“The ideas that are being tossed around for presentation are incredibly creative and insightful.  It’s going to be a lot of fun hearing your presentations!  I would add that many ideas have been posed have fallen under the ‘novel modern environment’ umbrella (this often includes the gene-mismatch and by-product hypotheses).  These are completely acceptable and important approaches.  But if you can, try to stretch to include other categories, such as tradeoffs between two adaptive arenas, antagonistic pleiotropy before/after reproductive years, expected sex differences or demographic differences, or build a case for a highly specific design (vs a by-product of another design or adaptation), et cetera.  Stating your hypothesis about your chosen ‘adaptation’ (or by-product of another clearly defined adaptation) in terms of its proposed function will be key.  Coming up with a testable hypothesis is the goal.  Try to imagine an experiment that might convince NIH to provide funding, or even just a preliminary pilot study….”

MF

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Joe Alcock

Emergency Physician, Educator, Researcher, interested in the microbiome, evolution, and medicine