On Sunday, April 20th 2025, starting 8:30am GMT, there will be maintenance work that will involve the website being unavailable during parts of the day. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your understanding.
We noted you are experiencing viewing problems
-
Check with your IT department that JWPlatform, JWPlayer and Amazon AWS & CloudFront are not being blocked by your network. The relevant domains are *.jwplatform.com, *.jwpsrv.com, *.jwpcdn.com, jwpltx.com, jwpsrv.a.ssl.fastly.net, *.amazonaws.com and *.cloudfront.net. The relevant ports are 80 and 443.
-
Check the following talk links to see which ones work correctly:
Auto Mode
HTTP Progressive Download Send us your results from the above test links at access@hstalks.com and we will contact you with further advice on troubleshooting your viewing problems. -
No luck yet? More tips for troubleshooting viewing issues
-
Contact HST Support access@hstalks.com
-
Please review our troubleshooting guide for tips and advice on resolving your viewing problems.
-
For additional help, please don't hesitate to contact HST support access@hstalks.com
We hope you have enjoyed this limited-length demo
This is a limited length demo talk; you may
login or
review methods of
obtaining more access.
Printable Handouts
Navigable Slide Index
- Introduction
- The goal of evolutionary/Darwinian medicine
- Medicine uses some evolution
- But much is missing
- Some general principles
- General principles corrected
- Schools that include topic in medical curriculum
- Evolutionary biology faculty in medical schools
- Gertrude Stein on her deathbed
- Volnerability of the body and natural selection
- Natural selection is too weak to improve the body
- The new answer
- The dawn of Darwinian medicine
- A picture of George Williams
- Disease and evolution
- An example: the eye
- First half of medical school: an organ of perfection
- In the clinic: a botched design
- Designing a better body in one afternoon
- Natural selection
- Two kinds of explanation
- Two complementary explanations
- Tinbergen's 4 questions
- Tinbergen's 4 questions organized
- Four questions about honeycreeper beaks
- The 30 cm spur of the star orchid and the moth
- Darwinian medicine
- How is evolution useful for medicine?
- Direct applications in the clinic?
- Evolution and medicine - branches
- Why we get sick
- Evolutionary questions about disease
- Six reasons why diseases exist
- 1. Mismatch
- Atheroma
- Cholesterol levels
- Breast cancer
- Genetic "quirks"
- Myopia
- Mean negative affect scores vs. BDNF genotype
- Hygiene hypothesis
- Signals of recent selection
- BP, genes, latitude and environment
- 2. Competition with other organisms
- Streptococcal infection
- Antibiotic resistance of 480 soil bacterial isolates
- Virulence
- 3. Every trait is a trade-off
- Malaria in Melanesia
- Alpha + thalassemia protects against malaria
- Gout syndrome: uric acid crystals in joints
- Billirubin: highly toxic compound, then why?
- 4. Constraints
- Terrestrial whales
- Path dependence
- 5. Health is not selection's goal
- Senescence and pleiotropy
- The strength of selection
- Force of selection against senescence
- If mortality stayed at early adulthood rates
- The vulnerable sex
- Male to female mortality ratio
- Developmental pleiotropy a prediction
- 6. Defenses and suffering
- Charles Darwin
- Defenses vs. defects
- Defense regulation
- The smoke detector principle (1)
- What if the cue is unreliable?
- How loud should the noise be before you run?
- Optimal response threshold
- Should you flee from a noise?
- A threat and response
- Being killed greatly decreases future fitness
- Panic disorder
- The smoke detector principle (2)
- A phylogeny of emotions
- A conclusion about defenses
- Six reasons for vulnerability
- Main conclusions
- Some of many implications
- Overall conclusion
- The state of Darwinian medicine
- www.EvolutionAndMedicine.org
Topics Covered
- How evolution is useful to medicine
- Why doctors don't know evolution
- The body: perfect and pathetically flawed
- Proximate and evolutionary explanations
- Explain vulnerability, not diseases
- Six reasons for vulnerability
- Darwinian medicine growing fast
Talk Citation
Nesse, R. (2007, October 1). Evolution: medicine's missing basic science [Video file]. In The Biomedical & Life Sciences Collection, Henry Stewart Talks. Retrieved April 15, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.69645/BTGJ4205.Export Citation (RIS)
Publication History
Financial Disclosures
- Prof. Randolph Nesse has not informed HSTalks of any commercial/financial relationship that it is appropriate to disclose.