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(lighthearted piano music)
We are the paradoxical ape.
Bipedal, naked, large brain.
Long the master of fire, tools and language,
but still trying to understand ourselves.
Aware that death is inevitable,
yet filled with optimism.
We grow up slowly,
we hand down knowledge.
We empathize and deceive.
We shape the future from our shared understanding
of the past.
CARTA brings together experts from diverse disciplines
to exchange insight on who we are and how we got here.
An exploration made possible
by the generosity of humans like you.
(energetic piano music)
- It's an especial privilege for us at ASU,
Arizona State University to be collaborating
for the first time officially with our partners
here at CARTA to create this symposium
on evolution of medicine.
I've actually had the privilege of working with Ajit Varki
on several previous ones on medicine, one on the origins
of morality and I must say that all of the efforts you see
from all these different people and the quite extraordinary
production value, it's not just pretty,
it actually makes the science better and we can hear
each other clearly and talk to each other in wonderful ways.
I think it's a wonderful investment and we thank everyone
who's made it possible.
This field really, in terms of the new version of it,
began about 25 years ago with a question and it's a simple
question we all ask ourselves at times that is,
"Why didn't natural selection do a better job?".
(audience laughing)
You feel like when you're sitting with your back pain,
and you think it's your back pain and you go to your doctor
and say, "Why do I have back pain?".
But, many of us have been encouraging asking
a different question.
The question is, "Why do almost all of us have back pain?
Please couldn't we have a better job?".
And then then a kind of off joke I make sometimes,
"We have figured out what women want, we really would
like to know why is the birth canal so narrow, really?".
So many things about the body seem as if they could
be made better, in a way that improves health simply,
but for some reason they haven't
Enormous efforts and have gone in recent decades to try
and understand this whole different kind of explanation
for disease.
Not why one person gets sick,
not why the mechanism is broken in that person,
but why the mechanism is vulnerable to failure in everyone.
We're taking the transition from a view of the body,
from a mechanics point of view which is,
hey it's broken, what's broken, let's fix it.
To an engineer's point of view of asking instead,
"Who designed this thing?
Why isn't it better?
Why can't it be made better in the future?".
You'll hear marvelous examples of that
in the next few talks.
The last couple decades however,
have vastly expanded the scope.
That question about why our bodies aren't better,
is only one small part of evolutionary medicine,
which really includes everything
having to do with the basic science of evolutionary
biology, being applied to medicine and public health,
really for the first time.
CARTA has been instrumental in
helping that transition happen.
The medical school here is one of the few
where medical school students are starting to get
a grounding in evolutionary biology of the same kind
of grounding that they get in genetics, physiology,
biochemistry and all of the other sciences
that are equally useful for medicine.
The field that (mumbles)
We have the editor of the main journal, "Evolution,
Medicine, and Public Health", with us here today,
Stephen Stearns.
There are societies, international societies
for evolutionary medicine and public health,
it's having it's third meeting in Europe, this August.
There are all kinds of other meetings,
I'll show a slide in my talk briefly later
about how you can find more information about those.
For right now, I just want to emphasize,
not only how much fun this all is,
but how important it is for us
to have chances to talk to each other.
There will be only a 20 minute break,
but we're going to try to get you out on time for that.
Do write down your questions,
there's no chance for questions between these talks,
all the questions will be at the end.
(energetic piano music)