Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

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Very,very, interesting

Evolution in a way you never knew!

Understanding genetic disease from an evolutionary point of view

Razzle dazzle them

Somewhat difficult subject matter for those lacking a background in science or medicine..

Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease
Sharon Moalem , and Jonathan Prince
Manufacturer: William Morrow
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

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The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution

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ASIN: 0060889659
Release Date: 2007-02-06

Book Description

Read it.

You're already living it.

Was diabetes evolution's response to the last Ice Age? Did a deadly genetic disease help our ancestors survive the bubonic plagues of Europe? Will a visit to the tanning salon help lower your cholesterol? Why do we age? Why are some people immune to HIV? Can your genes be turned on -- or off?

Joining the ranks of modern myth busters, Dr. Sharon Moalem turns our current understanding of illness on its head and challenges us to fundamentally change the way we think about our bodies, our health, and our relationship to just about every other living thing on earth, from plants and animals to insects and bacteria.

Through a fresh and engaging examination of our evolutionary history, Dr. Moalem reveals how many of the conditions that are diseases today actually gave our ancestors a leg up in the survival sweepstakes. When the option is a long life with a disease or a short one without it, evolution opts for disease almost every time.

Everything from the climate our ancestors lived in to the crops they planted and ate to their beverage of choice can be seen in our genetic inheritance. But Survival of the Sickest doesn't stop there. It goes on to demonstrate just how little modern medicine really understands about human health, and offers a new way of thinking that can help all of us live longer, healthier lives.

Survival of the Sickest is filled with fascinating insights and cutting-edge research, presented in a way that is both accessible and utterly absorbing. This is a book about the interconnectedness of all life on earth -- and, especially, what that means for us.

Customer Reviews:

Very,very, interesting.......2007-09-21

This is one of those books that is a delightful read, educating, interesting, and entertaining. The author puts forth his theories that many modern diseases are variations of evolutionary traits that were held by our ancestors that enabled them to survive the ice age and bubonic plague. He goes on to describe how viruses cause certain behavior in their carriers to help the viruses survival. The common cold leaves you well enough to stay moving and go to work so you can spread the virus to others, while the parasitic malaria wants you immobile and in bed because mosquitos can continue to carry it even better with you immobile.
The author also presents a case currently making head way in evolutionary science that is challenging the savannah theory. He proposes that we are evolved form aquatic apes as opposed to grassland dwellers, which would explain our hairlessness like other aquatic mammals and being bipedal. We also have fat stored at the skin like water dwellers and our infants have swimming instincts at birth that have been proven by water birthing that is very successful.
And finally I was really fascinated by the finding that what scientists have believed were "junk DNA" is slowly being shown to actually be a creative force that causes mutations in DNA for the benefit of survival of the species. I have always had trouble believing in the evolutionary theory because no mechanism could be created with causing it outside of God, and God would not need it. I also believed that the key was in DNA. Now I have a cause, the DNA itself creates and casues beneficial mutations.
I really can not do this book justice in a review with out making it far to long so buy the book if the above sounds interesting. The book presents an excellent case and has made me a believer.

Evolution in a way you never knew!.......2007-09-08

Everything out there is influencing the evolution of everything else. The bacteria and viruses and parasites that cause disease in us have affected our evolution as we have adapted in ways to cope with their effects. In response they have evolved in turn, and keep on doing so.

There are many dietary diseases that have had an evolutionary advantage in our ancestors but that today do more harm than good. In a person with hemochromatosis, for example, the body always thinks that it doesn't have enough iron and continues to absorb iron unabated. The excess iron can lead to liver failure, heart failure, diabetes, and even cancer.

Why would a disease so deadly be bred into our genetic code? Remember how natural selection works. If a given genetic trait makes you stronger--especially if it makes you stronger before you have children--then you're more likely to survive, reproduce, and pass that trait on. People with hemochromatosis have therefore an evolutionary advantage--protection against the bubonic plague!

On one set of experiments, macrophages from people who had hemochromatosis and macrophages from people who did not were matched against bacteria in separate dishes to test their killing ability. The hemochromatic macrophages crushed the bacteria. They are thought to be significantly better at combating bacteria by limiting the availability of iron than the nonhemochromatic macrophages. So though hemochromatosis will kill those inflicted with it decades later, they are much more likely than people without hemochromatosis to survive plagues, reproduce, and pass the mutation on to their children.

Diabetes also provided an evolutionary advantage to our ancestors by providing superior ability to withstand the cold by eliminating water and driving up sugar levels (like alcohol, sugar is a natural antifreeze). As a theory, it's hotly controversial, but diabetes may have helped our European ancestors survive the sudden cold, including the ice-age.

Malaria is an infectious disease that infects as many as 500 million people every year, killing more than 1 million of them. But not everyone who gets bit by malaria-carrying mosquitoes gets infected. And not everybody who gets infected dies. So what's helping the malaria survivors? People with a genetic tendency for sickle-cell anemia, another inherited blood disorder, had better natural resistance to malaria.

As you've seen with hemochromatosis, diabetes, and sickle-cell anemia, one generation's evolutionary solution is another generation's evolutionary problem.

At the end of the day, every living thing shares two hardwired imperatives: Survive. Reproduce. To achieve this, some organisms have inherited ingenious techniques to manipulate their hosts--the phenomenon that occurs when a parasite provokes its host to behave in a way that helps the parasite to survive and reproduce.

Orb weavers are a family of spiders that experience host manipulation. A wasp bites the spider, temporarily paralyzing it, then deposits its egg in its abdomen. The spider then goes on with his life oblivious to the egg in him. The egg then hatches, and the larva slowly feeds off the blood of the spider. When it is ready to cocoon, it injects chemicals into the spider's bloodstream to manipulate the spider into building a special web for it--instead of building circular webs, it goes back and forth building a rectangular web. Once the web is completed, the larva kills the spider by sucking off all its blood, and then throwing its carcass to the jungle floor below. It then uses the specially built web for it to cocoon by hanging on it.

A worm that infects ants is a classic example of another host manipulator. As the worms being carried by the ant develop, one of them makes its way to the ant's brain where it manipulates the ant's nervous system. Suddenly, the ant behaves in completely uncharacteristic fashion. At night, it leaves its colony and hangs on the tip of a grass, waiting to be eaten by a sheep. If it does not, it returns to its colony only to resume again its journey at night to the tip of a grass waiting to be eaten. Once eaten by a sheep, the worm would have succeeded in its manipulation, and would grow inside the sheep's stomach, its intended host.

The rabies Virus is another interesting host manipulator. It manipulates its host into becoming aggressive, which will make its host bite others and thus also infecting others.

Here is one amazing example of host manipulation: One researcher has discovered that women infected with T. gondii spend more money on clothes and are consistently rated as beings more attractive than women without the infection. Infected women were more easy-going, more warm-hearted, had more friends, and cared more about how they looked. However, they were also less trustworthy and had more relationships with men. Infected men, on the other hand, were less well groomed, more likely to be loners, and more willing to fight. They were also more likely to be suspicious and jealous and less willing to follow rules.

A normal sneeze occurs when the body's self-defense system senses a foreign invader trying to get in through your nasal passages and acts to repel the invasion by expelling it with a sneeze. But sneezing when you've got a cold? There's obviously no way to expel the cold virus which is already lodged in you. The cold virus has learned this reflex so it can infect your colleagues, family and your friends. Your body is actually being manipulated by the virus into sneezing!

The herpes virus may heighten sexual feeling, which will increase the probability of transmission. In other words, sometimes the herpes virus may want you to get some action in order for it to spread to other hosts.

So what if we made it easier for a given type of bacteria to survive in a healthy human than to survive in a sick human? Would this create evolutionary pressure against behavior that harms us? In fact there is an evolutionary advantage for the malaria parasite to push its hosts toward the brink of death. The more parasites swarming through our blood, the more parasites the mosquito is likely to ingest; the more parasites the mosquito ingests, the more likely it will cause an infection when it bites someone else. Cholera is similar--it doesn't need us moving around to find new hosts, so there's no reason for the bacteria to select against virulence. The bottom line is that if an infectious client has allies (such as mosquitoes) or good delivery systems (such as unprotected water supplies), peaceful coexistence with its host becomes a lot less important. In those cases evolution is likely to favor versions of the parasite that best exploit its host's resources, allowing the parasite to multiply as much as possible. Some researchers believe that we can use this understanding to influence the evolution of parasites away from virulence. The basic theory is this: shut down the modes of transmission that don't require human participation and suddenly all the evolutionary pressure is directed at allowing the human host to get up and get out. According to this theory, the virulence of a cholera outbreak in a given population should be directly related to the quality and safety of that population's water supply. If sewage flows easily into rivers that people wash in or drink from, then the cholera strain would evolve toward virulence--it can multiply freely, essentially using up its hosts, relying on its access to the water supply for transmission. But if the water supply is well protected, the organism should evolve away from virulence--the longer it remains in a more mobile host, the better its chance of transmission.

A series of cholera outbreaks that began in Peru in 1991 and spread across South and Central America over the next few years provide compelling evidence that this theory might actually work. The water supply systems from country to country ranged from relatively advanced to seriously rudimentary. Sure enough, when the bacteria invaded nations with poorly protected water supplies, such as Ecuador, the virus became more harmful as it spread. But in countries with safe water supplies, such as Chile, the bacteria evolved downward in virulence and killed fewer people. The implications of this are huge. Instead of challenging bacteria to become stronger and more dangerous through an antibiotic arms race (which we are currently losing), we could essentially challenge them to get along. If mosquitoes didn't have access to bedridden malaria patients, the microbe would be under evolutionary pressure to evolve in a way that allowed the infected person to remain mobile, increasing the opportunity for it to spread.

A series of groundbreaking research has shown that certain compounds can attach themselves to specific genes and suppress their expression. Let's take a look at a few examples. Depending upon the time of year the vole (a type of mouse) is due to give birth, baby voles are born with either a thick coat or a thin coat. The gene for a thick coat is always there--it's just turned on or off depending on the level of light the mother senses in her environment around the time of conception.

One species of lizard is born with a long tail and large body or a small tail and small body depending on one thing only--whether their mother smelled a lizard-eating snake while pregnant. When her babies are entering a snake-filled world, they are born with a long tail and big body, making them less likely to be snake food.

This is a fascinating book and I highly recommend it. I truly enjoyed reading it and I have learnt things I never imagined! Now that's what I call precious reading!

Understanding genetic disease from an evolutionary point of view.......2007-09-01

We really don't "need" disease. This is a bit misleading. It just so happens that some genetic disorders, such as sickle-cell anemia, favism, diabetes, hemochromatosis, the tendency to obesity, etc., confer on the afflicted compensatory advantages. Thus a predilection for getting fat is adaptive if a drought or a long winter beckons, or a person with a genetic tendency toward sickle-cell anemia is less likely to get malaria, and so on. Note that it is only diseases caused by genetic mutations that Dr. Moalem is talking about.

One of the techniques our bodies use when fighting infection is to reduce the amount of iron available to the invaders. Bacteria need iron to reproduce. If there is a lot of it available their numbers can grow quickly. Without iron they can't reproduce at all. Iron is a limiting factor for many kinds of life. Vast stretches of ocean support little in the way of life because the microorganisms that begin the food chain can't grow where there is so little iron. As Dr. Moalem reports in this wide-ranging and eyebrow-lifting book, sprinkle some iron onto those patches of ocean and they will quickly turn green with microorganisms.

So it is a bit of an irony that people who have hemochromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes them to retain large amounts of iron in their bodies, are able to survival infections like the plague. This is because they starve the invading microbes through "iron locking." They have a lot of iron in their bodies, but they keep it away from the bacteria. Other people who have low levels of iron in their bodies are able to withstand bacterial attacks because they also keep what little iron they have away from the germs. In fact, one of the body's initial responses to microbial invasion is to limit the amount of free iron in the system.

Genetic coding for levels of iron in the body is an example of evolutionary adaptation, part of the ongoing arms race between us and the microbes that live in and on our bodies. This is just one of several interesting and new ideas coming from the growing science of evolutionary medicine that I found in Survival of the Sickest. Incidentally, one way to manage hemochromatosis is through donating blood on a regular basis, which explains in part why physicians of old were sometimes successful when they bled their patients.

This got me to thinking about "only women bleed" which led me to think about hemorrhoids (which prove that it isn't only women who bleed). Perhaps bleeding instead of retaining blood, which seems like the more natural thing for our bodies to do, has adaptive value in some people in some environments.

Another interesting idea is this from page 58: "ACHOO syndrome--its full name is autosomal dominant compelling heliopthalmic outburst syndrome." It is a "disorder that causes uncontrolled sneezing when someone is exposed to bright light, usually sunlight, after being in the dark." Dr. Moalem suggests that "way back when our ancestors spent more time in caves, this reflex helped them to clear out any molds or microbes that might have lodged in their noses or upper respiratory tract." Now this may sound a bit far fetched, but I have suffered from low grade allergies all my life, and used to have asthmatic attacks. I came to believe that the buildup in my lungs and the sneezing were signals to me to move on! Of course now I clean and vacuum like a germaphobe, but the idea is the same. My symptoms were adaptive. They more or less forced me to reduce the level of potential irritants and microbes in my environment.

But there is more. I noticed long ago that sometimes the sun in the morning would cause me to sneeze. I never figured out why until I read the above from Dr. Moalem. I am just the kind of person who would need to sneeze those molds out.

Later on in the book Moalem returns to an evolutionary idea that has been kicking around for decades. Beginning with the work of Elaine Morgan from the 1970s the public became aware of the notion that we humans had an aquatic past. She got the idea from marine biologist Alister Hardy. Through such books as The Descent of Woman (1972) and The Aquatic Ape: A Theory of Human Evolution (1982) Morgan argued that some of our unusual adaptations came about because we had an aquatic past. Taking up the idea, Moalem writes, "Every hairless mammal is aquatic or at least plays in the mud--think of hippos, elephants and the African warthog. But there aren't any hairless primates." (p. 198) Furthermore we have fat directly under our skin to help keep us warm just as aquatic mammals do. Also, Moalem notes, "the ability to survive on land and sea" gives us adaptive flexibility. If "chased by a leopard, the semiaquatic ape could dive into the water; chased by a crocodile, it could run into the forest." (p. 199)

These ideas are familiar but what I didn't know was that an aquatic past could have figured in our evolution toward bipedalism. "[S]tanding upright in water allowed...[aquatic apes] to venture into deeper water and still breathe, and the water helped to support their upper bodies, making it easier to support them on two feet." (p. 199)

This is an easy to read book, aimed at a general readership. An earlier, slightly more technical book that covers some of the same territory is Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (1994) by Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams, which I also recommend.

Razzle dazzle them.......2007-08-27

This book embodies much of what I dislike in popular cience books, while having few of the qualities I admire in such books. It relies more on sleigh of the hand and razzle dazzle, you-wouldn't-have-thought-of-it than on throughly thought out, well substantiated lines of thought.

Let's start with the subtitle: "A medical maverick discovers why we need disease". That is a clear case of fiction: nowhere in the book does the author "discover" anything; he merely retells the study of others. This, of course, is not a demerit, as many interesting scientists have difficulties in explaining their work in clear terms, acessible to the layman. However, the author must be hyped as the "discoverer", as the center figure in the tale.

Since James Burke's "Connections", it seems that popular science must explore all the crossroads, no matter how irrelevant. So Moalem goes on long tangents that have little to do with the theory he is trying to substantiate. In order to show how diabetes works to protect the body against cold, the reader is taken through the mechanism of an ice age, how ice core samples are removed and so on. If one were to remove all this "extra" material, this book would be thin indeed.

The book seems to revolve around this material and the author's use of jokes. Unfortunately, his sense of humour tends more towards ha-ha than funny, which helped to further fray my patience towards this book.

All of this is indeed a pity, as the subject is very interesting. If more pages had been dedicated to developing a central line of thought and substantiation and to showing the debate behind all these ideas (in a real light, instead of "the thickheaded traditionalists who won't accept new ideas"), it would be well worth the read.

Somewhat difficult subject matter for those lacking a background in science or medicine.........2007-07-08

From time to time I pick up a book on a subject I know virtually nothing about. Ordinarily I devour books about history or politics or current events. These are topics I am well versed in and comfortable with.
Dr. Sharon Moalem's "The Survival of the Sickest: sounded like a fascinating departure from my ordinary fare. So I thought I would give it a whirl. Unfortunately for me the results were somewhat mixed. Although Dr. Moalem and her co-author have written this book in fairly simple language that most should be able to follow pretty easily I found myself overwhelmed at times by the number of terms I was simply not familiar with at all. I'm afraid my lack of education in the sciences was showing. Blame me not the good doctor. Yet in spite of these difficulties I was still able to glean some important information from this book. I now have a somewhat better understanding of the whole business of why disease exists in the first place. I also discovered the important role viruses play in our ability to survive and reproduce. I also found out that the development of diabetes in human beings probably emerged as natures response to people having to cope with conditions in regions with extremely cold temperatures. This makes perfect sense and was interesting to me because a number of people in my family have battled this disease. Perhaps the most fascinating thing I learned in "Survival of the Sickest" is that exposure to the sunshine actually helps to convert the cholestorol in our bodies into the vitamin D we all need to ensure strong bones and help avoid osteoperosis. I had never heard this before and found this revelation to be quite interesting indeed!
For me, attempting to read "Survival of the Sickest" was a little like visiting a foreign country and not knowing the language. I was simply unprepared to get the most out of this book. As you can see, other reviewers continue to heap praise on Dr. Sharon Moalem for her book. I suspect their evaluation of this book is right on the money. In the end I found that reading "Survival of the Sickest" was time well spent anyway. After all, it is impossible to expand your horizons if you never make the attempt.

Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

Average customer rating:

What's for dinner?
Really great read
A fresh and innovatrive approach
EVOLUTIONARY MEDICINE
Outstanding introduction to a perspective on health you won't get from your doctor

Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine
Randolph M. Nesse , and George C. Williams
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0679746749
Release Date: 1996-01-30

Amazon.com

Is our tendency to "fix" our bodies with medicine keeping them from working exactly as they're supposed to? Two pioneers of the emerging science of Darwinian medicine argue that illness is part and parcel of the evolutionary system and as such, may be helping us to evolve towards better adaptation to our environment.

Book Description

The answers are in this groundbreaking book by two founders of the emerging science of Darwinian medicine, who deftly synthesize the latest research on disorders ranging from allergies to Alzheimer's and from cancer to Huntington's chorea. Why We Get Sick compels readers to reexamine the age-old attitudes toward sickness. Line drawings.

Customer Reviews:

What's for dinner?.......2007-09-02

"If you are starving in a rain forest, eat the camouflaged frog that is hidden in the vegetation, not the bright one sitting resplendent on a nearby branch."

At first glance, this quote from WHY WE GET SICK wouldn't seem to be relevant to the topic. But since the hypothesis of the book is that evolution and natural selection govern the senescence of aging and the physiological responses to diseases and mortally competitive environments, the fact that the gaudier frog has evolved with potent internal poisons that (should) signal "danger" to any potential predator makes the connection vis-a-vis both the amphibian's toxin and the starving hiker whose internal defense mechanisms may at least cause vomiting and diarrhea if frog's legs make it onto the dinner menu.

As authors Randolph Nesse and George Williams summarize:

"First, there are genes that make us vulnerable to disease ... Most deleterious genetic effects ... are actively maintained by selection because they have unappreciated benefits that outweigh their costs ... Second, disease results from exposure to novel factors that were not present in the environment in which we evolved ... Third, disease results from design compromises, such as upright posture with its associated back problems ... Fourth, ... natural selection ... works just as hard for pathogens trying to eat us and the organisms we want to eat. In conflicts with these organisms, as in baseball, you can't win 'em all. Finally, disease results from unfortunate historical legacies ... the human body must function well, with no chance to go back and start afresh ... Susceptibility to disease ... cannot be eliminated by any duration of natural selection, for it is the very power of natural selection that created them."

Under the umbrella of natural selection, the authors include everything from the obvious and non-arguable, such as fever as a mechanism to kill invading pathogens with heat, to the less obvious and perhaps debatable, such as the instinctive desire of small children to remained unweaned from mother's breast, which serves to prolong lactation and ensures that Mom won't become pregnant with a potential rival. Other examples fall into the category, Gee, Why Didn't I Think of That, including the morning sickness of pregnancy, which serves to prevent Mom from ingesting toxins during that vulnerable period when the unborn child is experiencing peak organ formation, and the causative agent of gout, uric acid, the build-up of which also protects the body from the aging effects of oxidative damage. Then there's cancer, which wouldn't be a problem had we not tissue cells that grow and regenerate. And did you know that premature ejaculation in the male is ostensibly selective, in an evolutionary sense, for those men that can get the gene transfer job done, so to speak, and then flee before the female's alpha male partner shows up to brain the interloper with a knotty pine cudgel?

Nesse and Williams lucidly present an unconventional paradigm of medicine, a different perspective from which to view disease and aging, that's only accasionally preachy. They rue the fact that it's not part of the mainstream, and argue for its inclusion in the curriculum of the country's medical schools. They fail to mention what I think is the more practical route to widespread acceptance, i.e. when it can make the medical industry lots of money.

Hey honey! How about some frog legs for dinner? I see a bright green one with yellow and red speckles perched in the carrotwood out back!

Really great read.......2007-01-09

Anyone in interested in how evolution impacts their day-to-day lives should read this book. It's not only informative, but also an enjoyable read.

A fresh and innovatrive approach.......2006-03-22

Insightful, progressive, meaningful, and comprehensive coverage of the field. I learned a lot from the book. Few minor points that can be improved. One, the figures in the book (there are only a few anyway) are vague and don't add much to the content. Two, there are many sentences in the book that are either out of context or they don't convey what the authors have in mind. Third, the book could have benefited from a bibliography. Alphabetical bibliography is easier to use to look the sources up than to struggle to find them in the Notes section at the end of the book. But, overall, a great book.

EVOLUTIONARY MEDICINE.......2006-02-26

Why we get sick is great for explaining evolutionary medicine for first timers. It's great for students, classrooms and anyone interested in Evolutionary medicine.

Outstanding introduction to a perspective on health you won't get from your doctor.......2006-01-02

This is a very readable, intelligent introduction to a perspective on medicine that is very useful for those of us who recognize that we have to manage our own medical care. It provides us with a basis for asking questions about the recommendations that doctors make. Those recommendations can be short-sighted. Most medical schools have not provided doctors with a useful evolutionary perspective on disease and medicine. The evolutionary perspective is simple enough for an intelligent lay person to grasp and use and novel enough to give insights that most doctors will not be able to provide.

Together with some knowledge of psychosomatic medicine (also neglected in most doctor's education) evolutionary medicine can give a patient sound footing to formulate a holistic perspective on health that few doctors will provide. Unlike holistic perspectives based on, say, Chinese medicine, this kind of perspective is more directly and obviously scientifically based. Accordingly, it is more likely to help a patient earn the respect of doctors that is needed for them to accept the patient as a full partner in the diagnosis and healing process.

Mismatch: Why Our World No Longer Fits Our Bodies

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the importance of developmental plasticity
Modern Man is in Trouble
Our Bodies Fit the Ancient African Savannah, I Don't Live There

Mismatch: Why Our World No Longer Fits Our Bodies
Peter Gluckman , and Mark Hanson
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0192806831

Book Description

We have built a world that no longer fits our bodies. Our genes - selected through our evolution - and the many processes by which our development is tuned within the womb, limit our capacity to adapt to the modern urban lifestyle. There is a mismatch. We are seeing the impact of this mismatch in the explosion of diabetes, heart disease and obesity. But it also has consequences in earlier puberty and old age. Bringing together the latest scientific research in evolutionary biology, development, medicine, anthropology and ecology, Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson, both leading medical scientists, argue that many of our problems as modern-day humans can be understood in terms of this fundamental and growing mismatch. It is an insight that we ignore at our peril.

Customer Reviews:

the importance of developmental plasticity.......2007-04-07

The book is in two parts. The first deals with matching. With gens and developmental plasticity an organism tries to achieve a better match to its environment. The second part informs us about three main mismatches; the maturational mismatch which is increasing gap between physical maturation and psychosocial maturation, mismatched metabolism resulting in metabolic syndrome and mismatch between our inbuilt repair mechanism and our life course.

The authors explain their thoughts with good examples and concepts. Methylated genes, life-history strategy, metabolic syndrome, developmental plasticity, physical and psychosocial maturation are some of the concepts I derived much benefit.

The notes given at the end of the book are also important and should be read.

The book make me aware of the problems we face and arouse my curiosity to delve further into the relating subject.

Modern Man is in Trouble.......2006-12-01

This is a very interesting and easy to read book. Gluckman and Hanson have managed in less than three hundred pages to explain the consequences of our man-made world not longer being appropriate for the biology we evolved with. They have done so using ideas from evolutionary biology, developmental science and medicine and show an understanding of environmental change and use examples that make this book equally appealing to the technically interested and the absolutely lay reader.

The book is in two parts - the first part is about the science and the second part is about the consequences for human health and disease. Both are filled with examples and there is not much technical language. There are no chapters I found too challenging for a lay reader.

In the second part of the book they use three major illustrations; puberty aging and the menopause and obesity/diabetes. I particularly found their insights into adolescence and puberty refreshing and challenging. The concept that the age of puberty may be returning to an younger age set by evolution, while the age of psychological maturation has moved in the opposite directions changes how one thinks about adolescence and has profound implications - parents, politicians and educators should read chapter 7. Their ideas on the role of foetal development in determining why some individuals are more at risk of diabetes and obesity creates a much more balanced perspective than purely genetic perspectives have led us into. The implications for how to stop the obesity epidemic and the need for different strategies in different populations are most thought provoking and compelling.

But it is not just the specifics of these examples that makes this book so interesting. It is full of information from comparative biology, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, medicine and social science and it is the way they have combined these and produced a lucid and I think very important book. They are clearly scholars but scholars who can write in a very accessible way. They marry evolutionary biology and medicine in a much more complete and realistic way that previous attempts. And the sociological and associated commentary shows how much they have thought about the subject - the notes are quite fun too.

If you are the kind of person who enjoyed Bill Bryson's Short History or Jared diamond's Guns Germs and Steal you will enjoy this book - it will leave you thinking.

Our Bodies Fit the Ancient African Savannah, I Don't Live There.......2006-12-01

The evidence is pretty overwhelming that we developed as humans in the African Savannah. The anthropologists point out how our bodies developed over the millennia to have a lot of characteristics that helped to enable, even guarantee our survival in that environment.

There are numerous books that talk about our special adaptations: no hair ('The Naked Ape' Desmond Morris) so we wouldn't overheat while running, males with eyes optimized to detect movement of game while hunting, females with a thousand times better color sensitivity to detect the ripe fruit from the others.

All this doesn't fit very well with my day of sitting staring at the computer screen, my neighbor's driving a truck, or nearly any of today's ways of earning a living. Yup! There's a mismatch.

The authors do an excellent job of point out our world no longer fit our bodies. This is an insight that we ignore at our peril. They also point out some of the things that humankind might do to change the situation -- but BOY! is their solution going to offend some of the religious fundamentalists. Then again, wouldn't you want your children to be a better match for their society: slimmer, smarter, free from diabetes, cancer, heart disease?

Average customer rating:

Some good chapters on fascinating new field

Evolutionary Medicine
Wenda R., Ed. Trevathan
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0195103564

Book Description

Evolution is the single most important idea in modern biology, shedding light on virtually every biological question, from the shape of orchid blossoms to the distribution of species across the planet. Until recently, however, the theory has had little impact on medical research or practice. Evolutionary Medicine shows how this is beginning to change. Collecting work from leaders in the field, this volume describes an array of new and innovative approaches to human health that are based on an appreciation of our long evolutionary history. For example, it shows how evolution helps to explain the complex relationship between our immune systems and the virulence and transmission of human viruses. It also shows how comparisons between how we live today and how our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived thousands of years ago illuminate a variety of contemporary ills, including obesity, lower-back pain, and insomnia. Evolutionary Medicine covers issues at every stage of life, from infancy (colic, jaundice, SIDS, parent-infant sleep struggles, ear infections, breast-feeding, asthma) to adulthood (sexually transmitted diseases, depression, overeating, addictions, child abuse, cardiovascular disease, breast and ovarian cancer) to old age (osteoporosis, geriatric sleep problems). Written for a wide range of students and researchers in medicine, anthropology, and psychology, it is an invaluable guide to this rapidly developing field.

Customer Reviews:

Some good chapters on fascinating new field.......2001-05-05

This book applies Darwin's theory of evolution to medicine and that's very exciting. It's exciting because the theory of evolution turns out to be a framework with impressive explanatory power in the area of health and disease. Why do babies in modern Western societies show more excessive crying than infants of !Kung San hunter-gatherers? What makes many women that give birth in modern high-tech hospitals still unsatisfied with the process? Why do so many modern women get breast cancer? Evolutionary medicine proposes answers, sometimes controversial, but definitely almost always worth considering. Why only four stars then? Perhaps it's because the field is still maturing but I thought only six of the eighteen chapters of the book showed clear arguments, high-quality writing, and didn't require a Ph.D. in biochemistry to follow the details. (I liked the chapters about evolutionary perspectives on infant crying, sudden infant death syndrome, obstetrics, nutrition, psychiatry, and breast cancer). And finally, readers should keep in mind that "Evolutionary Medicine" is a university textbook. For a more accessible introduction into this exciting new field they should read Nesse and Williams' "Why We Get Sick".

Human Evolutionary Genetics: Origins, Peoples & Disease

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A great book all around
A must have book for this field
Essential reading

Human Evolutionary Genetics: Origins, Peoples & Disease
M. A. Jobling
Manufacturer: Garland Science
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0815341857

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"This is an absolutely superb book! I have been recommending it enthusiastically to professional colleagues, graduate students, and even the occasional highly motivated undergraduate student ever since it was published last year, and the response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive. Not only is the book unique in terms of topical coverage, but it is also extremely well executed. In fact, it is one of the best textbooks on any subject that I have read. It belongs on the shelves of everyone interested in the genetic aspects of human evolution. There is also much of value in it for paleoanthropologists, historical linguists, archaeologists, and human biologists (biological anthropologists), as well as for geneticists with various complementary specialties and interests.

… The text is clearly written, and the illustrations are excellent. The boxed supplementary text is especially informative, whether just explanatory information or an opinion piece by an outside expert. There is a real richness to the mtDNA and Y-chromosome data presented in a phyolgenetic/phylogeographic framework in the three chapters on prehistoric range expansion and global colonization. Students have found chapters 3-6 (about genome diversity) quite helpful and have deemed the text's brief excursions into the realm of mathematics to be effectively presented and not overly technical. Appropriate Web sites are mentioned throughout the book, to foster independent research. I must confess that I learned something new (and important) from every chapter in the book!

… This new compendium emphasizes the enormous explosion in knowledge derived from human haploid systems and molecular genetic markers, and, as such, it is a most worthy successor. It should quickly become the book to consult for genetic information pertinent to the evolution of our species. To the authors, I offer both a sincere thank you and a hearty congratulations for a job well done!"

American Journal of Human Genetics, 76:0, 2005

Customer Reviews:

A great book all around.......2006-07-28

I ordered this book when I first began my research using DNA markers. I found it very easy to read and highly informative, even beyond my own interests. It's a great reference to have around and a must read for anyone working in the field of human genetics, both from a clinical or academic perspective. Its organization lends it suitable for a good textbook in an advanced evolutionary genetics course as well.

A must have book for this field.......2004-08-07

Very up-to-date (msot references are from 2000 to 2003),
and well-written.

You will become an expert in this filed after studying this classic!

I bought a copy for myself, and another one for my advisor.

I have read it twice in a week!

Essential reading.......2004-02-06

Clearly laid out like one of the classic undergraduate textbooks (e.g. Genes VII, Albers et al.), this is the only up-to-date introduction in the field.

The authors make great efforts to link advances in genetics to other fields (e.g. linguistics, anthropology), as well as to organise chapters around key issues such as the spread of agriculture, offering space to key authors in these associated fields. Bibliographic/website sources are also well documented.

Book Description

Recent interest in new diseases, such as HIV/AIDS and Ebola, and the resurgence of older diseases like tuberculosis has fostered questions about the history of human infectious diseases. How did they evolve? Where did they originate? What natural factors have stalled the progression of diseases or made them possible? How does a microorganism become a pathogen? How have infectious diseases changed through time? What can we do to control their occurrence?

Ethne Barnes offers answers to these questions, using information from history and medicine as well as from anthropology. She focuses on changes in the patterns of human behavior through cultural evolution and how they have affected the development of human diseases.

Writing in a clear, lively style, Barnes offers general overviews of every variety of disease and their carriers, from insects and worms through rodent vectors to household pets and farm animals. She devotes whole chapters to major infectious diseases such as leprosy, syphilis, smallpox, and influenza. Other chapters concentrate on categories of diseases ("gut bugs," for example, including cholera, typhus, and salmonella). The final chapters cover diseases that have made headlines in recent years, among them mad cow disease, West Nile virus, and Lyme disease.

In the tradition of Berton Roueché, Hans Zinsser, and Sherwin Nuland, Ethne Barnes answers questions you never knew you had about the germs that have threatened us throughout human history.

Barnes, a paleopathologist, offers general overviews of specific diseases (West Nile virus, Lyme disease, Ebola, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, cholera, etc.) and their carriers.

Customer Reviews:

Diseases and Human Evolution.......2007-07-04

It is exacty what I need, in fact I got this book for my father, he really enjoyed it.

Evolution of Human Disease: How the Microbes Got Us.......2006-03-09

This is a often fascinating catalogue of human diseases and how the viruses and bacteria evolved to successfully attack humans. It includes good histories of major epidemics. It also covers how the evolution of human society provided new ooportunities for our microbial foes.

Evolving Health: The Origins of Illness and How the Modern World is Making Us Sick

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This book should be required reading in all the schools
Evolution in Health and Disease
Excellent introduction to the ideas of evolutionary medicine

Evolving Health: The Origins of Illness and How the Modern World is Making Us Sick
Noel T. Boaz
Manufacturer: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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ASIN: 0471352616

Book Description

Human illnesses can be understood as damage to those adaptations that we took on at various stages in our evolution from pre-life molecules to modern Homo sapiens. Preventing these illnesses entails avoiding what causes the damage-- which too frequently are the everyday hazards of twenty-first-century life, as the chart below shows:

Level of Evolution	Cause of adaptive failure	resulting disease or problem
Pre-life	Environmental poisons	Certain birth defects
Single cell (bacteria and amoeba-like)	Viral infection	Colds/flu/HIV
Morula (sponge-like)	Cellular stress	Cancer
Chordate	Physical stress	Back pain
Fish	Excess dietary salt	Hypertension/heart disease
Amphibian	Tobacco smoke	Lung cancer/emphysema
Lower primate	Excess dietary sugar	Diabetes mellitus
Higher primate	Vitamin C deficiency	Scurvy
Ape	Excess dietary protein	Gout
Homo sapiens	Reduced dietary variety	Nutritionaldiseases/food allergies

Customer Reviews:

This book should be required reading in all the schools.......2007-09-30

This is one of the four or five best books I have ever read. It explains our most important health problems in their evolutionary context, and it explains why diet and lifestyle changes are far superior to pills and surgery. Everyone should read this book in their youth, so that they can prevent the health problems that come with a lifetime of bad choices and bad medical care. Buy this book, and buy more copies for all your relatives and friends --- and buy one for your doctor so that she can do a better job for you.

Evolution in Health and Disease.......2005-09-18

This is a fascinating book, written in clear, lucid, and descriptive prose, and written for the non-specialist and specialist alike, exploring the impact of evolution on health and disease. The book introduces "evolutionary medicine" to help the reader make informed choices about his or her own health. No one who wants to live a long, healthy life can afford to ignore the important insights gleaned from evolution in this book. What worked when we were hunter-gatherers on the African savannas no longer works in modern society, and the changes in our modern environments have caused Homo sapiens to adapt poorly.

One of the key evolutionary concepts is an entity's adaptation to its environment: When all the body's organs and systems are operating optimally under the ideal evolutionary environments, both internally and externally, our bodies are concordant. When our bodies are out of sync with either environment, they begin to fail, and our bodies become discordant. The former is homeostasis and health, the latter is disease and dysfunction.

After a very short introduction to the essential Darwinian concepts, excellently and easily recapitulated, the author turns to the seventeen stages of human evolutionary development, beginning with prokaryotes as stage one and ending with Homo sapiens as stage seventeen millions of years later, and describing all the intermediary stages in between. Although not difficult, it's the only place where the reader might become pensive, if not impatient, thinking the author is off course. But the key to understanding the rest of the book depends on understanding the material presented in Chapter Two. Here are some of the insights in columnar outline:

LEVEL OF EVOLUTION, ADAPTIVE FAILURE, CONSEQUENCE

Pre-life, Environmental poisons, Birth defects
Single cell, Viral infection, Cold/Flu/HIV
Morula (sponge-like), Cellular stress, Cancer
Chordate, Physical stress, Back pain
Fish, Excess dietary salt, Heart disease
Amphibian, Tobacco smoke, Lung disease
Lower primate, Excess dietary sugar, Diabetes mellitus
Higher primate, Vitamin C deficiency, Scurvy
Ape, Excess dietary protein, Gout
Homo sapiens, Reduced dietary variety, Allergies

This is a partial list. Each of the seventeen stages co-exist in humans; this complexity is both to our advantage, and can be our downfall. Understanding how each stage of evolution works within us unlocks a wealth of information.

Obviously, the emphasis is on prevention, not treatment, although there are constructive, non-medical, non-surgical options discussed. Some of the ideas are extremely valuable and helpful, others are highly speculative and dubious. For example, one particularly difficult concept advocated by Boaz is a return to a Paleo Diet that is high in animal products (especially gamey meats), while avoiding indigestible beans, grains, and dairy. It might be the "ideal" diet, but it's an impossible one to follow, and even more difficult to find. Still, the insights can help guide one to nutrition from an evolutionary perspective. The chapter on our musculoskeletal system was by far my favorite; I suffer from many of the system's dysfunctions, and now realize why. I knew it was a failure to adapt, but exactly how was new to me.

Nearly every anatomical and physiological system is evaluated in evolutionary terms. I'd run out of space just outlining them. Suffice it to say, this is not the only book on evolutionary medicine. This new field is literally exploding. Certainly an excellent alternative is Randolph Nesse's and George Williams' "Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine." Both are equally competent and informative, the only difference is a matter of style and approach. Take a look at both books and find the one that suits your temperament best. I truly enjoyed both. Ignore either to your health's detriment.

Excellent introduction to the ideas of evolutionary medicine.......2003-03-10

This works as a general introduction to the nascent field of evolutionary medicine. Note well the word "health" in the title. One of the central ideas in evolutionary medicine is preserving health, and in general looking at medicine from the point of view of the healthy instead of from an overweening concentration on the sick. An ounce of prevention in evolutionary medicine is worth a whole ton of cure.

Another important idea is to look, in so far as possible, to our adaptations as evolutionary beings to see what we might be doing wrong today. For example, grasses with plump seeds of carbohydrates were in short supply before the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. There were wheats and ryes, wild oats and such, but their seeds were relatively small and required a lot of labor to harvest. Consequently, our ancestors on the savannahs and in the woodlands ate grain carbohydrates in small amounts. Now, of course, grains--especially rice, wheat and corn--are the staple foods everywhere in the world and we eat massive amounts of them.

Is this a problem? As Professor Boaz points out, evolutionary medicine suggests that it is. We are "carbohydrate intolerant" (Boaz uses the term "glucotoxicity," page 133) and cannot shut down our appetite for all the carbohydrates so tantalizingly available to us. They are especially enthralling when served up with salt and fats.

In the prehistory there were no supermarkets open 24-hours a day. Instead there were freezing winters and droughts that might last for months or more, sure to visit almost every human eventually. So when there was a bountifulness in the land we chowed down big time. And those of us who had the ability to put on fat could live out the times of famine better than any prehistoric runway model. And so our chubby guy- or chubby gal-genes were favored. Boaz calls this the "thrifty genotype."

However that virtue has become a fault. What to do? Boaz recommends exercise, for one thing. In the pre-history our ancestors managed to walk all the way around the world. They had no cars or easy chairs. That we can solve our fat problem by looking at the way our ancestors lived and emulate them, is the somewhat bitter pill of this book. And, by the way, this "medicine" (hard to take, as we all know) also works against heart attacks, gout and other modern diseases.

Boaz has gone to some considerable trouble to associate various "diseases" with 17 evolutionary levels of human structure and function. (There's a table on pages 19-25.) These levels are like the idea that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" in that some of the levels are similar to those stages in the embryo's development from single cell through bony fish and amphibian to mammal, all the way to us. What Boaz is adding here is the idea that certain diseases are associated with each level of development. For example, emphysema is associated with the amphibian level of adaptation while viral infections go all the way back to when our ancestors were just single cells.

This scheme is useful in helping us to understand disease. It is even helpful in treatment. But Boaz's formulation is no magic pill or cure-all. For the chronic diseases that plague those of us in the developed world there is no easy cure. Boaz recognizes a "discordance" between our evolutionary selves and the modern environment that is leading to these diseases. He uses a concept he calls "adaptive normality" that can guide us away from the discordance.

This is a very readable book requiring no prior expertise. It is obvious that Boaz wanted to reach the educated lay person with his ideas. For those of you new to the idea of evolutionary medicine, this will be an exciting book. Boaz does an excellent job of teaching us is how to think from an evolutionary perspective, which is something we all need to do.

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Nothing can scare us quite as much as cancer. This disease, striking sometimes sensibly, sometimes arbitrarily, inspires despair and hopelessness to the same extent that its cure eludes us. Cancer researcher Mel Greaves illuminates what we know of its causes and the obstacles to research in Cancer: The Evolutionary Legacy. The subtitle is intriguing, and Greaves backs it up with a detailed examination of the evolutionary biology of cancer cells. It turns out that we can profitably think about cancer as a tool in the struggle for survival and reproduction among all the cells within a body. Losing regulatory genes might be great for reproducing individual cell lines, but in the long run, they are, of course, devastating to the organism as a whole. Greaves's personal, almost chatty style helps the nontechnical reader through some of the complicated immunological and genetic issues, and it also humanizes a topic that can easily overwhelm us with awe. Slipping back a few centuries, he explores the history of cancer and our attitudes toward it, then looks at how it has changed in recent years to become more widespread and better understood. Though Greaves is careful not to promise a cure just around the corner, his experience lends the writing an optimism that most readers will find refreshing. Though we're still at the mercy of this terrible disease, it's good to know we have more than just natural selection on our side. --Rob Lightner

Book Description

In this lucid and entertaining book, Mel Greaves argues that evolutionary biology offers a new perspective that can help us unravel the riddle of cancer. Why, for example, have women always had such a raw deal in the cancer stakes? And why are some cancers, such as prostate cancer, increasing in incidence? Greaves argues that Darwinian selection millions of years ago has endowed our genes and cells with inherently cancerous credentials, and this is exacerbated by our rapid social evolution and exotic behavioural traits that outpace genetic adaptation. The book is full of novel insights, the latest scientific discoveries, and wonderful historical anecdotes. It provides a unique portrait of cancer, past, present, and future.

Customer Reviews:

Thorough discussion made interesting.......2001-09-10

Dr. Greaves does a great job of navigating the myths, evolution, paradoxes, and treatments of cancer. The amazing accomplishment of this author is that he can do all this while keeping the lay person interested, even injecting some humor. What other cancer researcher would first detail the high incidence of cancer of the esophagus in the Hubei province of China, then discuss how that same diet causes cancer in their chickens and end the discussion saying "Not unambiguous evidence maybe, but if I was a chicken, I would ask for a transfer."
All is not lighthearted, of course, in a discussion of cancer. The interesting mosaic which Greaves creates discusses the varied alleged causes of various types of cancer, including social, demographic, economic, dietary, and of course hereditary. He then gives an excellent argument for the prevention rather than cure of cancers. For example, he states that for "every 1,000 young men adopting a life time habit of smoking, on average one will be murdered, six will die in road traffic accidents and 250 will die ot tobacco-related deaths including lung cancer." Sobering statistics for the deadly life decision to keep this habit.
If you have any interest in cancer, read this book. Be prepared to work through some jargon, but with Greaves writing style, you'll enjoy the read.

A new perspective on cancer.......2000-05-22

Greaves does an excellent job of explaining how evolution applies to cancer. How did cancer survive throughout evolution? How do cancer cells go through a Darwinian process of survival of the fittest? How are some cells resistant to chemotherapy? He answers all of these.

He also points out that, contrary to popular opinion, in many cases, it is impossible to point to a single "cause" for a person's cancer. People want to point blame somewhere, but cancer takes a series of DNA mutations to get going in a cell. This may happen over a lifetime of exposure to various things.

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"All superficial comparisons to the contrary, Oliver Sacks and I are really quite dissimilar," said Dr. Harold Klawans, in his essay "My Lunch with Oliver." He and Sacks were both neurologists, both with special interests in movement disorders and Parkinson's disease, and both writers. "The brain and how it functions is to Oliver a philosophical issue... I try to ask simple questions." Klawans's questions are not really "simple," but they're about evolution and development instead of philosophy.

In his clinical practice, Klawans thought about the evolution of the brain to try to understand his patients' problems, and vice versa. His theme throughout is that brain development is about windows of opportunity: many things can only be learned in certain periods, and after puberty in particular the brain has been largely "pruned to shape," so that skills like language and music may never be properly acquired.

The cavewoman of the title is the one who stayed home taking care of the babies while Man the Hunter was off spearheading the Ascent of Man (in what Stephen Jay Gould, one of Klawans's favorite writers, calls an "evolutionary just-so story"). Not so, says Klawans: because the window of opportunity for learning language is in childhood, especially early childhood, language must have arisen between mothers and children: "though few defend the Cavewoman, we all speak our mother's tongue." --Mary Ellen Curtin

Book Description

A master neurologist's clinical tales--both funny and profound--of the evolution of the brain. During Dr. Harold Klawans's lifetime, patients came to him from all over the country, exhibiting a huge array of troubles, all of which boiled down to one complaint: something was wrong with their brains. As a sympathetic--and brilliant--brain detective, Klawans deduced a great deal from his patients, not only about the immediate causes of their ailments but also about the evolutionary underpinnings of their behavior. Klawans examines people ranging from the woman suffering from "painful foot and moving toe syndrome," whose case reminds him that we were once reptiles with brains at the bases of our spines, to the farmer from Indiana who had contracted something similar to mad cow disease, caused by a protein-like pathogen that man himself helped nurture by removing the pressures of natural selection from his herds of livestock and from his own communities. As Klawans notes, "almost all of man's recent 'evolution' takes place outside the body . . . because man can alter his environment in ways that no other species ever could." In the best tradition of clinical tales, this master physician/storyteller weaves into his patient narratives brilliant insights into the evolutionary legacy encoded in the brain and the remarkable capacity of the human mind.

Note: the paperback reissue of this book has slightly different title: "Strange Behavior: Tales of Evolutionary Neurology" (ISBN: 0393321843).

Customer Reviews:

Digresses extensively, but that does have appeal.......2003-01-25

Although I enjoyed Dr. Klawans' book immensely, I felt that the title, Defending the Cavewoman, was somewhat misleading. The volume purports to approach human evolution from the perspective of the brain, and the title suggests that the effect of women on the process would be a component of the discussion. While the effect of the maternal-infant bond is discussed briefly as a factor in language acquisition in the early part of the book, in general the rest of it consists of anecdotes involving the doctor's practice.

His stories are very interesting to me, since Dr. Klawans did his residency on the same ward, Station 50, at the University of Minnesota Hospital that I worked on early in my career as a nurse. As he mentions in the book, his mentor was our department head, Dr. Abraham B. Baker, a brilliant diagnostician. Dr. Klawans probably graduated from the institution a year or two before my arrival. While the stories are intriguing, they seemed to me to provide more illumination on the complicated process of diagnosis, especially of the more unusual neurological diseases, in particular the movement disorders (Parkinson's disease is the doctor's specialty) than they did a theory of evolution of the brain in humans. In fact it might be said that an understanding of the underlying principles of evolution would be of more use in unraveling the causes of neurological problems, than vice versa. Certainly an understanding of genetics, the very foundation of evolution, has lead to more advances with respect to the causes of some of the more exotic neurological problems, like Huntington's Chorea, Kuru, and Jacob-Croitzfelds syndromes.

By the end of the book, the author has completed his lengthy digression and returns to his main theme, the evolution of the brain, it's effects on our overall evolution, and the key factor that women contribute, namely the size of the birth canal. In his final chapter, Dr. Klawans discusses the importance of the immaturity of the human infant post-natally. Compared to other types of mammal, the human baby is essentially still fetal at birth, as Stephen Jay Gould points out in his book The Panda's Thumb. While the baby horse is ready to run independently within minutes of birth, the human baby is not able to walk for months. This is due to the fact that the nervous system is still too immature for the newborn to be autonomous. In order to accommodate the larger brain, a larger brain case is necessary. In order to deliver the child without killing the mother, the mother's birth canal must be wide enough for the head to pass through it and/or the brain/skull must be smaller. The baby's brain is still immature at birth and the plates of the brain case are not fully fused, allowing it to pass through the mother's pelvis.

Of interest was the doctor's suggestion that the bottleneck that caused the Neanderthal's demise and prevented a genetic mix with Homo sapiens was the contribution of maternal DNA and pelvis size to the situation. In a human male- female Neanderthal mix, the mother's pelvis and DNA would lead to a more mature infant with fuller sized head and nervous system, a situation that would provide less of an opportunity for learning. As the author writes, "The greater maturation of the Neanderthal brain at birth would have been a biological advantage only so long as survival depended more on a classic survival of the fittest than on the acquisition of knowledge within a human-manipulated environment (p. 240)." On the other hand, with a Neanderthal male-human female mix, the mother's smaller pelvis and the infant's larger head size would probably have killed them both.

The book digresses extensively, but that does have its appeal.

Neurologist's view of evolution.......2001-02-14

Neurologist Harold Klawans' sensitive and fascinating collection of clinical tales explores evolutionary neurology - how our brains are constructed and why - through the peculiar things that can go wrong in them.

A woman suffering from "painful foot and moving toe syndrome" demonstrates the remnant of dinosaur brain we still carry around in our spines; a musician who loses the power of speech to a stroke retains his ability to conduct music, an illiterate man shows how reading has changed our perspective on the world, an English professor loses the ability to read English (from stroke) and substitutes Hebrew.

The first half of the book explores brain function and what it can teach us about evolution. The second explores hereditary diseases, pain, and, in an informative piece on mad cow disease, external evolution, or human alteration of the environment.

Klawans pleasure at the elegance of evolution infuses each of his essays, many of which center around a 'eureka!' moment - an offhand comment or question leading to a breakthrough in understanding. For example, his daughter's quip that an authentic Arabic restaurant always plays "the Song," meaning all Arabic music sounds the same to her, makes him realize the fundamental similarity between music and speech. Both exist in all cultures and culture determines comprehension.

Klawans particular interest is the plasticity of the human brain. Bipedalism changed the human pelvic structure, which forced an evolutionary choice - small chimplike brains or small immature brains that would require years of maternal nurturing. The beauty of the choice made by evolution is the unique abilities fostered by environmental interaction with a developing brain.

Speech is the greatest of these and the title essay concerns the case of a six-year-old girl found locked in a closet in an abandoned building. Undernourished and undersized, she was unable to speak. But her "window of opportunity" remained open and once exposed to language her progress was amazing. An adolescent, however, never exposed to speech, never develops the brain constructs and never speaks or comprehends. It's the "cavewoman," Klawans says, who made our unique cultural abilities possible, the cavewoman's nurturing and the cavewoman's mitochondrial DNA (brain diseases passed by mitochondrial DNA indicate a crucial role in brain development). Klawans' final essay, "Whatever Happened to Baby Neanderthal?" poses a stunning theory of extinction. Big Neanderthal brains were big at birth, thus lacking human plasticity, precluding language ability. Interbreeding would not have helped. Human men fathering Neanderthal babies could not pass on mitochondrial DNA (passed only through egg) and human woman did not have pelvises big enough to birth half-Neanderthal babies.

Klawans ("Toscanini's Fumble," "Why Michael Couldn't Hit"), who died last year, was an engaging, clear-sighted, stimulating writer with an infectious enthusiasm. In making his way to evolutionary insights, he takes the reader through neurological diagnoses of real people with baffling problems and even lets us know how it turns out for them in the end.

Neurology explained and placed in the framework of evolution.......2001-01-05

This is a wonderful book. It is extremely readable, with each chapter making a story of some aspect of neurology. It is also an excellent description of neurological problems, teaching me many things I didn't know even though I am a nurse practitioner working in the field of neurological research. Ocasionally Klawans digresses into descriptions of music or baseball, which seemed like filler rather than relevant material, but for the most part his stories are enthralling. His description of mitochondrial DNA is a little obscure. His ability to weave together different strands of neurology and biology to explain a theory of human evolution is riveting. My neice bought this book while I was visiting, and I couldn't leave until I had finished it.

Incredible and Facinating!.......2000-11-16

I picked this book up on a whim, and it has sparked a love of neurology and biochemestry in me that I never would have believed. Well written and entertaining, I would recomend it to anyone, even if you aren't interested in the biological sciences, it's an excelent book, and a fairly easy read.

Extremely radable.......2000-08-01

Careful Readers of Dr. Klawans' work will recognize him as the compassionate and erudite face of the neurosciences. In this book he teaches and explains with the same passion and skill, sensitivity and sensibility with which he appears to treat his patients. The result is that this book is difficult to put down until the last page and even then, the elegantly espoused ideas sit with you. You leave with a new appreciation for the beauty and function of the human brain and a new compassion for the owners of these organs. The attention paid to the evolutionary accomplishments of women is well reasoned, understandable, and likely to be the new paradigm for our understanding of what it means to be human. Not a hunter, or a tool-builder, but a human. The distinction is delicate but important. Dr. Klawans' death is certainly a loss for a number of fields and would be even sadder if we did not have his excellent books to remember him by. This one is very personal and reads like a letter from your family doctor in places, never condescending, never failing to attribute and praise the various people who played their parts in the ideas within, but it still hits with the force of a powerful intuition and diagnostic skill. It would have to be an exceptional legacy for anybody...

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The Evolution of HIV

Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Inferring Phylogenies

ASIN: 0801861500

Book Description

The HIV epidemic has spawned a scientific effort unprecedented in the history of infectious disease research. This effort has merged aspects of clinical research, basic molecular biology, immunology, cell biology, epidemiology, and mathematical biology in ways that have not been seen before. In The Evolution of HIV Keith A. Crandall brings together researchers from these disciplines to present perspectives on both the molecular biology and molecular evolution of HIV.

The book is organized into three sections: "Introduction to HIV" explores the fundamentals of the virus's molecular biology and its global diversity. "Molecular Methods for Studying HIV Diversity" looks at such topics as HIV phylogenetics, modeling the molecular evolution of HIV sequences, the use of phylogenetic inference to test an HIV transmission hypothesis, and coalescent approaches to HIV population genetics. The third section,"Case Studies of HIV Evolution" examines the levels of diversity within and among host individuals, the phylogenetics of known transmission histories, and HIV evolution and disease progression via longitudinal studies.

The book will be of interest to researchers and clinicians working on HIV, as well as scientists studying molecular evolution, population genetics, and evolutionary biology. Contributors are John M. Coffin, Keith A. Crandall, Joseph Felsenstein, Walter M. Fitch, Brian Foley, Esther Guzman, Paul H. Harvey, David M. Hillis, Edward C. Holmes, Marcia L. Kalish, Bette T. M. Korber, Julia Krushkal, Carla L. Kuiken, Gerald H. Learn, Thomas Leitner, Wen-Hsiung Li, Francine E. McCutchan, Spencer V. Muse, Oliver G. Pylons, Allen G. Rodrigo, Raj Shankarappa, Richard W. Steketee, Alan R. Templeton, Donald M. Thea, Raphael P. Viscidi, Steven M. Wolinsky.

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