Important Background Reading:Nesse-Stearns-2008 and“Why” questions

Our first session was held today at UNM’s Center for Disaster Medicine (2704 Yale SE). As a group, we decided that we would explore different topics each week, as decided by the previous week’s conversation.This is a more organic way to plan a half-semester than the traditional syllabus, but one that will be productive.

Here is the powerpoint from today:introductory-lecture

Our first discussion identified several interesting evolutionary medicine problems to explore:

The question of diet and the Paleolithic diet in particular.

Eaton (2006)-Ancestral human diet

Mental Health. Evolutionary hypotheses for depression. Read: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.html

Drug abuse and addiction.

Mismatch and Drug abuse

The caretaker role and medical treatment fads – do they have an evolutionary basis?

(We will have to find some relevant literature on this.)

Please read all the articles so that we can have a good discussion. To start on thursday we will continue our discussion on diet and move on to other topics as time permits.

Grading: Participation (80%) Final Essay (20%)

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Joe Alcock

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