darwinian approach to diseases

Question 1

heuristic models

Answer 1

learning new ways of thinking that allow us to make our own new discoveries

Question 2

what is the perspective on disease based on?

Answer 2

illness (patient)
sickness (society)
disease (health professionals)

Question 3

what is a disease?

Answer 3

ways of functioning of an individual body that are maladaptive with respect to the environmental context and reduce survival/reproduction of an organism

Question 4

what contributes to a disease?

Answer 4

usceptible host +/or pathogen +/or conducive environment = disease

Question 5

darwinian medicine

Answer 5

many physical/proximate causes are considered linked with remote /evolutionary causes of disease in which reproduction and adaptability are preferred over health

Question 6

what is the basic principle behind darwin’s theory?

Answer 6

sexual reproduction + struggle for survival -> genetic variation -> survival of the fittest (live longer or breed more)

Question 7

why did the publish of ‘the origin of species’ create controversy?

Answer 7

• threatened religious belief
• degraded human nature
• supports nihilism and relativism (moral degradation of society)
• deterministic conception of human nature

Question 8

where does the genetic variation between men arise?

Answer 8

we originated from 10,000 individuals who came out africa (I and II) to populate land

• most of genetic variation (85% is intra-populational)
  
  • only 15% is interpopulations -> races don’t exist
  • there is more genetic difference between the same human groups than different human groups

Question 9

founder effect

Answer 9

reproductive isolation of a small group of humans and their initial set of genes

Question 10

bottleneck effect

Answer 10

critical event favours/allows only for the survival of individuals with a certain characteristic that makes them fitter for survival
- mutations maintained in the gene pool as adaptive and for the genetic drift

Question 11

mechanism of society

Answer 11

negative correlation between fertility and industrial development

Question 12

dunbar hypothesis

Answer 12

human intelligence did not evolve as a means to solve ecological problems but rather as a means for survival and reproducing in large and complex social groups

Question 13

thrift genes hypothesis

Answer 13

antagonistic pleiotropy: genes that are beneficial in early life (reproduction, survival) become harmful later in life
- thrift gene: genes which predispose diabetes were historically advantageous but became detrimental in modern age

Question 14

barker hypothesis of foetal programming of adult disease

Answer 14

link between small birth size (poor prenatal nutrition) and heart disease in middle age

• biological evolution -> slow changes fixed in genome
  
  • modern environment is changing more rapidly than we can adapt to it

Question 15

evolutionary psychology

Answer 15

adaptive bias: human brain has evolved to reason adaptively rather than rationally
- we did not evolve as mechanism to reduce the number of cognitive errors

Question 16

human diseases due to evolutionary mismatch

Answer 16

• increased cell division in women due to higher number of menstrual cycles in life
• almost aseptic environment leads to development of autoimmune diseases

Question 17

theory of epidemiological transition

Answer 17

• 3 great epidemiological/health transitions:
  
  • age of pestilence and famine
  • retreat of pandemics
  • man-made degenerative diseases
• biocenosis: association of different organisms forming a closely integrated community
• patocenosis: set of pathological states present within a given population at a given time (disrupt great transitions)

Question 18

what does the frequency of distribution of disease depend on?

Answer 18

• endogenous factors: infectivity, virulence, route of infection, vector
• ecological factors: climate, urbanisation, promiscuity
• frequency and distribution of all the other diseases within the same population

Question 19

evolutionary trade-off

Answer 19

every new character acts on another one -> over-design of 1 would upset entire organism’s function

• ex. - sickle cell-anaemia was correlated to malaria -> people with sickle-cell anaemia were resistant to malaria
  
  • sickle-cell abnormality caused vector to be unable to place in blood
  • selective advantage to fight malaria