Welcome to Grand Rounds 5.15: At the interface of evolution and medicine, a celebration of blogging on the myriad ways evolutionary biology influences medicine. Why evolution and medicine, you may ask? Why now? Well, in anticipation of the new year, of course; 2009 marks the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On The Origin of Species, and the one thing that just doesn’t get as much recognition as it should is the role of evolutionary biology in both research and clinical medicine.

Coming from the perspective of an individual who conducts medical research in evolutionary genetics, I have found that very few people outside of the world I work have been exposed to all of the ways evolutionary biology interfaces with medicine. My hope is that with this edition of Grand Rounds those who have not yet been exposed to this topic become, at the very least, sufficiently intrigued. Let us begin from the top, then, with the very structure that does the intriguing…

…the human brain: HighlightHEALTH author Walter Jessen reviews an article from the journal Genome Biology that proposes the evolution of human cognitive abilities has pushed the brain to its metabolic limit, and in doing so has given our species a quite detrimental psychotic disorder. According to the lead author of the study, Dr. Philipp Khaitovich of the Chinese Academy of Sciences:

Our brains are unique among all species in their enormous metabolic demand. If we can explain how our brains sustain such a tremendous metabolic flow, we will have a much better chance to understand how the brain works and why it sometimes breaks.

Great, I finally have an explanation for mother! “Remember that time I punched you in the face because I thought you were a human-sized trout? It was just a result of my metabolically demanding brain!”

Thankfully, most of us our brains function perfectly well; these eons of evolution have produced a mechanism with quite impressive abilities. They have given us the ability to contemplate our own existence, our place in the cosmos, and have even allowed us the ability to express ourselves through art.

T, over at Anesthesioboist, has provided a magnificent example of this with a poem entitled Ode to Vocal Cords, a reflection of the role of laryngeal descent in human evolution. If you’ve always wondered what you get when you cross a poet with an anesthesiologist, here’s your chance!

Speaking of crossing talents, I met a neurosurgeon the other day that moonlights as a clown. He told me a story about how he accidentally came in to do an emergency craniotomy with full make-up on. Talk about embarrassing…

EVOLUTION!

There, now we’re back on track. Speaking of the e word…

Did you know that “nothing in medicine makes sense…” except in the light of evolution? Perhaps this is overzealous… Nonetheless, Precordialthump has provided an amazingly resourceful post laying out all the avenues medicine has been approached via the methods of evolutionary biology. There are plenty ‘o links to websites, pdf articles, and there’s even a neat video of Paul Ewald at TED discussing diarrhea!

Along the same vein, our very own Dutch blogger Laika, of Laika’s MedLibLog, gives us a very didactic approach to learning about evolution and medicine with her post Evolution and Medicine. Cancer and adaptive immune responses as evolutions ‘within’.

Speaking of those ‘within’, I’ve always wondered…

…What exactly does evolution have to do with HIV? In Fighting HIV—The boring version, PalMD over at denialism blog gives us an overview of how HIV works, and how its relationship to nucleoside analog reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs) is a story narrated by none other than evolution itself. ‘Boring’? Anything but!

Also over at the SEED empire, Orac of Respectful Insolence took to creating his own mini-series on the topic of evolution and medicine. In the second part of the series he reviews research in his specialty, oncology, discussing the correlation of genetic diversity in tumors with the likelihood of malignancy. You should also check out the third part, which discusses the topic of trypanosomes (Something I have posted on a few times myself) and the way evolution explains the pathogenesis of sleeping sickness.

Superbug? Deadly!? Schoolkids!?!? In our final featured article of this edition of Grand Rounds PalMD, in a post entitled Oh, MRSA! Evolution in action over at WhiteCoat Underground, gives us the low down on Methacillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) – how selection and antibiotics have created an infectious beast that can be combatted by simple preventive practices. DO. NOT. PANIC! (seriously).

I hope you have enjoyed this edition of Grand Rounds. I have presented here the best the medical blogosphere has to offer at the interface of evolution and medicine, and I hope in doing this I have sufficiently whetted your appetite. If you are further interested in topics of evolution and medicine please check out The Evolution and Medicine Review and the recently released special edition of the influential medical journal The Lancet, dedicated to the impact of Charles Darwin on biology and medicine. If you have any futher questions on the topic, feel free to e-mail me at moneduloides at gmail dot com, or leave a comment here.

Thanks goes out to the Grand Rounds blog carnival and those who make it possible (including you). I encourage all of you to follow the carnival in the future, perhaps through subscribing to the Grand Rounds RSS feed provided by HighlightHEALTH in the last edition. For those of you too lazy for an rss feed (Which, pretty much means you’re either in a coma or dead…) just head on over to Edwin Leap for the next edition!