SaveYourself.ca • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
published 10/14/06
Randolph M Nesse and George C Williams. Why We Get Sick: The new science of darwinian medicine. Random House, 1995.
This excellent and user-friendly book begins with a series of questions that I had been asking for many years when I first picked it up: why do we get sick? More exactly, “Why, in a body of such exquisite design, are there a thousand flaws and frailties that make us vulnerable to disease?” I could hardly believe my luck that someone had written a whole book to try to answer this question! I’ve always wondered the very same.
Nesse and Williams present an amazingly clear set of answers to questions that I had almost completely given up any hope of having answered in this lifetime. Through every chapter of the book, I found myself nodding and slapping my forehead and saying, “Of course!” By the end, I felt deeply satisfied by the resolution of several nagging mysteries of human biology. I am grateful to them for it.
”Darwinian medicine” is the secret ingredient: the scientific perspective that makes the book work and provides such enlightening answers to otherwise unapproachable questions.
Nesse and Williams have spent a lot of time thinking about out how natural selection accounts for the delicate compromises that constitute human physiology, the imperfections that are built into the system. One peculiarity of human frailty after another is made sensible. By the end of the book, I was accustomed to the unusual perspective and starting to apply it to other questions. My understanding of health has deepened substantially since then.
