Abstract
Two new movements vie for the attention of mainstream medicine: anti-aging medicine and Darwinian medicine. Each is based on the rejection of one of the major assumptions of medical practice and medical research. Anti-aging medicine rejects the basic assumption of conventional medicine that the deterioration accompanying increasing chronologic age is an unchangeable absolute.1 Instead, anti-aging is based firmly on the hope that medical research will discover practical means to intervene in human aging processes, not just individual degenerative diseases, so that the limits of the healthy human life span can be progressively increased. Darwinian medicine rejects the assumption that the scientific foundations of medicine are to be found in the swatch of biologic disciplines ranging from biochemistry to organismal physiology, and no further.2 Proponents of Darwinian medicine argue that numerous concrete benefits can be obtained from reforming, or at least expanding, medicine so that it takes into account the many insights derivable from such fields as population genetics, molecular evolution, quantitative genetics, evolutionary ecology, and the like. These two new perspectives on medicine intersect in a small field that I call "Darwinian anti-aging medicine." Defining this approach to medicine is the concern of the present article.
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