Randall "A new road map shows how to prevent pandemics" and Nesse "Making evolutionary biology a basic science for medicine"

What is the main idea of Randall’s paper

most new infectious diseases start when a virus jumps from an animal to a human (zoonotic spillover), to prevent this you must keep ecosystems healthy

what does the road map recommend us to do to prevent zoonotic spillover

• protect and restore where animals forage

• minimize human-wildlife encounters in developed areas

• wild animals stressed by food shortages or habitat loss are more prone to infection and my shed more virus

explain the hendra virus case study

• winter food shortage caused bats to fly to urban gardens and farms to find flowering plants

• infected bats urine and feces contaminates areas where horses graze, horses pick it up and infect humans

how many WHO highest risk diseases do bats carry

4/9

what is reverse spillover

viruses jumping from humans to animals

what is the main idea of the Nesse paper

evolutionary bio should be a basic science for medicine, most peeople never take a course in it, even though it explains why we get sick

what type of framework does evolution give doctors

an integrative framwork - basically explains our body has emerged from multiple systems in the layers of our body

what is natural selection

genetic variants carried by individuals who reproduce more increase in frequency, so the population becomes better adapted to its environment

the two main branches of evolutionary bio is

phylogeny and adaptation

what is proximate vs evolutionary explanations

proximate - how a mechanism works

evolutionary - how a mechanism came to be and why

what is stabalizing selection

selection that can explain why a species stays mostly the same for thousands of generations

what role does mutation, selection, drift, and migration play

shaping genotypes and phenotypes

what is allele frequency math

how fast an allele changes under different strengths of selection

what is the comparative method

use data from other primates, such as teeth and guts, to test a hypothesis about human diet

what are tradeoffs regarding bio

no trait is perfect

facultative adaptation (phenotypic plasticity)

traits that respond to the environment

heritability

high heritability of a common disease suggests that strong effects of environmental factors

modern environments and disease

the transition where chronic disease overshadows infectious disease, bc our bodies are ill suited to modern environments

what is path dependence physiologically

evolved bodies differ from designed machines

what is genetic data and relatedness

tracing phylogenies, such as relatedness to other primates

what do the authors conclude at the end of the paper in Nelle

compare med students not learning about evolutionary med to engineering students never learning physics. they recommend teaching evolution before and during medical school