To get a jump on this week’s topic start with this reading: Reading #1: age-old-question Still Pondering an Age-Old Question. Flatt T and Promislow EL. 2007. Science (318) 1255-1256.

Estimated reading time: 13 seconds

This piece entitled ‘Debunking the hunter gatherer workout” is worth a read: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/debunking-the-hunter-gatherer-workout.html?_r=1&hp

Estimated reading time: 11 seconds

Evolutionary Medicine 2012 Click on the link above for the powerpoint from today. The writing assignment is due in hardcopy in class next tuesday, one page or less (references not needed). Answer this question: “Why should doctors understand evolution? How will knowledge of evolution help doctors take care of patients?” […]

Estimated reading time: 48 seconds

On Tuesday this week we will introduce the topic of evolutionary medicine. We will tackle some of these questions about evolutionary medicine: What is it? Why is it important? What do doctors need to know about evolution? What evolutionary concepts are useful in medicine? What needs to happen before evolutionary […]

Estimated reading time: 58 seconds

This year’s course in evolutionary medicine will tackle some of the most fascinating questions in human health and disease. We will spend the semester exploring how tradeoffs involving natural selection and “path dependence” influence diseases rare and common. Each session will focus on one or more questions relating to a […]

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Ruslan Medzhitov, an immunologist at Yale, and his colleagues published a review of the evolutionary function of allergy in the journal Nature this week. This article proposes that the debilitating and sometimes deadly symptoms of allergy, including rhinitis, hives, allergic dermatitis, and bronchospasm, evolved as a host defense against environmental […]

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

Modern life has its challenges, and getting enough sleep is one of them. Artificial lighting, hectic lifestyles, night shifts, and the lure of late night screen time: all these factors conspire to rob us of sufficient sleep, which the CDC defines as 7 to 9 hours per night. An estimated 53 […]

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Was meat the key to humans’ evolutionary success? A new report suggests that meat was critical in allowing the increase in brain size that is the central feature of our humanity. Similarly, Caleb Finch and others have suggested that meat eating was important in the evolution of human longevity. It […]

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Two decades ago, in an article entitled ‘The dawn of Darwinian medicine” published in the Quarterly Review of Biology,  George C. Williams and Randolph Nesse wrote: “The substantial benefits of evolutionary studies of disease will be realized only if they become central to medical curricula, an advance that may at […]

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Click on the photo below to read about a paper, by Ed LeGrand and Joe Alcock, published in the Quarterly Review of Biology (March issue), entitled “Immune Brinksmanship.”  Immune Brinksmanship is an evolutionary hypothesis for why the immune system causes harm to the human body during the acute phase response. […]

Estimated reading time: 45 seconds