The Evolution & Medicine Review

 Book Review:  The Fragile Wisdom by Grazyna Jasienska (Harvard University Press, 2013)Do unto others; First do no harm; Ask questions. Maxine Weinstein EMPH published 10 April 2013, 10.1093/emph/eot006 In this ambitious volume, Grazyna Jasienska poses a host of thoughtful questions, enough to keep a stable of researchers going for many lifetimes. The central query is whether [...]

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Evolutionary Medicine : clinical medicine from an evolutionary perspective Martin Brüne and Ze’ev Hochberg A Collection of 8 articles  in BMC Medicine  (open access) Developmental heterochrony and the evolution of autistic perception, cognition and behavior Bernard Crespi BMC Medicine 2013, 11:119 (2 May 2013) Evolutionary medicine – the quest for a better understanding of health, disease and prevention [...]

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Article in the Boston Globe by  Kevin Hartnett  April 29, 2013 We’re used to controversies around the teaching of evolution but here’s one place you might be surprised to learn Darwinian thinking is still struggling to take hold: medical schools. It’s not that the medical establishment doubts evolution, it’s just that traditionally it hasn’t viewed it as [...]

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In a previous post (http://evmedreview.com/?p=1034), I discussed a study from Stuart Orkin’s lab that illustrated the exploitation of genetic variants that influence a disease-related phenotype to design a possible therapy for a murine version of sickle cell disease.  Increased fetal hemoglobin expression had been demonstrated to diminish the severity of sickle cell disease in mice, [...]

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The Second International Biannual Evolution and Cancer Conference, “From Unicellularity to Multicellularity and Back Again” will be at the University of California, San Francisco, June 12-16, 2013 (IBECC 2013). This will likely be the preeminent evolutionary medicine meeting  in the USA during 2013. Following the success of the first IBECC in 2011, we are again bringing [...]

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Worm therapy: Why parasites may be good for you By Rachel Nuwer on the BBC Webpage Early trials suggest a host of allergies and autoimmune ailments could be treated with worm therapy, or infection with live worm-like parasites. But will it ever reach the clinic? Jim Turk initially put his symptoms down to stress. The [...]

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The Centre for Evolutionary Medicine (ZEM), University of Zurich, is calling for grant applications.  The applicants are free to submit any research project within the wider field of Evolutionary Medicine,  preferably, but not exclusively, on the study of the evolution of human musculo-skeletal disease.  Primary current ZEM research topics (which show the area of research [...]

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From Unicellularity to Multicellularity and Back Again 2nd International Biannual Evolution and Cancer Conference at UCSF Registration now open Keynote talks by Mel Greaves and Anna Barker Foci: cancer suppression in the evolution of multicellularity and applying insights from the evolution of single cellular organisms to the study of cancer Sessions include: Insights  from Experimental [...]

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Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live By Marlene Zuk  (Norton, 2013) Free sample from NCSE     Review in Salon   Review in the WSJ  Review in Nature

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The consortium of investigators known as ENCODE (ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements) published, with much publicity, a series of about thirty papers last fall purporting to “identify all functional elements in the human genome sequence” (https://www.genome.gov/ENCODE/).  Dan Graur, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Houston, and his associates have published a paper in Genome Biology [...]

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Conserved Shifts in the Gut Microbiota Due to Gastric Bypass Reduce Host Weight and Adiposity Liou, Alice P., Paziuk, Melissa, Luevano, Jesus-Mario, Machineni, Sriram, Turnbaugh, Peter J., & Kaplan, Lee M. (2013). Science Translational Medicine, 5(178), 178ra141. doi: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3005687  (Not open access) Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) results in rapid weight loss, reduced adiposity, and improved [...]

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Common Risk Alleles for Inflammatory Diseases Are Targets of Recent Positive Selection Towfique Raj, Manik Kuchroo, Joseph M. Replogle, Soumya Raychaudhuri, Barbara E. Stranger, Philip L. De Jager The American Journal of Human Genetics – 21 March 2013       Not Open Access Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have identified hundreds of loci harboring genetic variation influencing inflammatory-disease susceptibility [...]

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Antibiotic Exposure and IBD Development Among Children: A Population-Based Cohort Study By Matthew P. Kronman, Theoklis E. Zaoutis, Kevin Haynes, Rui Feng,and Susan E. Coffin Pediatrics 2012; 130:4 e794-e803  Open Access OBJECTIVE: To determine whether childhood antianaerobic antibiotic exposure is associated with the development of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). METHODS: This retrospective cohort study employed data from 464 UK ambulatory practices [...]

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By Mel Greaves, in Evol Appl. 2013 Jan;6(1):102-8. doi: 10.1111/eva.12017. Open access Cancer development is widely recognized to be a somatic cell evolutionary process with complex dynamics and highly variable time frames. Variant cells and descendent subclones gain competitive advantage via their fitness in relation to micro-environmental selective pressures. In this context, the ‘unit’ of selection is [...]

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HIV Infection Disrupts the Sympatric Host–Pathogen Relationship in Human Tuberculosis    By  Fenner L, Egger M, Bodmer T, Furrer H, Ballif M, et al. (2013) . PLoS Genet 9(3): e1003318. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1003318   Open Access Author Summary  Human tuberculosis (TB) caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis kills 1.5 million people each year. M. tuberculosis has been affecting humans for millennia, suggesting that [...]

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Stabilization of cooperative virulence by the expression of an avirulent phenotype, by Diard, M., Garcia, V., Maier, L., Remus-Emsermann, M. N. P., Regoes, R. R., Ackermann, M., & Hardt, W.-D. (2013). . [10.1038/nature11913]. Nature, 494(7437), 353-356.  (see the end of this post for abstract)

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Parent-Offspring Conflict and the Persistence of Pregnancy-Induced Hypertension in Modern Humans By  Hollegaard B, Byars SG, Lykke J, Boomsma JJ (2013) .PLoS ONE 8(2): e56821. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0056821  Open access Abstract: Preeclampsia is a major cause of perinatal mortality and disease affecting 5–10% of all pregnancies worldwide, but its etiology remains poorly understood despite considerable research effort. Parent-offspring conflict theory suggests that such hypertensive [...]

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By Hemani G, Knott S, Haley C (2013) . PLoS Genet 9(2): e1003295.doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1003295  (open access) The relative importance between additive and non-additive genetic variance has been widely argued in quantitative genetics. By approaching this question from an evolutionary perspective we show that, while additive variance can be maintained under selection at a low level for some patterns of epistasis, the majority [...]

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In the past six months, I have encountered a review, by Thomas Nagel in The New York Review of Books (2012), of Alvin Plantinga’s latest book (Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, 2011 ) and a review, by Alvin Plantinga in The New Republic (2012), of a Thomas Nagel’s latest book (Mind [...]

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Christiane Goulart and Miriam Barlow and colleagues have published an important study in this month’s PLOS One entitled “Designing Antibiotic Cycling Strategies by Determining and Understanding Local Adaptive Landscapes.” Because of the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, antibiotic cycling has been proposed as a strategy to preserve antibiotic susceptibility of disease-causing microbes. Unfortunately, these efforts [...]

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