This link opens a poster announcement: The ASU Center for Evolution, Medicine & Public Health (CEMPH) will host several events to celebrate the center’s launch. Directed by Randolph Nesse, a founder of the field of evolutionary medicine, the center’s mission is to establish evolutionary biology as a basic science for medicine and public health worldwide. Research is at its core, but the center will also have major commitments to education, outreach and coordination with similar programs. The new center synergizes with the ASU Center for Evolutionary Medicine and Bioinformatics, directed by Sudhir Kumar, by augmenting existing strengths in phylogenetics, with new faculty whose research uses basic evolutionary principles to understand problems such as antibiotic resistance, cancer, autoimmune disease, aging and behavioral disorders.
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Randolph Nesse: As Tinbergen put it: ‘I have always been amazed, and I must admit annoyed as well, when I met, among fellow-zoologists, with the implied or stated opinion that the study of survival value must necessarily be guesswork’ ([5] p. 418).
My comment: I have always been amazed, and I must admit annoyed as well, by those who do not understand the biological fact that species survival and species diversity is nutrient-dependent and pheromone-controlled.
Randolph Nesse: Tinbergen’s core insight is that the questions are not alternatives, they are complementary: answers to all four are necessary for a complete biological explanation.
There is a “slide” from one of Randy’s presentations that appears when you open this pdf.
Clearly it is long past time to begin further discussion of ecological adaptations in terms of their adaptive significance: they enable nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled species diversity.
Please note also, that Mark Flinn was one of the presenters at the opening ceremony, and see: Evolutionary functions of early social modulation of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis development in humans cited in Kohl (2013). “The newer and often redefined terms for pheromones limit the use of what is now known about their epigenetic effects, which are also associated with social stress on adaptively evolved socio-cognitive niche construction (Flinn, Nepomnaschy, Muehlenbein, & Ponzi, 2011; O’Connell & Hofmann, 2011, 2012; Whiten & Erdal, 2012).”
James V. Kohl detailedl how quantized energy-dependent microRNA biogenesis links the pheromone-controlled physiology of reproduction to biophysically constrained viral latency and healthy longevity. Links from what organisms eat to the enzyme-dependent metabolism of food also link metabolic networks to microRNA-mediated genetic networks in the context of RNA interference. Drug therapies alter RNA interference by altering cell type differentiation in all cells of all individuals of all species. For comparison, during the past 26 years, Kohl has detailed how the chemistry of protein folding is biophysically constrained at every level of biological organization by conserved molecular mechanisms.