AHS19

In 1973 Nikolaas Tinbergen was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his contributions to the discipline of animal behavior. Tinbergen’s contributions were especially profound and lasting because in addition to experimental work in behavior, he—echoing Aristotle’s Four Causes—outlined the so-called “Four Questions” approach to understanding why living things exist. Two of the Four Questions involve “how” organisms come into existence, and most current biomedical understanding involves how questions: genetics, gene expression, metabolic pathways, signaling systems, physiology, etc.

What is often missing in biomedical science, however, are the “why” questions—why is the organism exhibiting this trait?; is this part of normal, though sub-optimal, functionality?; is this symptom an adaptation, or a byproduct?; is this disease due to faulty mechanisms, or are the mechanisms operating outside the evolutionary norm, and thus due to mismatch?

This talk will argue that a Four Questions approach can improve medical understanding.