Evolutionary Medicine

Stephen C. Stearns is the Edward P Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. A 1967 Yale graduate, he earned an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia. He was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley prior to his first academic appointment at Reed College. In 1983, he assumed the directorship of the Zoology Institute at the University of Basel, Switzerland, returning to Yale in 2000. In addition to Evolutionary Medicine, his books include Evolution: An Introduction; Watching, from the Edge of Extinction (coauthored with his wife, Beverly Peterson Stearns); and The Evolution of Life Histories. A founder of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (and its journal) as well as the Tropical Biology Association, Dr. Stearns has served as President of both. In 2011 he received the Devane Medal for undergraduate teaching from the Yale chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.Ruslan Medzhitov is the David W. Wallace Professor of Immunobiology at Yale University School of Medicine. He is also an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He obtained his B.A. (Biology) from Tashkent State University (1990) and Ph.D. (Biochemistry) from the Moscow State University (1993). Beginning his career as a visiting student at the University of California at San Diego, he became a Postdoctoral Associate with HHMI in January 1994, working at Yale University School of Medicine. With the late Charles A. Janeway, Jr. (with whom he worked as a postdoctoral fellow from 1994â€"1999), Dr. Medzhitov co-discovered and characterized mammalian Toll-like receptors, now recognized as integral to the innate immune system. Widely recognized for his research, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

Stearns and Medzhitov provide a valuable, authoritative resource for students encountering evolutionary medicine for the first time. For biomedical scientists, medical students, and students of evolution, it is a valuable introduction to an important emerging field.

• Preface.- 1. Introduction to Evolutionary Thinking.- 2. What is a Patient?.- 3. What is a Disease?.- 4. Defenses.- 5. Pathogen Evolution.- 6. Cancer.- 7. Reproductive Medicine.- 8. Mismatch.- 9. Mental Disorders.- 10. Individual Health versus Population Health.- 11. Open Questions and Other Issues.- References.