Spring 2022 Events

We’re pleased to announce our spring Club EvMed lineup. See you in 2022!

Control system failures and evolutionary medicine

Tuesday, January 11th at 12pm EST/18:00 CET

Join us for a conversation with Robert Perlman, Professor Emeritus of the Dept. of Pharmacological and Physiological Sciences at the University of Chicago, and Randolph Nesse, Research Professor of Life Sciences and Founding Director of the Center for Evolution & Medicine at Arizona State University. They will lead a discussion about how natural selection shaped the thousands of control systems that make life possible, how their failure modes can help us understand disease, and the evolutionary reasons why some are especially vulnerable to failure. The goal is to create a community interested in developing work at this intersection, so please come prepared to share examples of how we can study why some control systems are vulnerable to failure.

Attendees are encouraged to read Perlman 2019*, “An evolutionary view of homeostasis: bioenergetics, life history theory, and responses to pregnancy” and Nesse 2021, “Evolutionary medicine needs engineering expertise.” Sign up here for the meeting link.
*Note: If you do not have access to this article, please contact us for assistance.

A Natural History of the Future

Tuesday, January 18th at 12pm EST/18:00 CET

Join us for a conversation with Rob Dunn, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University. Drawing on his recent book, Rob Dunn argues that humans remain far more dependent on nature and nature’s regularities/rules/laws than tends to be presupposed. Focusing on the special case of microbiomes, Dunn considers the question, just how many microbial species do we depend on and how might we ensure that they travel with us into the future? In concluding, he will open up the question to the group to discuss what the most likely scenario is with regard to the intergenerational transfer of the species on which we depend as well as what the hoped for scenario might look like. Sign up here for the meeting link.