. Such as the pathogen might have resistance to antibiotics after overusing the antibiotics, and this resistance is caused by an evolutionary mechanism. Studying evolution would help us avoid these health problems caused by natural selection. Secondly, evolution could help people fight serious diseases. Since the virus will evolve quickly in some serious diseases, it’s hard to resist these diseases if we don’t know the principle of evolution. To prevent the evolution of this virus, we need to use the basic principle of evolution – a single organism can’t evolve resistance to complex environments. Based on this principle, the scientists usually use multiple antibiotics to prevent the human disease. Thirdly, many symptoms can be explained by the evolutionary biology. For example, the evolutionary biology could explain that fever is an anti-bacterial response. If this response activates too many components of the immune system, it will be harmful to human health. And some bacteria have genes that could prevent antibiotics kills them. These genes allow infections to keep spreading. Learning evolution could help ensure vaccines are effective to prevent the strains of bacteria in circulation. Fourthly, evolution helped the development of the drug. Based on evolutionary theory, human share the common ancestor with animals such as mice, birds, and dogs. When to take the drugs, animals would have common symptoms as human. So scientists always test drugs on animals instead of putting the human at risk. Many pharmaceutical companies spent billions of dollars’ research medicine by animal testing.

Citation: “Evolution’s Importance to Society”. Massimo Pigliucci. Action Bioscience. July 2005. http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/pigliucci.html “Inside Life Science”. Emily Carlson. National Institute of General Medical Sciences. February 6, 2014. https://publications.nigms.nih.gov/insidelifescience/evolutionhealth.html

“Five Reasons Why Evolution is Important”. Steven Newton. The Huffington Post. Nov 17, 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-newton/five-reasons-whyevolutio_b_459636.html...