The Opinion article in Comparative Medicine by Stephen P. Schiffer, DVM seems to ignore some fundamentals of evolutionary biology as they pertain to animal models of human disease. While Schiffer is correct when he states"The phylogenetic relationship of humans to other animals is not a linear one," he fails to elaborate on the rather important consequences of this nonlinearity. As researchers Marilyn E. Carroll and J. Bruce Overmier explain in their recent book, Animal Research and Human Health, and as Hugh LaFollette and Niall Shanks also do in Brute Science, animals in biomedical research are frequently used as causal analogical models (CAMs). Ifthe heart pumps blood in a chimpanzee, then we reason by analogy it will pump blood in humans also.If fen-phen is safe for the hearts of animals, we reason by analogy it will be safe for human hearts as well. In the past, the differences between species did not rule out transspecies extrapolation of experimental results; all mammals have hearts, use ATP, convey information from generation to generation via DNA, and so forth. But the depth at which we studied in the past differs from today. Today, in light of evolutionary biology, molecular biology, and complexity theory, we are at a very different level of examination and animal models are not what they used to be.
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机译：DVM的Stephen P. Schiffer在《比较医学》中的观点文章似乎忽略了进化生物学的某些基础知识，因为它们与人类疾病的动物模型有关。 Schiffer指出“人与其他动物的系统发育关系不是线性的”时是正确的，但他没有详细说明这种非线性的重要后果。正如研究人员玛丽莲·卡罗尔（Marilyn E. 。如果心脏在黑猩猩中抽血，那么我们以类推就认为它也会在人体内抽血。如果芬芬对动物的心脏是安全的，我们以类推也就对人类的心脏也很安全。过去，物种之间的差异并不排除对实验结果进行跨物种外推;所有的哺乳动物都有心脏，使用ATP，通过DNA代代相传地传递信息，等等。但是我们过去研究的深度与今天不同。今天，根据进化生物学，分子生物学和复杂性理论，我们处于非常不同的检查水平，而动物模型已不再像以前那样。
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