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0:00
I'm Paul Turke.
I'm going to be telling you a little bit
about Evolutionary Pediatrics.
0:05
I started off as an anthropologist,
worked and helped to develop a field
called cooperative breeding in humans.
That required me to understand
some evolutionary life theory
but specially trade-offs
between early and late-life events.
That led me down the hall to an immunologist
at the University of Michigan
named Richard Miller,
and I collaborated with him as a Postdoc
for a while on planning evolutionary theory
to the problem of T cells senescence.
From that my interests
in medical complex peaked,
and so I moved
to the Michigan State University,
where I went to medical school,
and after that I came back
to the University of Michigan
to complete my pediatric residency.
And then finally in 1999,
I bought a small private pediatric practice.
And today,
I and our partner Suzanne Thomashow
in the small town of Dexter,
which is next to Ann Arbor,
we take care of over
1,000 different families.
1:06
Before I tell you a lot about
evolutionary pediatrics,
I want to talk just for a minute
about science in general
and how science is done.
As most people know science
has two main components,
there's the ideas or theory side
and then there's the data or evidence side.
And in reality they are all wrapped together
but we separate them from time to time
when we're actually doing science.
And in fact, on a given day,
a scientist may work
purely on the data side
or purely on the theory side.
And similarly,
fields of science can be
somewhat out of balance with respect to one
or the other at any given point.
So string theory, for example,
in physics is heavily weighted
on the theory side right now.
The technology tests
a lot of the theories there
just aren't available.
That's not bad, they will be,
and so right now,
theory is pointing the way
to the kind of data to look at,
so there is not a problem.
Medicine on the other hand is over-weighted
in terms of evidence and data.
Medical doctors, medical scientists
are the best in the world
probably at collecting data and analyzing it
and culling it, and putting it
into usable formats and so on,
but they're fairly light on the theory.
