21. Evolutionary Medicine

Principles of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior (EEB 122)

Evolution plays an important though underutilized role in medicine. Evolution guides how our bodies respond to various treatments, how pathogens will respond to treatments, and how pathogens' responses will change over time. Pathogens oftentimes will evolve to an intermediate level of virulence where they become strong enough to infect a host and reproduce, but not so strong as to kill the host before it can spread the pathogen.

00:00 - Chapter 1. Introduction
06:40 - Chapter 2. "Thrifty Phenotypes"
11:36 - Chapter 3. Auto-immune Diseases in Developed and Undeveloped Countries
17:27 - Chapter 4. Treating Auto-immune Diseases
26:20 - Chapter 5. Pathogen Evolution
37:40 - Chapter 6. Virulence
47:16 - Chapter 7. Summary

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses

This course was recorded in Spring 2009.