Evolutionary Medicine

Catalog description

This course provides an introduction to the principles of Evolutionary Medicine, and how these principles can be applied to combat growing public health crises in human society. Evolutionary Medicine is a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field that uses evolutionary biology to answer questions about modern human health and disease. Instead of focusing on cellular or molecular mechanisms, this field seeks to understand the larger ultimate reasons why people get sick: Why has evolution left us so vulnerable to diseases such as obesity, heart disease, cancer, back pain, anxiety and depression? In this course you will investigate these questions by applying evolutionary theory and principles of human evolution to understand the causes of modern diseases, and how we can better prevent and/or treat them.