CARTA Mismatch: Human Origins and Modern Disease
From The Observatory
The human body is a mosaic of features with an enormous range of evolutionary ages. This Symposium covers that range by discussing the impacts on health of vulnerabilities that originated from 1.5 billion to 2 million years ago.
Multicellularity, the vertebrate immune system, lactation, menstruation, placentas, and other traits gained along the path of human evolution all have health effects. For example, when we became hairless (2 mya) and got abundant sweat glands (2 mya), we could run far and work hard in hot weather, but that made us vulnerable to skin cancers. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle (2 mya) expanded our microbiome, with new elements playing an immunoregulatory role, but it made women vulnerable to polycystic ovarian syndrome. It became the reference lifestyle for the mismatch diseases of civilization.Key Speaker: Pascal Gagneux, Stephen Stearns, Steve Frank, Andrea Graham, Deena Emera, Günter Wagner, Genevieve Housman, Martin Häusler, Barry Bogin, Justin Sonnenburg, Erica Sonnenburg, Caleb Finch
Participants
Center for Academic Research & Training in Anthropogeny
Organizer | Homepage
Where did we come from? How did we get here?
CARTA's primary goal is to "explore and explain the origins of the human phenomenon".
In other words, seeking answers to these age-old questions.