… bridging the gap
Posted in Aging, Article review, Evolutionary biology, Ideas, Mismatch, Trade-offs, evolutionary medicine on Mar 16th, 2010
In an 1858 humorous poem The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or the Wondeful One Hoss Shay, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. described a carriage so artfully constructed as to have no weakest link. The carriage ran smoothly for exactly a hundred years, and then one day
it went to pieces all at once, –
All at once, and nothing first, [...]
Posted in Article review, Genetics, Immunology, Infection, Trade-offs, evolutionary medicine on Dec 30th, 2009
According to both academic lore and history (Paulos, 1985; Ryerson, 2004), the late Sidney Morgenbesser, a professor of philosophy at Columbia and a renowned conversationalist and wit, was once listening to an Oxford colleague, J. L. Austin, lecturing on the philosophy of language. The eminent Professor Austin proceeded to claim that while a double negative [...]
Posted in Article review, Conference report, Education, evolutionary medicine on Nov 17th, 2009
This article summarizes suggestions from several groups that have considered how evolutionary biology can be useful in medicine, what physicians should learn about it, and when and how they should learn it. It is based on a Sackler Colloquium at the USA National Academy in April 2009.
The paper is open access, a pdf can be [...]
Posted in Article review, Genetics, evolutionary medicine on Sep 19th, 2008
People who follow genetics advances in the New York Times or similar newspapers might be forgiven for thinking that gene hunters have been on a remarkable run-that the genes that govern complex diseases have mostly been found or will be so shortly. Those in the trenches also understand that progress is being made, but [...]
Posted in Article review, Defenses, Evolutionary biology, Infection, evolutionary medicine on Aug 24th, 2008
Commentary on: M. Ackermann, B. Stecher, N. E. Freed, P. Songhet, W.-D. Hardt, and M. Doebeli (2008) Self-destructive cooperation mediated by phenotype noise. Nature 454:987-9
One of the most exciting developments in microbial population biology over the past few years is the recognition that high levels of phenotypic noise – in which genetically identical microbes express [...]
Posted in Article review, Defenses, Education, Good Questions, Infection, Mismatch, Opinion, evolutionary medicine on Jul 26th, 2008
A recent article by Hood and Jenkins provides an overview of a May 2007 Meeting on Evolutionary Medicine organized by Diddahally Govindaraju, Peter Byers and Stephen Stearns and hosted by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center.
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Posted in Article review, Autoimmune disease, Defenses, Ideas, Infection, evolutionary medicine on Jul 21st, 2008
In 2005 Sarkis Mazmanian and colleagues showed that a single polysaccharide from an intestinal commensal, Bacteroides fragilis, could largely correct the subnormal and functionally distorted development of the immune system that occurs in germ-free mice (Mazmanian et al. 2005). More recently they have shown, using three different models of intestinal inflammation, that the same polysaccharide, [...]
Posted in Article review, Defenses, History, Infection, evolutionary medicine on Jul 10th, 2008
Do worms protect us against autoimmune diseases? The epidemiological evidence is strongly suggestive. Ethiopian, Brazilian, Venezuelan, and Gambian adults have less asthma when infected with nematodes; Gabonese schoolchildren with schistosomiasis have fewer allergic reactions to dust mites than do those who are not so infected, and children living on farms in Germany have fewer allergies [...]
Posted in Article review, Genetics, Phylogeny on Jun 26th, 2008
The human haplotype map (HapMap) shows that human populations differ genetically and have been subject to strong, recent positive selection: selection ‘for’ particular genetic variants. Surprisingly, patterns of inferred selection vary markedly between the three human groups analyzed thus far, one Caucasian, one African, and one Asian (Voight et al. 2006). Ethnicity, and natural selection, [...]
Posted in Article review, Defenses, Infection on Jun 5th, 2008
It is pretty obvious that fever is useful. Work by Kluger and others has shown that increased temperatures decrease mortality during infection. Even for lizards! (When infected they crawl to warmer places.)
The mystery has been how fever works. Can higher body temperature alone inhibit pathogen growth? It seems unlikely that changing temperature by just a [...]
Posted in Article review, Genetics, Mental disorders on May 28th, 2008
Ten years ago, most of us paying attention were exhilarated about the prospects for psychiatric genetics. Heritability is high for many disorders-80% of the variation in vulnerability to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia can be attributed to genetic variations. We thought we would soon find the responsible abnormal genes, and this would quickly reveal the biochemical [...]
Posted in Article review, Genetics, Phylogeny on May 22nd, 2008
Articles about evolution and medicine are spread so widely over the scientific landscape that no matter how much you read, you know you are missing things. The pleasure on finding them is, however, like finding a diamond in the sand. Such is the case with evolutionary pharmacogenomics (a phrase that turns up not one hit [...]
Posted in Article review on May 15th, 2008
I have always found it somewhat confusing that evolutionary principles can be applied to medicine in so many ways. From the start of my work with George Williams, it has seemed clear that our attempts to ask why natural selection left the body vulnerable to so many diseases are fundamentally different from applications of population [...]
Unless otherwise noted, original content on the Evolution & Medicine Review is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence.
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