Evolutionary Medicine and the Medical School Curriculum: Meeting Students Along Their Paths to Medical School

Abstract

Over the past several years, numerous reports that have been independently prepared by prestigious organizations in the U.S. have agreed that new approaches to improve teaching and learning of biology at both the pre-college and undergraduate levels are important and timely. Their recommendations, which are based on emerging research about human learning and cognition, are in agreement that evolution is an organizing principle and foundation of modern biology and should be presented as such. This paper provides an overview of the conclusions and recommendations from those reports and proposes that helping students learn evolution through the lens of human examples that are part of the emerging field of evolutionary medicine could help biology educators improve the teaching of evolution, and biology more generally, by asking students to address biological problems that are inherently interesting and motivating.