Nicole Bender organized an Evolutionary Medicine symposium that was presented at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting in Montpellier, France last week. Abstracts of the talks are below.
Session 28. Symposium: Evolutionary medicine: challenges and future directions 1. (Pasteur)
Grazyna Jasienska Reproductive ecology and female health, and lifespan: energy budgets, physiological trade-offs and antagonistic pleiotropy. High energetic costs of pregnancy and lactation may cause physiological trade-offs for maternal organism, which partially explains why women with high parity often have poor health in older age and, consequently, reduced lifespan. For women, having adequate energy during all stages of life, including periods of fetal and childhood development, and adulthood, is related to high levels of reproductive steroids hormones. High lifetime levels of these hormones have both beneficial and detrimental effects: they increase chances of pregnancy, but also the risk of breast cancer. Intra-individual variation in energetic status that leads to intra-individual variation in levels of steroid hormones may help to explain the complex relationship between parity and lifespan. This relationship is further complicated by pleiotropic effects of genes, including APOE, PPAR-gamma, IL-10, ERS1, which encode traits potentially important for both fertility and health in women. Modern clinical medicine usually ignores findings from the area of human reproductive ecology, but evolutionary medicine suggests that this knowledge might be useful for medical practice and for programs of disease prevention. Most important aspects are treatment of infertility, prevention of reproductive cancers and prevention of diseases (such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and Alzheimer’s) the risks of which often increase in women who had high costs of reproduction. Supported by the Center for Human and Primate Reproductive Ecology (CHaPRE), the Polish National Science Centre and The Salus Publica Foundation.
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Elodie Vercken & B. Mauroy Don’t fall off the adaptation cliff! Asymmetrical fitness costs constrain the evolution of human lung. The human bronchial tree is a branched network, whose function is to bring air from the mouth to the exchange surface, the acini. The relative size of the branches up and down a bifurcation h is known to be a critical parameter: too small, the circulation of is impaired by the large hydrodynamic resistance of the tree; too large, the volume occupied by the bronchial tree reduces drastically the volume left in the chest for the exchange surface. In order to evaluate lungs efficiency, theoretical models of the bronchial tree have been developed. These models have been able to predict the optimal value for the parameter h resulting from the compromise between hydrodynamic resistance and exchange surface. Although quantitatively close, the predictions from these models are consistently inferior to physiological measures of the parameter h. These models of optimal bronchial tree geometry are based on a function for lungs efficiency, equivalent to a fitness function in evolutionary biology. This fitness function is asymmetrical around the optimal value, therefore cliff-edge effects are expected to play a role on the evolution of lung geometry. Cliff-edge theory (Mountford, 1969) states that in presence of variability in phenotypic expression, expected fitness has to be calculated over the range of possible phenotypes. If the fitness function is asymmetric, the best strategy is not at the apparent maximum of the fitness function. We propose a mathematical model of population dynamics to predict quantitatively the influence of cliff-edge effects on the evolution of bronchial tree geometry. Once fitted with empirical data, this model is able to give precise information on: 1/ the “quantity” of variability suffered by the human bronchial tree ; and 2/ the distribution of bronchial tree geometries in the population. In particular, our model predicts that, even if the population is adapted at best, there always exist individuals whose bronchial trees are associated with costs larger than average, and who ought to be more sensitive to geometrical remodelling.
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Kaspar Staub, U. Woitek, M. Henneberg & F. Rühli Challenging perspectives in evolutionary medicine: microevolution of human morphology and its medico-social impact. Contribution for the SYMPOSIUM ON EVOLUTIONARY MEDICINE: Human morphology is undergoing important evolutionary changes. The socio-economic and clinical impact of such alterations of human anatomy is mostly underestimated so far. The newly founded Centre for Evolutionary Medicine (ZEM) at University of Zürich is focusing on the microevolution of human morphology as one of its major research directions. We present not only current research data on such morphological traits but also address particularly their medico-social impact. Based on skeletal samples from ancient to modern times as well as based on historical and modern Swiss Armed Forces conscription data (N>100 000) we are able to show significant increases in body dimensions, decrease in skeletal robustness and increase in morphological variability. Using data from the Swiss Armed Forces (universal conscription, representing 80-100% of the 19-year-old men alive) on the secular trend of height and BMI between 1875-2010 we can trace the evolution of body dimensions. The trends of height, weight and BMI in Switzerland show the following pattern: The positive secular height trend (15 cm height gain in 130 years) begun in the 1890s (birth years 1870s) and slowed down a hundred years later in the 1990s (birth years 1970s). Contrary, the trend in body weight did not slow down in the recent decades, average weight continued to rise. Consequently, average BMI, which did not change between 1879 and the 1950s, shows a marked two-step increase at the end of the 1980s and again since 2002. A further particular focus of our contribution lays on the alterations of the axial skeleton (eg. increased frequencies of spina bifida occulta). We will also address specific consequences for public health measures (target groups for weight reduction programs), medical teaching (variability of anatomical structures) or clinical research (low back pain etiology).
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Gillian Ragsdale & R. Foley Parent-of-origin effects on empathy. Genomic imprinting is a violation of Mendel’s laws that enables selection to act on genes depending on parent- of-origin. This study tested whether there are parent-of-origin effects on the heritability of empathy in the general population as part of a larger question concerning the role of imprinted genes in the evolution of human cognition and behaviour. The measure tested was the Empathy Quotient, which was developed by The Autism Research Centre for use with both general and clinical population samples. To test genomic imprinting hypotheses correlations in EQ scores between pairs of full, maternal and paternal siblings were compared using path analysis. Where scores are influenced by imprinted genes, the actual correlations between pairs of siblings will differ from those expected following classical Mendelian inheritance in a predictable way depending on what kind of imprinting is influencing the trait and the fit of Mendelian and imprinting models can be compared. The results of this study support a model of competing maternal and paternal influences on strong and weak empathy.
Session 31. Symposium: Evolutionary medicine: challenges and future directions 2. (Pasteur)
Elizabeth Uhl Expanding the perspective: animal diseases and evolutionary medicine. An evolutionary perspective is increasingly being embraced in medicine and is now considered essential for a comprehensive understanding of disease. To date the evolutionary medicine movement has concentrated on the evolutionary aspects of human disease, however only a very few diseases are truly unique to humans. For example, for dogs alone, of the 450 reported canine diseases approximately 360 are analogous to human diseases. Add this to the fact that many animals live in very close association with humans and thus share exposure to the same environment, it becomes clear that an integrative knowledge of the evolutionary aspects of disease can provide a framework that greatly enhances the understanding of human diseases. Extension of the reach of evolutionary medicine to include animal diseases also opens up a much broader range of experimental research questions. For example, human gene association studies have identified potential gene targets in a wide variety of diseases, but the gene manipulation studies required for confirmation and characterization of phenotypic effects cannot be performed on people. Animal models will therefore be needed for these critical cause and effect studies. However, although much of what is known about human diseases has been learned from the study of animal models, the evolutionary influences that molded animal phenotypes and how they may differ from those influencing humans have rarely been considered in their selection. Because of this, animal models have not been fully utilized in studies of disease and the lack of an evolutionary perspective has contributed to a serious ‘prediction problem,’ to wit that many of the findings from studying animal models do not apply to the human disease. In addition, animal models have traditionally been based only upon their similarities to the human diseases and their differences have either been ignored or considered a weakness. An evolutionary perspective that considers both humans and experimental animals in the environmental contexts in which they evolved will make investigations of the differences between the human and animal manifestations of diseases, especially those with the same etiology, as equally insightful to the understanding human disease as are interspecies similarities. Such an integrated evolutionary perspective on disease has the potential to provide a unifying context to the study of disease just as it did for biology and genetics.
Rudi G.J. Westendorp Selection for human longevity. Human longevity has long been considered to be beyond evolutionary control. Over recent decades however, various adaptive theories have been put forward that favour post-reproductive survival in women, enhancing the reproductive success of their (grand) children. In polygamous populations older men frequently continue to sire children up to an advanced age. Such an effect may have contributed also to selection for human longevity. From 2002 through 2010 we have prospectively followed 28,994 individuals in 1,703 households from a contemporary polygamous African population, with a demographic structure and environment that probably resembles our evolutionary past more closely than recent developed societies. In a full kin analysis, using a two-sex model, we have assessed the effect of the presence of women and men aged fifty and above on offspring survival and reproduction in their households. Our results suggest that human longevity evolved predominantly throughselection for longevity in older men, rather than through selection favouring post-reproductive survival in older women. As survival up to old age under adverse conditions critically depends on fighting infection, these findings underpin a central role of the (innate-) immune system in regulating longevity and the inverse, the ageing process. Previously, we have pointed to a immunological trade-off between reproduction and longevity. Now, by comparing the expression of the (innate-) immune system in an original adverse environment in Ghana and the nowadays affluent environment in developed countries, we better understand the occurrence of inflammation mediated age associated diseases such as atherosclerosis, apathy and dementia that are part of our current life histories.
David van Bodegom, M. Rozing & R. Westendorp Socioeconomic status determines sex dependent survival of human offspring. BACKGROUND In polygamous societies, rich men have high reproductive prospects through the marriage of multiple wives. Evolutionary, rich households would therefore benefit more from sons. RESULTS In a large polygamous population of 28,994 participants in rural Africa, after eight years of follow-up for survival and fertility, men in rich households had twice the reproductive prospects of women. In line with evolutionary expectation; in rich households more sons were born; sons had higher survival and sons had better nutritional status. CONCLUSIONS These findings could reflect a higher vulnerability of sons to poor conditions. They are also in line with differences in parental investment as hypothesized by Trivers and Willard. Irrespective of the underlying mechanism, the differential survival of sons and daughters dependent on socioeconomic status maximizes reproductive success in this polygamous society.
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