Sitting on the Couch, Talking Evolution

I’m seated here, in upholstered comfort, with two questions. The couch is a dreadful, shameless pun, which I will explain in a moment. The questions though, are real. Both questions relate to the relevance of evolution in emergency medicine. The first is how does our current understanding of evolution help us be better clinicians? The second question is what do we not yet know? Or, in other words, what is the depth of our ignorance? (Please don’t answer that. It is a rhetorical question*). Evolution. To briefly recap the last three and a half billion years (give or take), it started when a few basic molecules chunked themselves together. Amino acids assembled into proteins – monomers to polymers, folding themselves into proteinaceous origami. DNA formed. Pretty quickly this had the remarkable idea to split and produce an heir. This was the real miracle of life. Twitches of biological advantage then produced, amongst other things, a wall to box in the carbon-based bits and bobs forming cells – units which then really got the hang of division. They did this over and over. For a while things bided their time. These bacterial grade debutantes swum round in a vicious, blistering stew for two billion years, at the end of which they realised it was time for an upgrade. By this point they had oxygenated the planet, and some serious evolution could occur. Then any hiccoughs that might produce a biological advantage were passed on, creating more and more complex organisms. Fina...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Literary Medicine antiphora apocrisis epiplexis epitemesis evolution qSOFA rhetorical question subjectio Source Type: blogs