BIO A FUCKING FINAL

What is evolutionary mismatch?

Evolutionary mismatch happens when traits shaped in past environments become poorly matched to modern environments because environments changed faster than natural selection could.

Why does evolutionary mismatch happen?

Natural selection is slow, so rapid environmental change can create adaptive lag between evolved traits and current conditions.

What does adaptive lag mean?

Adaptive lag means evolution has not had enough time to adjust traits to a new environment.

How can a previously adaptive trait become harmful?

A trait that helped in an ancestral environment may become maladaptive if the modern environment rewards different behaviors or creates new risks.

What are psychological mechanisms?

Psychological mechanisms take in environmental information, process it through evolved decision rules, and produce cognition, attitudes, and behaviors.

How does mismatch apply to cognition?

Cognitive traits may be useful in some environments but impairing in modern settings like classrooms, offices, or highly structured institutions.

What is ADHD?

ADHD is persistent inattention, hyperactivity, and/or impulsivity that causes functional impairment.

What is inattention in ADHD?

Inattention means difficulty carefully completing tasks or sustaining attention to people, information, or activities.

What is hyperactivity in ADHD?

Hyperactivity means a high level of activity or excitement, especially in settings where it is considered inappropriate.

What is impulsivity in ADHD?

Impulsivity means acting suddenly on desires, ideas, or feelings without careful consideration.

Why is ADHD described as dimensional?

ADHD traits exist on a continuum, meaning everyone has some degree of attention, activity, and impulse variation.

Why is ADHD context-dependent?

ADHD-related behaviors may be impairing in some settings but less impairing or even useful in others.

Why might ADHD be considered an example of evolutionary mismatch?

ADHD traits may clash with modern demands for long periods of sitting, focusing, and delayed reward, even if those traits were less harmful in other environments.

What are possible adaptive hypotheses for ADHD?

ADHD may be linked to increased exploration, stronger response to multiple unfamiliar stimuli, and greater willingness to migrate or enter new environments.

What is one possible advantage of ADHD-related exploration?

Exploring more can help individuals discover resources or opportunities in changing environments.

What is the DRD4 7R allele?

The DRD4 7-repeat allele is a dopamine receptor gene variant associated with ADHD-related traits.

What does the ADHD lecture conclude about ADHD-as-mismatch?

The lecture says the speaker’s research did not strongly support ADHD strengths matching current adult environments, but some environments might still make ADHD less impairing or beneficial.

What is the key caution about calling ADHD a disorder?

Whether something is “disordered” depends partly on social norms and environmental demands, not only the trait itself.

What question should evolutionary medicine ask about mental health?

Instead of asking why selection shaped a disorder, ask what about evolved psychology makes humans vulnerable to disease or disorder.

Why is “why did selection shape depression?” considered the wrong question?

Because depression may not be an adaptation itself; instead, evolved systems may leave people vulnerable under certain conditions.

What are construct-level questions in mental health measurement?

Construct-level questions ask whether the category being measured exists as a coherent phenomenon in that context.

What are instrument-level questions in mental health measurement?

Instrument-level questions ask whether a tool or survey actually captures the phenomenon accurately.

Why does construct-level validity come before instrument-level validity?

Because a measurement tool only matters if the thing being measured is meaningful in that context.

What is an example of a mental health measurement problem across cultures?

A translated trauma term may be linguistically correct but socially misunderstood, causing the instrument to fail scientifically.

What are idioms of distress?

Idioms of distress are culturally specific ways people express suffering, such as through body, spirit, social shame, heart-mind, or brain-mind categories.

Why can DSM categories change over time?

Mental health constructs are revised as clinicians, researchers, patients, and society redefine symptoms and categories.

Why does this complicate claims like “depression is rising”?

If the diagnostic construct changes over time, it is hard to know whether the same phenomenon is being measured across decades.

What is feedback between diagnosis and lived experience?

Diagnostic categories shape how people notice, name, and report their experiences, which then influences future categories.

What is VSAD?

VSAD means Viewing Symptoms As Diseases.

Why is VSAD a problem?

It confuses evolved defenses or symptoms with diseases, which can block understanding of what the body is trying to do.

Give examples of evolved defenses.

Fever, pain, cough, anxiety, fear, and low mood can all function as protective responses in certain contexts.

How can anxiety be an evolved defense?

Anxiety can detect threat and mobilize the body for response

How can low mood be an evolved defense?

Low mood can help disengage from unprofitable effort and conserve resources.

What is an emotion according to the coordination view?

An emotion is a coordinated multi-system response tuned to a recurrent situation.

Why is fear not just a feeling?

Fear affects physiology, motivation, attention, behavior, cognition, and social signaling all at once.

What are three ways researchers define emotions?

Discrete categories, coordination/integration, and constructed emotion frameworks.

What is the discrete category view of emotion?

It sees emotions as universal types with specific circuits, expressions, and functions.

What is the constructed emotion view?

It sees emotions as built from core affect, culture, language, and interpretation.

What is the main lesson from mental health measurement?

We must be careful about whether we are measuring the same construct across cultures, subgroups, and time.

What is substance use disorder from an evolutionary medicine perspective?

brain chemistry problem; it must be understood through evolved reward systems, environments, and modern mismatches.

What is a DALY?

A DALY, or Disability-Adjusted Life Year, is one lost year of healthy life.

What does DALY measure?

It measures disease burden by combining years lost to early death and years lived with disability.

What is the hijack model of addiction?

The hijack model says drugs bypass normal reward-tracking systems and directly trigger dopamine signals.

What were the ancestral targets of reinforcement learning?

Food, sex, and social bonds were natural targets because they were fitness-relevant.

Why are modern drugs a mismatch in the hijack model?

Modern drugs can be purified, concentrated, and fast-delivered in ways that had no ancestral equivalent.

Why didn’t selection fully protect humans from addictive drugs?

There was little ancestral exposure to modern concentrated drugs, so there was limited selection for specific protections.

What does “wanting ≠ liking” mean?

Wanting and liking are separate; addiction can increase craving while reducing actual pleasure.

What happens to wanting and liking in addiction?

Wanting becomes amplified, while liking or enjoyment often decreases.

Why does the question “why doesn’t everyone exposed get addicted?” matter?

It shows addiction cannot be explained only by drug chemistry; environment and individual context also matter.

What is Rat Park?

Rat Park was an enriched environment where rats sampled morphine but often preferred water, showing environment affects drug use.

What does Rat Park suggest about addiction?

It suggests isolation, stress, and environment can strongly affect substance use vulnerability.

What is the co-opted defenses model?

It says humans may intentionally use plant chemistry because some substances originated as plant defenses and can affect physiology.

How does the co-opted defenses model differ from the hijack model?

The hijack model emphasizes novelty and mismatch; the co-opted defenses model emphasizes functional ancestry and intentional use of plant chemicals.

What is the alcohol question in substance use evolution?

Alcohol is not a plant defense, so its appeal may need a different evolutionary explanation.

What is the “drunken monkey” idea?

It suggests attraction to alcohol may come from evolved attraction to ripe or fermenting fruit cues.

What is the key takeaway from substance use?

Addiction risk comes from interactions among evolved reward systems, drug properties, delivery method, and environment.

What is virulence?

Virulence is the harm a pathogen causes to its host, often measured through reduced host fitness.

Is virulence the same as contagiousness?

No. Virulence is harm to the host; contagiousness is how easily the pathogen spreads.

Give an example of low virulence but high contagiousness.

The common cold has low virulence but high contagiousness.

Give an example of high virulence but lower per-contact contagiousness.

Untreated HIV is highly virulent but has low transmission per contact.

What is the avirulence hypothesis?

The outdated idea that pathogens should evolve to become harmless because killing hosts is bad for pathogen reproduction.

Why is the avirulence hypothesis incomplete?

Some pathogens become or remain highly virulent because transmission benefits can outweigh costs of harming the host.

What is Ewald’s view of virulence?

Virulence is a pathogen life history trait shaped by trade-offs between replication benefits and costs of host damage.

What is the virulence trade-off?

Higher pathogen replication can increase transmission but also harm or kill the host sooner.

What is optimal virulence?

Optimal virulence is the level of harm that maximizes pathogen reproduction, where replication benefits balance costs of host immobilization or death.

How does mode of transmission affect virulence?

If transmission does not require a mobile host, higher virulence can be favored.

Why are directly transmitted pathogens often predicted to have lower virulence?

They usually need hosts to move and contact others, so immobilizing the host can reduce transmission.

Why can vector-borne pathogens evolve higher virulence?

Vectors like mosquitoes can move the pathogen even if the host is very sick or immobilized.

Why can waterborne pathogens evolve higher virulence?

They can spread through contaminated water even when the host is immobilized.

Why can attendant-borne transmission increase virulence?

Hospital workers or caregivers can spread pathogens between immobilized hosts, reducing the cost of making hosts very sick.

How can host behavior influence pathogen virulence?

Host behaviors can change the cost-benefit ratio for pathogen strategies and affect which virulence level spreads best.

What is multilevel selection?

Multilevel selection means selection can act at different levels, such as within groups and between groups.

How can within-host selection favor higher virulence?

Pathogen strains that replicate faster inside a host may outcompete others, even if they harm the host more.

How can between-host selection favor lower virulence?

Strains that keep hosts alive and transmitting longer may spread better across hosts.

How is virulence a multilevel selection problem?

Within-host competition can favor aggressive replication, while between-host transmission can favor strategies that maintain host transmission opportunities.

What is the big lesson from virulence evolution?

Pathogens do not automatically become mild; their virulence depends on transmission ecology and selection at multiple levels.

What is aging?

Aging is the amount of time an organism has been alive.

What is senescence?

Senescence is the decline in performance, health, and/or fitness with advancing age.

What is biological aging?

Biological aging is how biology changes with chronological age, especially after sexual maturity.

What is geroscience?

Geroscience studies biological aging to understand and treat chronic and age-related diseases.

Why does mortality rise with age?

Later life is affected by weakening selection, accumulated damage, trade-offs, and declining repair.

What happens to the force of selection after reproductive years?

The force of selection decreases after reproductive years.

Why does weaker late-life selection matter?

Harmful effects that appear late are less strongly removed by selection because reproduction may already have happened.

What are the three main theories of senescence?

Mutational accumulation, antagonistic pleiotropy, and disposable soma.

What is mutational accumulation?

Late-acting harmful mutations can accumulate because selection is weaker at older ages.

Why are early-acting harmful mutations selected against more strongly?

They reduce survival or reproduction before genes are passed on.

Why can late-acting harmful mutations persist?

They appear after reproduction, so they have less effect on evolutionary fitness.

What is antagonistic pleiotropy?

A gene can have beneficial effects early in life but harmful effects later in life.

Why can antagonistic pleiotropy be favored by selection?

Selection may favor early-life reproductive benefits even if the same gene causes late-life costs.

What is disposable soma theory?

Organisms face trade-offs between investing energy in reproduction versus maintenance and repair.

Why does disposable soma lead to aging?

If energy is allocated toward reproduction instead of perfect repair, bodily damage accumulates over time.

Why are the theories of senescence non-mutually exclusive?

More than one process can contribute to aging at the same time.

What is the key evolutionary idea behind senescence?

Selection is strongest when traits affect survival and reproduction earlier in life.

What is a biomarker of aging?

A biomarker of aging is a measurable biological or functional indicator used to estimate aging-related change.

What are examples of aging biomarkers?

Functional impairment, inflammation, telomeres, epigenetic clocks, grip strength, blood pressure, cholesterol, and metabolic measures.

What is functional/behavioral impairment as an aging biomarker?

It measures aging through performance or function, such as cognition, grip strength, or sit-stand ability.

What is metabolic syndrome?

Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of risk factors including central obesity, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, low HDL, and elevated blood glucose.

What is inflammaging?

Inflammaging refers to chronic low-grade inflammation associated with aging.

What are telomeres?

Telomeres are protective chromosome ends that can shorten with cell division and stress.

What are epigenetic clocks?

Epigenetic clocks estimate biological age using DNA methylation patterns.