The advent of evolutionary medicine in the last two decades has provided new insights into the causes of human disease and possible preventative strategies. One of the strengths of evolutionary medicine is that it follows a multi-disciplinary approach. Such an approach is vital to future biomedicine as it enables for the infiltration of new ideas. Although evolutionary medicine uses Darwinian evolution as a heuristic for understanding human beings’
susceptibility to disease, this is not necessarily in conflict with Islamic medicine. It should be noted that current evolutionary theory was first expounded by various Muslim scientists such as al-Jāḥiẓ, al-Ṭūsī, Ibn Khaldūn and Ibn Maskawayh centuries before Darwin and Wallace. In this way,
evolution should not be viewed as being totally antithetical to Islam. This article provides a comparative overview of Islamic medicine and Evolutionary medicine as well as drawing points of comparison between the two approaches which enables their possible future integration.
Islamic medicine and evolutionary medicine provide unique insights into human health and disease. The growth of evolutionary medicine in the last twenty years has been mainly due to its multi-disciplinary approach. Its North American and European scientific proponents argue that there is a need for medicine to utilize evolutionary principles in understanding human disease. Of course,
evolutionary principles to understanding disease are not new but were developed in Islamic science over one thousand years ago. What is new perhaps are the different sciences, such as molecular biology, that are available for testing evolutionary hypotheses.
I argue that the principles of Islamic medicine and evolutionary medicine are not irreconcilable but can assist in each other’s theoretical scope. This paper provides an overview of Islamic medicine and evolutionary medicine and emphasizes points of comparison which can form the basis for a possible future integration of both approaches
