Good ideas. I think there are lots of reasons that ecology needs to be in
the background of pre-health professions students, and many of these reasons
are similar to or the same as those promoted by Randolf Nesse and others
about the centrality of evolution to medical training. Indeed, the many
publications on “evolutionary” or “Darwinian” medicine are good starting
points, since much of this field focuses on evolutionary arms races between
humans and our pathogens. For years I introduced my course on ecology and
evolutionary biology (the third of 3 intro or core courses for all students
intending to take any of our upper-level courses) with examples where
ecology and evolutionary biology were important for understanding virtually
all facets of human experience in addition to the things they usually think
of as evolution and ecology. I included examples from history, using some
examples from Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” For human health, I
used some of the usual suspects like antibiotic resistance and Lyme disease,
but also some lesser-known examples like the most promising and effective
approaches to malaria being low-tech ones like window screens and bed nets,
that stomach ulcers (once thought to be a “lifestyle” disease) were actually
caused by a bacterium, the intriguing connections between atherosclerosis
and bacterial infection, between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and
bacterial infection, the fact that most of epidemiology is really ecology,
and on and on. Several of these examples were cases in which medical
science would have made more rapid advances had its practitioners been
better trained in ecology and evolutionary biology. I even threw in a
damning quote or two (“The future of infectious diseases will be very dull”
Dr. McFarlane Burnet, 1972 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine). I
also pointed out that the MCAT contained sections on population biology, and
that these were not covered in any of the other intro courses. It was still
true that lots of our pre-professional students would prefer to focus their
coursework on physiology, genetics, and cell and molecular biology, but I
think most of them would have agreed that what we call ecology and
evolutionary biology are very important to the study of human biology and
the of management of human health.
Our current curriculum has only two semesters of intro courses, but
together, E & E still comprise fully one-third of the course material. And
our majors still have a distribution requirement to take at least one upper-
level course that deals with biology at the population (or above) level of
organization. We do not experience much grousing about these requirements
at all, to my knowledge.
