Resumo

ROMERO, Fidel Ramón  e  FARIAS, José María. Evolutionary or Darwinian medicine. Rev. Fac. Med. (Méx.) [online]. 2014, vol.57, n.2, pp.5-14. ISSN 2448-4865.

Evolutionary medicine is an approach to the study of medicine proposed by Randolph Nesse y George Williams, physician and evolutionary biologist, respectively, in 1994. Although evolution is an observation performed since thousands of years ago, it was until Charles Darwin described the mechanism driving it, called Natural selection, which was complemented with Mendel’s laws of inheritance and the studies that gave birth to genetics, that its medical approach was accepted. Although its current application is limited, several American and European medical schools have their programs and departments specialized in this approach for the study of medicine. Its main objective is to understand the evolutionary origin of diseases to improve patient’s care and treatment. A free-choice subject on Evolutionary Medicine is available for the students of the Facultad de Medicina de la UNAM.

Palavras-chave : Evolution; genetics; diseases.