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Chapter 1What do we do when we get sick? The details, of course, depend on the illness, but the immediate and obvious answer is that we try to make ourselves feel better. A cold or bout with the flu usually spurs us to the pharmacy for cough lozenges, aspirin, and decongestants, while an upset stomach means finding a remedy for running to the bathroom. Alleviating the symptoms may not be a permanent cure, but it cant do any harm, right?Not necessarily. Although I dislike the analogies between war and disease, it does help to think of symptoms as the sounds, bullets, and urgent messages coming in from the front, with no indication of whether they are from friend or foe. Wiping them out indiscriminately risks destroying our own troops with friendly fire. In some ways, the Calvinists were rightsuffering can be good for you, though the more modern application of this idea suggests that it is not the soul but the body itself that benefits from pain. The trick is to figure out when that is the case, and when there is no virtue in misery.And what about diseases that do not result from infectious agents like bacteria or viruses, but seem to be a flaw in the factory model? Although some aspects of the human body can seem like a miracle of precision in design, our knees and backs give out and childbirth is not exactly a walk in the park. We have wisdom teeth that cause problems because there is no room for them in our jaws. Genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis persist in the population. We scientists always point to the amazing adaptations of organisms, whether its the design of our eye or a lowly moths wings that mimic leaves so perfectly that they have built-in tatters and stains from bird droppings. If nature does such an incredible job with camouflaging a mere insect, why has she dropped the ball with our vertebrae?A relatively new field, called evolutionary medicine or Darwinian medicine, takes a radically different perspective on health and illness to answer these questions. First articulated by psychiatrist Randy Nesse and evolutionary biologist George Williams, Darwinian medicine places diseases and defects in an evolutionary framework to make sense of the apparent mismatch between the way our bodies often work and the way we would like them to: Natural selection may not have produced diseases like diabetes or arthritis directly, but it has made bodies vulnerable to them for a variety of reasons.DESIGNED BY A COMMITTEEBack and knee problems are the source of enormous amounts of pain, and they cost society millions of dollars in treatments ranging from anti-inflammatory drugs to surgery, lost work time, and insurance payments. Lower back pain alone is said to afflict nearly half of many adult populations at one time or another within a given year. It is not confined to industrialized or even modern-day populations. Evidence of arthritis of the vertebrae and joints can be found in prehistoric hunter-gatherer skeletons, and back problems are Excerpted from Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are by Marlene Zuk All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.