Enhancing the Teaching of Evolution in Public Health

Abstract

Summary Public health courses are emerging as popular undergraduate offerings, especially at universities with schools of public health. It is important to note that evolution has shaped the burden of disease in the modern world in which we practice and educate for public health. Human cultures and technologies have modified life on Planet Earth and have co-evolved with myriad other species, including microorganisms, plant and animal sources of food, invertebrate vectors of disease, and intermediate bird, mammal, and primate hosts. Molecular mechanisms of evolution have produced differential resistance or susceptibility to infectious agents, including malaria, plague, smallpox, TB, measles, and diarrheal and respiratory diseases. The domestication of sheep and cattle led to natural selection in favor of human populations able to digest milk throughout life through persistence into adulthood of lactase enzyme expression in the intestine, a major story of anthropology. The emergence of a “Western diet” of dairy, refined cereal grains, refined sugars, vegetable oils, alcoholic beverages, salt, and omega-6-rich meats has dramatically altered glycemic load, fatty acid composition, macro-nutrients, acid-base balance, sodium/potassium ratio, and fiber content. This is a major story of nutrition and disease. The results include epidemics of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, certain cancers, and bowel, inflammatory, and autoimmune disorders. Another interesting phenomenon is the selection of excessive hemostatic activity from platelets and the plasma clotting proteins; what was protective against death from bleeding after injuries among hunter-gatherers or from pregnancy-related hemorrhage now contributes to thrombosis underlying heart attacks and strokes. Conversely, there is little pressure against hemostasis and thrombosis since deaths from these causes occur mostly after the reproductive years of life. Learning about evolution over millennia for humans and over hours or days for microbes enlivens the experience of understanding evolutionary biology in public health context.

Evolution and Medicine in Undergraduate Education: A Prescription for All Biology Students

“…The website Evolution and Medicine Review (http://evmedreview) provides a resource for sharing news about events and relevant articles, as well as a list of syllabi and other resources useful for educators (Box 2). The December 2011 issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach includes by Stearns (2011b), Omenn (2011), and Alcock and Schwartz (2011) that provide specific suggestions for courses linking evolution to medicine and public health. Other articles in the same issue provide excellent examples of the synthesis of evolution and medicine in cancer (Casas‐Selves and DeGregori 2011), vaccine development (Hanley 2011), and scurvy (Buklijas et al 2011) and highlight a new module for teaching evolution and medicine (Beardsley et al 2011).…”

Does knowledge of evolutionary biology change high school students’ attitudes about healthy eating?

“…For example, recent efforts have been made to include evolutionary biology courses in medical school curricula and training programs (Nesse and Schiffman 2003;Stearns et al 2010;Nesse et al 2010;Wells et al 2017). At the undergraduate level, mostly in biology and anthropology departments at research universities, courses continue to spring up across the United States that focus on or integrate core concepts of evolutionary medicine (Omenn 2011;Grunspan et al 2019).…”