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0:00
Hello everyone and
welcome to this talk
providing an overview of
evolutionary medicine.
I'm Randy Nesse from
the University of Michigan
and Arizona State University,
and the editor of this
Henry Stewart Talks series
of over 50 talks about
evolutionary medicine.
It's not possible to do
justice to the field
at this point.
It's grown so fast and there are
so many interesting
developments.
But I will provide some
highlights that I hope will help
organize your attention to the
other talks in the series.
0:30
Evolutionary medicine
sounds like it's something
radical or alternative or
a new practice method.
It's none of those things.
It's just a basic science for
medicine like genetics
or physiology.
Evolutionary medicine
uses the basic science
of evolutionary biology
to better understand,
prevent, and treat disease.
You would think this would
have been done long ago.
But one of the very
surprising things that we're
going to discover
in this talk is
evolutionary biology has
basically been neglected
by medicine and a huge
opportunity therefore awaits.
1:03
This diagram shows
evolutionary biology
as the basic science,
medicine as the applied field
with evolutionary
medicine in between.
But those arrows are
significant also,
it's not a one-way street just
using basic science to medicine.
It's also the fact that
studying diseases offers
deep insights into the nature
of why biological systems fail,
which advances studies
in evolutionary biology.
1:28
The field has grown
enormously fast.
George Williams and I wrote
a paper grandly titled.
It was his idea with
the grand title there,
the Dawn of Darwinian
Medicine in 1991.
You can see the scholar
citations increasing
exponentially and they continue
to do so in recent years.
There's now a
scientific society,
the International Society for
Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health,
having its eighth annual
meeting this year;
an Oxford Press journal,
Evolution Medicine and Public
Health, it's open access.
EvMedEd is a series
of resources,
the Evolution of
Medicine Review is
a newsletter, and club
EvMedEd is a journal club
that meets regularly.
If you find all
this interesting,
you can go to
evmed.org and sign up
for newsletters and
other resources.
Henry Stewart Talks
has made a lot of
this possible and
growing faster.
