THEPHYSIOLOGIST Book Reviews

Evolution and Medicine

Robert L. Perlman relevant to genomic change as well as to the subsequent Cary, NC: Oxford Univ. Press, July 24, 2013, 200 p., $44.95 immense. In a recent article in Experimental Physiology ISBN: 987-0-19-966172-5 (http://ep.physoc.org/content/98/8/1235.full.pdf+html), I wrote, “It is hard to think of a more fundamental change Robert Perlman begins his lovely and highly welcome for physiology and for the conceptual foundations of book by observing that Charles Darwin’s family was biology in general.” The change has raised so many a family of physicians. Charles himself also studied questions that I have posted a whole webpage of answers medicine, although he was never a practitioner. To this (). I can add that the inventer of the term neo-Darwinism in 1883 was a physiologist, George Romanes. Charles Perlman’s book brings an important dimension to Darwin, T. H. Huxley, and many other leading biologists this debate, which is that the implications for the were members of the early Physiological Society. It understanding of medicine are important. His chapters would have seemed perfectly natural to 19th-century on aging, cancer, host-pathogen coevolution, sexually physiologists that function and evolution were related transmitted diseases, malaria, gene-culture evolution, in a two-way process. Then came the Weismann barrier, and man-made diseases are full of insights. The cover blurb refers to “an anticipated expansion in seminars outside world,” later reinforced by the Central Dogma and in undergraduate and continuing education courses of Molecular Biology. All of this was popularised in The on this topic.” I agree. Physiology needs to return to Medicine and evolution became divorced its 19th-century roots in which there was no divorce through the assumption that function never determines between physiology and evolutionary biology. genetic change and cannot therefore be the driving force in evolution. The process became one-way only: are ~12 references in The Origin of Species to the inheritance mutations, followed by natural selection. of acquired characteristics. He even fulsomely praised Lamarck in the 4th edition (1866) of his book as “this Epigenetics is now driving a whole cavalcade of coaches justly celebrated naturalist . . . who upholds the doctrine and horses through the Weismann barrier. As Perlman that all species, including man, are descended from notes, “Many epigenetic marks are removed during other species.” It is through epigenetics that Lamarck’s the formation of germ cells, but some remain” (p. 38). ideas are returning to mainstream physiology. Through that crack, which has now opened up to be a Denis Noble regarded as impossible are returning into biological Balliol College, Oxford University, UK research. The consequence is that function could be

Vol. 57/No. 2 | March 2014 • 105