Evolutionary medicine/External Links

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• Evolution and Medicine Network

• "This website is for scientists, scholars and clinicians working at the interface of evolution and medicine. While evolutionary biology has long provided a foundation for studies of antibiotic resistance and population genetics, its contributions to many other areas of medicine are just now being developed. No journal or scientific society yet provides a network for communication and coordination of work in this area. This website is a project undertaken by the evolution and medicine community to create an Evolution and Medicine Network for sharing information. Your contributions would be most appreciated."

• The Evolution & Medicine Review

• "The Evolution & Medicine Review (EMR) is a new scientific publication created by and for the community of scientists, scholars, clinicians and teachers working at the interface of evolution and medicine. It differs from a traditional journal as it is dynamic, interactive and more timely. The EMR provides open access to carefully selected information from diverse sources, along with engaging commentary and opportunities for discussion....There is no good name for this new genre of web publishing, created for The Evolution & Medicine Review. It is neither a blog nor a webpage. The best designation we have come up with is a WeView—a Web Based ReView created by a community with a shared interest in a specific topic.

• Evolutionary Biology and Human Disease

• Unusually extensive set of links to sites relating to evoutionary medicine. Page of a site about a course, "Evolutionary Biology and Human Disease", an interdisciplinary course offered through the University of Michigan's Life Sciences Initiative. The faculty instructors for the course are Randolph Nesse (Psychiatry and Psychology) and Alan Weder (Medicine).

• What is Darwinian Medicine? By Randolph Nesse, M.D. (The University of Michigan.)

• A brief overview of: Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine by Randolph Nesse and George Williams, Vintage Books, 1996. Published in the United Kingdom as Evolution and Healing: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, Orion Press, 1996.
• Darwinian medicine is the enterprise of trying to find evolutionary explanations for vulnerabilities to disease. Every trait needs an evolutionary as well as a proximate explanation. Disease, not being a product of selection, would seem to be excluded. This is one reason why doctors have not realized that evolution might be useful. Another reason is that medical research looks for differences between individuals in order to explain why one person gets sick while another stays healthy. But Darwinian Medicine does not seek evolutionary explanations for disease itself, and does not usually try to understand why one individual becomes ill when another does not. Instead, it tries to understand why all humans are vulnerable to each disease. It asks how it is possible that natural selection can shape the eye or heart or brain but cannot eliminate our vulnerabilities to nearsightedness, atherosclerosis, depression, or cancer. Darwinian Medicine applies the advances that have revolutionized evolutionary biology to the problems of medicine and tries to provide, for each disease, an explanation for why the body isn't better. These evolutionary explanations for disease fit nicely into just a few categories: defenses, infection, novel environments, genes, design compromises, and evolutionary legacies.

• Randolph Neese, M.D. webage: Selected Reprints

• This page is intended to allow ready access to a partial bibliography and to reprints for individual use only. If you would like permission to use a reprint for a book or course pack, please contact the publisher. Some articles are protected by a password. If you download a file that asks for a password when you try to open it, please send me a note at nesse(insert@here)umich.edu confirming that you will use the article only for your personal use, and I will send you the password for that file. Some of the articles underlined are in RTF or MS Word, but most are Adobe Acrobat pdf files.

• Henry Stewart Talks. Evolution and Medicine: How New Applications Advance Research and Practice.