I'm not trying to make any hypothetical scenarios whatsoever. Over and over I've said that this matter didn't spring fully-formed from MrHambre's overheated imagination. Myers, and Gould and Lewontin, and John O. Reiss are describing the flaws in the way people conceptualize the relationship between adaptation and evolution. Unfortunately, the way we conceptualize such things has consequences in terms of the way we define well-being in individuals and society.
And the problems with adaptationist thinking are easy to see in the matter of evolutionary medicine or EN. Michael Cournoyea at the University of Toronto describes the way an adaptationist approach to medicine has been of limited use to the discipline.
quote:
Much of the emphasis in EM’s early research program was on reinterpreting unpleasant and seemingly useless physiological processes as adaptive functions of bodily systems. Fever, vomiting, diarrhea, coughing, nausea, pain, fatigue, morning sickness, anxiety, and even jealousy were reconceptualized as adaptive functions of the body that had evolved to protect individuals from a variety of dangers (Nesse and Williams 1994). Recent papers in EM use the same adaptationist assumptions about humanity’s evolutionary past to justify norms of health and well-being. Solutions to the modern world’s “dietary crisis,” for example, can be found in an evolutionary perspective on nutrition, which highlights the disparity between “Stone Age” diets (the ideal to which we evolved) and current eating habits (which are far from ideal) in terms of quantity, quality, and variety (Cordain et al. 2005; Turner et al. 2008). This perspective also explains why many have difficulty digesting cow’s milk, bread, or root vegetables (Lindeberg 2010). Since the human body has not evolved to eat the kinds of foods consumed in affluent nations today, modern lifestyles have little to no evolutionary precedent. Medical research examining the health benefits of pre-agricultural lifestyles (such as the “Paleo” diet) is increasingly carried under the banner of EM. Noel Boaz (2002), professor of anatomy and anthropology at the Ross University School of Medicine, refers to such disparities between our ancestral health and our current health as discordances of “adaptive normality,” arguing that such normality is our “evolutionary birthright” (p. 5). Boaz makes it clear that evolutionary thinking—and, it seems, only evolutionary thinking—allows us to understand “what our normal ranges of environment, anatomy, physiology, and behavior really are” (p. 2, emphasis added).
So according to the adaptationists, the evolutionary heritage of traits or processes is the most important thing to understand about them, and the key to clinical practice. However, it turns out that even when EM isn't completely speculative, it's of very little relevance in practice:
quote:
Such adaptationist reasoning is disconcerting, because it can be misguided and potentially dangerous when applied to ideals of health and well-being. The program is misguided in proposing that we should define ideals of health and human nature based on speculative claims about humanity’s evolutionary past; it is potentially dangerous in suggesting that the “natural and normal” are best just because they are “natural and normal.” In this circular argument, such naturalizations may then appear to offer powerful justifications for what we should do, despite the worry that our ancestral life-histories are difficult (if not impossible) to test empirically. If the ideal function of some physiological process is found “in nature,” then malfunction, disease, and illness are interpreted as physiological malfunctions rather than biological variability. In a sense, theory becomes immune from error, since a “biological system can fail to behave as a theory predicts without impugning the prediction: we can say that the system is malfunctioning” (Murphy 2008). To take a controversial example, homosexuality might be pathologized and medicalized as bodily malfunction rather than used to question adaptive ideals of heterosexuality. Normalization and naturalization begin to blur when normative views are subtly naturalized. These concerns are even more salient when adaptationist thinking is used to propose species-wide or racially specific standards of health, rather than considering the complexities of sociocultural dissimilarities or the uniqueness of an individual’s subjective health. EM necessarily precludes these approaches, because it naturalizes and defines health/disease in supposedly objective adaptationist terms. EM may even trade one fallacy of medical normalcy for another, rejecting ethnocentric ideals of health for one that is biocentric, based on speculative ancestral conditions. While these are dangerous normative directions for EM, they might be avoided by reconsidering EM’s strong adaptationist stance.
Again, no one is disputing that humans are the products of evolutionary processes or that certain traits are adaptive. What's being disputed is whether we should define well-being in terms of adaptive importance, or whether the evolutionary legacy of a biological function is more relevant to clinical practice than the sociocultural or personal context of the patient's condition and treatment.
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