Evolutionary Medicine

Catalog description

. This course aims to examine evolutionary and ecological topics and apply these principles to understanding human health and disease. Areas of focus will include infectious disease, cancer, the microbiome and One Health (the intersection of human health and the environment). We will explore these topics through questions about why we get sick, how our evolutionary history has made us more or less susceptible to certain diseases and how and why infectious organisms frequently evolve resistance to our treatments. This 3-credit course will use topics in medicine and public health as a framework to teach the broad principles of evolutionary biology. (Three lecture hours per week)