Better use of Darwinian concepts might change the way we look at some diseases

Medical science seems generally to be fixed in a paradigm within which individual organisms are viewed as harmonious units with all their component parts functioning towards a common good. This paper shows how a more revealing research methodology might be generated if a cellular, as opposed to organismic, perspective were used when thinking about some pathologies. From the cellular perspective, cells in multicellular organisms are seen to abandon intracellular cooperation and 'go solo' in some situations. This change in cellular conduct is facilitated by vestigial or introduced genetic instruction. When cells in multicellular organisms stop cooperating we call it disease. (C) 2000 Harcourt Publishers Ltd.