Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/Case Western Reserve University/ANTH 302 Darwinian Medicine (Fall 2013)/Course description

Darwinian (evolutionary) medicine deals with evolutionary aspects of modern human disease. It applies the concepts and methods of evolutionary biology to the question of why we are vulnerable to disease. The purpose of this course is to understand the approach of Darwinian (evolutionary) medicine and apply it to explain “Why We Get Sick”. The content includes general hypotheses about the evolutionary bases of diseases (defenses, infection, novel environments, genes, design compromises, and evolutionary legacies) and tests of those hypotheses using information about a wide variety of contemporary diseases.

In the medical context, evolutionary medicine is seen as a basic science that plays an important role in understanding health and disease. In the evolutionary biology context, evolutionary medicine provides opportunities to test and refine fundamental concepts using a well-understood and documented species. In the anthropological context, evolutionary medicine expands understanding of human evolution, adaptation, and variation. Sanetti (talk) 17:18, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

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