Stearns and Medzhitov provide a valuable, authoritative resource for students encountering evolutionary medicine for the first time. For biomedical scientists, medical students, and students of evolution, it is a valuable introduction to an important emerging field. * John D. Nagy, BioScience *
This book is a gem of a textbook about the principles of evolutionary thinking and the relevance of evolutionary biology to clinical medicine. The authors draw upon decades of experience teaching medical students at Yale, with interesting examples, including experimental observations in other species. * Gilbert S. Omenn, Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health *
In addition to being intelligent, engaging, clear, and concise (prerequisites for any good textbook), Evolutionary Medicine outlines the field as a series of problems and questions rather than as a set of facts and concepts. Stearns and Medzhitov repeatedly challenge the reader to think critically and logically, to question common assumptions, and to demand good, critical scientific data and thinking. The book is also fun to read because the authors' passion and pleasure in the topic are evident from start to finish. All in all, anyone reading Evolutionary Medicine will get a solid foundation and plenty of stimulus for thinking broadly and critically about how to apply evolutionary data and theory to medicine. * Daniel E. Lieberman, American Journal of Human Biology *
Evolutionary Medicine is intended for undergraduate, graduate, or medical school courses. It draws from fields as diverse as anthropology to molecular biology in order to illustrate the vast landscape of an organism in all its complexity. In contrast to the reductionist approach often taken to answer complex biological questions, much of the strength of the book derives from the authors' ability to step back and describe themes that are broadly generalizable. This alternative perspective allows for an innovative understanding of basic biological processes with profound translational potential. The striking simplicity of the author's overall thesis allows the book to address, in a novel light, questions as fundamental as 'What is a patient?' as well as 'What is a disease?' * Alexandra Kuhlmann, Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine *
