Developing a Curriculum for Evolutionary Medicine: Case Studies of Scurvy and Female Reproductive Tract Cancers

Most early evolutionary thinkers came from medicine, yet evolution has had a checkered history in medical education. It is only in the last few decades that serious efforts have begun to be made to integrate evolutionary biology into the medical curriculum. However, it is not clear when, where (independently or as part of preclinical or clinical teaching courses) and, most importantly, how should medical students learn the basic principles of evolutionary biology applied to medicine, known today as evolutionary or Darwinian medicine. Most clinicians are ill-prepared to teach evolutionary biology and most evolutionary biologists ill-equipped to formulate clinical examples. Yet, if evolutionary science is to have impact on clinical thought, then teaching material that embeds evolution within the clinical framework must be developed. In this paper, we use two clinical case studies to demonstrate how such may be used to teach evolutionary medicine to medical students in a way that is approachable as well as informative and relevant.     

Evolutionary Medicine: A Key to Introducing Evolution

Science teachers can use examples and concepts from evolutionary medicine to teach the three concepts central to evolution: common descent, the processes or mechanisms of evolution, and the patterns produced by descent with modification. To integrate medicine into common ancestry, consider how the evolutionary past of our (or any) species affects disease susceptibility. That humans are bipedal has produced substantial changes in our musculoskeletal system, as well as causing problems for childbirth. Mechanisms such as natural selection are well exemplified in evolutionary medicine, as both disease-causing organism and their targets adapt to one another. Teachers often use examples such as antibiotic resistance to teach natural selection: it takes little alteration of the lesson plan to make explicit that evolution is key to understanding the principles involved. Finally, the pattern of evolution can be illustrated through evolutionary medicine because organisms sharing closer ancestry also share greater susceptibility to the same disease-causing organisms. Teaching evolution using examples from evolutionary medicine can make evolution more interesting and relevant to students, and quite probably, more acceptable as a valid science.     

Greenbeards in yeast: an undergraduate laboratory exercise to teach the genetics of cooperation

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in our understanding of the social behaviour of microbes. Here, we take advantage of these developments to present an undergraduate laboratory exercise that uses the cooperative flocculating behaviour of yeast (Saccharomyces sp.) to introduce the concept of inclusive fitness and teach the genetics of cooperation. Students generate their own data using co-cultures of various yeast strains and perform statistical analyses to test whether kin selection or greenbeard effects determine the cooperative flocculating behaviour. The lab has run successfully for two consecutive years in a second year course with some 1, 200 students per year at the University of Toronto, Canada. We discuss the benefits of using microbes to teach social evolution, describe the set-up and learning outcomes of the laboratory exercise, and then outline possible extension and variants of the lab. In addition to providing students with the opportunity to use a model organism to study social behaviour, students are also taught common laboratory skills, such as replica plating and sterile techniques. Ultimately, while the genetics of cooperation has traditionally been taught through computer simulations and evolutionary games, this exercise demonstrates a way to experimentally introduce the topic.     

A Clinical Perspective in Evolutionary Medicine: What We Wish We Had Learned in Medical School

Medical students have much to gain by understanding how evolutionary principles affect human health and disease. Many theoretical and experimental studies have applied lessons from evolutionary biology to issues of critical importance to medical science. A firm grasp of evolution and natural selection is required to understand why the human body remains vulnerable to many diseases. Although we often integrate evolutionary concepts when we teach medical students and residents, the vast majority of medical students never receive any instruction on evolution. As a result, many trainees lack the tools to understand key advances and miss valuable opportunities for education and research. Here, we outline some of the evolutionary principles that we wished we had learned during our medical training.     

Mammalian organogenesis in deep time: tools for teaching and outreach

Mammals constitute a rich subject of study on evolution and development and provide model organisms for experimental investigations. They can serve to illustrate how ontogeny and phylogeny can be studied together and how the reconstruction of ancestors of our own evolutionary lineage can be approached. Likewise, mammals can be used to promote 'tree thinking' and can provide an organismal appreciation of evolutionary changes. This subject is suitable for the classroom and to the public at large given the interest and familiarity of people with mammals and their closest relatives. We present a simple exercise in which embryonic development is presented as a transformative process that can be observed, compared, and analyzed. In addition, we provide and discuss a freely available animation on organogenesis and life history evolution in mammals. An evolutionary tree can be the best tool to order and understand those transformations for different species. A simple exercise introduces the subject of changes in developmental timing or heterochrony and its importance in evolution. The developmental perspective is relevant in teaching and outreach efforts for the understanding of evolutionary theory today.     

Network design meets in silico evolutionary biology

Cell fate is programmed through gene regulatory networks that perform several calculations to take the appropriate decision. In silico evolutionary optimization mimics the way Nature has designed such gene regulatory networks. In this review we discuss the basic principles of these evolutionary approaches and how they can be applied to engineer synthetic networks. We summarize the basic guidelines to implement an in silico evolutionary design method, the operators for mutation and selection that iteratively drive the network architecture towards a specified dynamical behavior. Interestingly, as it happens in natural evolution, we show the existence of patterns of punctuated evolution. In addition, we highlight several examples of models that have been designed using automated procedures, together with different objective functions to select for the proper behavior. Finally, we briefly discuss the modular designability of gene regulatory networks and its potential application in biotechnology.     

A first attempt to bring computational biology into advanced high school biology classrooms

Computer science has become ubiquitous in many areas of biological research, yet most high school and even college students are unaware of this. As a result, many college biology majors graduate without adequate computational skills for contemporary fields of biology. The absence of a computational element in secondary school biology classrooms is of growing concern to the computational biology community and biology teachers who would like to acquaint their students with updated approaches in the discipline. We present a first attempt to correct this absence by introducing a computational biology element to teach genetic evolution into advanced biology classes in two local high schools. Our primary goal was to show students how computation is used in biology and why a basic understanding of computation is necessary for research in many fields of biology. This curriculum is intended to be taught by a computational biologist who has worked with a high school advanced biology teacher to adapt the unit for his/her classroom, but a motivated high school teacher comfortable with mathematics and computing may be able to teach this alone. In this paper, we present our curriculum, which takes into consideration the constraints of the required curriculum, and discuss our experiences teaching it. We describe the successes and challenges we encountered while bringing this unit to high school students, discuss how we addressed these challenges, and make suggestions for future versions of this curriculum.We believe that our curriculum can be a valuable seed for further development of computational activities aimed at high school biology students. Further, our experiences may be of value to others teaching computational biology at this level. Our curriculum can be obtained at http://ecsite.cs.colorado.edu/?page_id=149#biology or by contacting the authors.     

Adaptive evolution in ecological communities

Understanding how natural selection drives evolution is a key challenge in evolutionary biology. Most studies of adaptation focus on how a single environmental factor, such as increased temperature, affects evolution within a single species. The biological relevance of these experiments is limited because nature is infinitely more complex. Most species are embedded within communities containing many species that interact with one another and the physical environment. To understand the evolutionary significance of such ecological complexity, experiments must test the evolutionary impact of interactions among multiple species during adaptation. Here we highlight an experiment that manipulates species composition and tracks evolutionary responses within each species, while testing for the mechanisms by which species interact and adapt to their environment. We also discuss limitations of previous studies of adaptive evolution and emphasize how an experimental evolution approach can circumvent such shortcomings. Understanding how community composition acts as a selective force will improve our ability to predict how species adapt to natural and human-induced environmental change.     

Partner choice creates fairness in humans

Many studies demonstrate that partner choice has played an important role in the evolution of human cooperation, but little work has tested its impact on the evolution of human fairness. In experiments involving divisions of money, people become either over-generous or over-selfish when they are in competition to be chosen as cooperative partners. Hence, it is difficult to see how partner choice could result in the evolution of fair, equal divisions. Here, we show that this puzzle can be solved if we consider the outside options on which partner choice operates. We conduct a behavioural experiment, run agent-based simulations and analyse a game-theoretic model to understand how outside options affect partner choice and fairness. All support the conclusion that partner choice leads to fairness only when individuals have equal outside options. We discuss how this condition has been met in our evolutionary history, and the implications of these findings for our understanding of other aspects of fairness less specific than preferences for equal divisions of resources.     

Bacterial evolution during human infection: Adapt and live or adapt and die

Microbes are constantly evolving. Laboratory studies of bacterial evolution increase our understanding of evolutionary dynamics, identify adaptive changes, and answer important questions that impact human health. During bacterial infections in humans, however, the evolutionary parameters acting on infecting populations are likely to be much more complex than those that can be tested in the laboratory. Nonetheless, human infections can be thought of as naturally occurring in vivo bacterial evolution experiments, which can teach us about antibiotic resistance, pathogenesis, and transmission. Here, we review recent advances in the study of within-host bacterial evolution during human infection and discuss practical considerations for conducting such studies. We focus on 2 possible outcomes for de novo adaptive mutations, which we have termed “adapt-and-live” and “adapt-and-die.” In the adapt-and-live scenario, a mutation is long lived, enabling its transmission on to other individuals, or the establishment of chronic infection. In the adapt-and-die scenario, a mutation is rapidly extinguished, either because it carries a substantial fitness cost, it arises within tissues that block transmission to new hosts, it is outcompeted by more fit clones, or the infection resolves. Adapt-and-die mutations can provide rich information about selection pressures in vivo, yet they can easily elude detection because they are short lived, may be more difficult to sample, or could be maladaptive in the long term. Understanding how bacteria adapt under each of these scenarios can reveal new insights about the basic biology of pathogenic microbes and could aid in the design of new translational approaches to combat bacterial infections.     

What we talk about when we talk with medical students

In this article, we review how we interact with medical students in our efforts to teach blood pressure regulation and systemic cardiovascular control along with related elements of respiratory and exercise physiology. Rather than provide a detailed lecture with key facts, we attempted to outline our approach to teaching integrative cardiovascular physiology to medical students, which includes five major themes. First, focus on questions versus answers and facts. We believe that this offers both the learner and teacher a number of advantages. Second, avoid teaching dogma in the name of clarity (i.e., heavy focus on teaching "facts" that have not yet been fully investigated). This is especially important because of the way knowledge evolves over time. Third, include laboratory-based experiences in human integrative physiology. Fourth, provide students with intellectual frameworks versus a list of "facts" to serve as a platform for question generation. Finally, focus on the role of integration and regulatory redundancy in physiology and the idea that physiology is a narrative that can help. In this article, we discuss the philosophy behind the themes outlined above and argue that questions, and not answers, are where the action is for both research and education.     

What have two decades of laboratory life-history evolution studies onDrosophila melanogaster taught us?

A series of laboratory selection experiments onDrosophila melanogaster over the past two decades has provided insights into the specifics of life-history tradeoffs in the species and greatly refined our understanding of how ecology and genetics interact in life-history evolution. Much of what has been learnt from these studies about the subtlety of the microevolutionary process also has significant implications for experimental design and inference in organismal biology beyond life-history evolution, as well as for studies of evolution in the wild. Here we review work on the ecology and evolution of life-histories in laboratory populations ofD. melanogaster, emphasizing how environmental effects on life-history-related traits can influence evolutionary change. We discuss life-history tradeoffs—many unexpected—revealed by selection experiments, and also highlight recent work that underscores the importance to life-history evolution of cross-generation and cross-life-stage effects and interactions, sexual antagonism and sexual dimorphism, population dynamics, and the possible role of biological clocks in timing life-history events. Finally, we discuss some of the limitations of typical selection experiments, and how these limitations might be transcended in the future by a combination of more elaborate and realistic selection experiments, developmental evolutionary biology, and the emerging discipline of phenomics.     

Simulated human diving and heart rate: making the most of the diving response as a laboratory exercise

Laboratory exercises in which students examine the human diving response are widely used in high school and college biology courses despite the experience of some instructors that the response is unreliably produced in the classroom. Our experience with this exercise demonstrates that the bradycardia associated with the diving response is a robust effect that can easily be measured by students without any sophisticated measurement technology. We discuss measures that maximize the success of the exercise by reducing individual variation, designing experiments that are minimally affected by change in the response over time, collecting data in appropriate time increments, and applying the most powerful statistical analysis. Emphasis is placed on pedagogical opportunities for using this exercise to teach general principles of physiology, experimental design, and data analysis. Data collected by students, background information for instructors, a discussion of the relevance of the diving reflex to humans, suggestions for additional experiments, and thought questions with sample answers are included.     

Evolutionary rescue beyond the models

Laboratory model systems and mathematical models have shed considerable light on the fundamental properties and processes of evolutionary rescue. But it remains to determine the extent to which these model-based findings can help biologists predict when evolution will fail or succeed in rescuing natural populations that are facing novel conditions that threaten their persistence. In this article, we present a prospectus for transferring our basic understanding of evolutionary rescue to wild and other non-laboratory populations. Current experimental and theoretical results emphasize how the interplay between inheritance processes and absolute fitness in changed environments drive population dynamics and determine prospects of extinction. We discuss the challenge of inferring these elements of the evolutionary rescue process in field and natural settings. Addressing this challenge will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of population persistence that combines processes of evolutionary rescue with developmental and ecological mechanisms.     

An exploration of instructor perceptions of community college students’ attitudes towards evolution

Background

Faculty perception of student knowledge and acceptance of subject matter affects the choice of what to teach and how to teach it. Accurate assessment of student acceptance of evolution, then, is relevant to how the subject should be taught. To explore the accuracy of such assessment, we compared how community college instructors of life sciences courses perceive students’ attitudes towards evolution with those students’ actual attitudes towards evolution.

Results

The research had two components: (1) a survey of students of several biology classes at a community college about their acceptance of evolutionary theory and (2) interviews with the biology faculty teaching those classes about their perceptions of their students’ attitudes towards evolution. Results of the study indicate relatively high levels of acceptance of evolution among community college students at this West Coast institution. We also found that community college instructors of life sciences courses varied in accuracy of their perceptions of their students’ attitudes towards evolution–but not systematically. Although one professor assessed each class quite accurately, the other two professors frequently underestimated the acceptance of evolution among their students.

Conclusions

Errors in perception seemed independent of whether the class was composed of majors, nonmajors, or a combination. Clearly, in our sample there is much idiosyncrasy regarding community college instructor accuracy concerning student opinions about evolution.

     

Addressing Undergraduate Student Misconceptions about Natural Selection with an Interactive Simulated Laboratory

Although evolutionary theory is considered to be a unifying foundation for biological education, misconceptions about basic evolutionary processes such as natural selection inhibit student understanding. Even after instruction, students harbor misconceptions about natural selection, suggesting that traditional teaching methods are insufficient for correcting these confusions. This has spurred an effort to develop new teaching methods and tools that effectively confront student misconceptions. In this study, we designed an interactive computer-based simulated laboratory to teach the principles of evolution through natural selection and to correct common student misconceptions about this process. We quantified undergraduate student misconceptions and understanding of natural selection before and after instruction with multiple-choice and open-response test questions and compared student performance across gender and academic levels. While our lab appeared to be effective at dispelling some common misconceptions about natural selection, we did not find evidence that it was as successful at increasing student mastery of the major principles of natural selection. Student performance varied across student academic level and question type, but students performed equally across gender. Beginner students were more likely to use misconceptions before instruction. Advanced students showed greater improvement than beginners on multiple-choice questions, while beginner students reduced their use of misconceptions in the open-response questions to a greater extent. These results suggest that misconceptions can be effectively addressed through computer-based simulated laboratories. Given the level of misconception use by beginner and advanced undergraduates and the gains in performance recorded after instruction at both academic levels, natural selection should continue to be reviewed through upper-level biology courses.     

A field guide for teaching evolution in the social sciences

The theory of evolution by natural selection has begun to revolutionize our understanding of perception, cognition, language, social behavior, and cultural practices. Despite the centrality of evolutionary theory to the social sciences, many students, teachers, and even scientists struggle to understand how natural selection works. Our goal is to provide a field guide for social scientists on teaching evolution, based on research in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and education. We synthesize what is known about the psychological obstacles to understanding evolution, methods for assessing evolution understanding, and pedagogical strategies for improving evolution understanding. We review what is known about teaching evolution about nonhuman species and then explore implications of these findings for the teaching of evolution about humans. By leveraging our knowledge of how to teach evolution in general, we hope to motivate and equip social scientists to begin teaching evolution in the context of their own field.     

An emerging synthesis between community ecology and evolutionary biology

A synthesis between community ecology and evolutionary biology is emerging that identifies how genetic variation and evolution within one species can shape the ecological properties of entire communities and, in turn, how community context can govern evolutionary processes and patterns. This synthesis incorporates research on the ecology and evolution within communities over short timescales (community genetics and diffuse coevolution), as well as macroevolutionary timescales (community phylogenetics and co-diversification of communities). As we discuss here, preliminary evidence supports the hypothesis that there is a dynamic interplay between ecology and evolution within communities, yet researchers have not yet demonstrated convincingly whether, and under what circumstances, it is important for biologists to bridge community ecology and evolutionary biology. Answering this question will have important implications for both basic and applied problems in biology.     

Molecular control of vertebrate limb development, evolution and congenital malformations

The vertebrate limb is a powerful model system for studying the cellular and molecular interactions that determine morphological pattern during embryonic development. Recent advances in our understanding of these interactions have shed new light on the molecular mechanisms of vertebrate limb development, evolution and congenital malformations. The transfer of information has, until recently, been largely one way, with developmental studies informing our understanding of the fossil record and clinical limb anomalies; however, evolutionary and clinical studies are now beginning to shed light onto one another and onto basic developmental processes. In this review, we discuss recent advances in these fields and how they are interacting to improve our understanding of vertebrate limb biology.