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Chapter 1: The Ecology of
Heath and Disease
•Medical Anthropology
•Adaptation
•Evolutionary Medicine
•Ecology of Health
Medical Anthropology
• Four Fields
– Biological
– Archaeological
– Linguistics
– Cultural
• Holistic?
• Multidisciplinary?
Adaptation
• Two meanings
– Biological: An adaptation is an innate
physiological or behavioral structure
designed by natural selection to solve/cope
with an evolutionarily stable problem.
– Adaptive response:
• Biological accommodation to a change in
environmental conditions
• Learned behavioral/cultural response to
environmental conditions
Adaptation by Natural Selection
•What is an Adaptation?
•Structures that are designed by
Natural Selection
•Adaptations provide solutions to
evolutionary problems (survival
and reproduction).
•Evolutionarily Stable Problems.
•Best thought of in terms of
function.
Evolutionary Medicine
• Why we get sick
• Uses the Adaptive program
– Fever
– Anemia and Bacteria
– Adaptive mismatch
• Diabetes and the Papago (Thrifty Gene Hypothesis)
• Depression and Serotonin
• Post Partum Depression?
Example: Parent-Offspring Conflict
– Child and parent are related by .5,
therefore they will not always agree on
what is the best strategy.
– Each offspring is related to each other by
.5
– Related to themselves by 1
– Each child will demand more than
– parent is willing to give
– Sibling rivalry
– Parents will try to distribute resources
more evenly or by need
Parent-Offspring conflict before birth
• Preeclampsia:
– Fetus will introduce hormones into to the mother to
increase blood flow to itself so that it grows faster and
bigger
– Open up arteries to the placenta
– Restrict arteries in the rest of the mother’s body
– Leads to high blood pressure in the mother with lower
pressure in the fetus and therefore a greater supply of blood
to the baby
– Mother attempts to limit blood flow to safeguard her own
health to the point that the fetus is viable but not much more
than this
– Women with preeclampsia have health problems but give
birth to bigger fatter babies.
• Gestational diabetes
– Fetus introduces hormones into the
mother to increases the sugar content in
the blood in order to increase its nutrition
– Mother has to process more sugar than
normally and sometimes her blood has
more sugar than is health for her and
higher blood pressure
– Babies are big and fat.
• Gestational anemia:
– Iron is food for bacteria
– Iron is necessary for blood clotting
– Mother iron level is set to balance risk of bacterial
infections against risk of blood loss
– Fetus wants iron levels to minimize bacterial
infections but does not incur a cost due to blood
loss
– Mother’s blood does not clot as well and is more
prone to blood loss during birth and from injuries.
– Fetus is less prone to bacterial infections
Assignment 1
• Go to www.darwinianmedicine.org
• Explore the website
• Write a short essay (one page) on
something that you learned.
• Bring your essay to class next week