Evolutionary Medicine (sometimes known as Darwinian Medicine) is an emerging inter-disciplinary field that is gaining increasing recognition across many disciplines and already has a strong tradition within anthropology.  It takes an ultimate view of diseases (and/or health) arguing that our vulnerability and/or wellbeing should be viewed from an evolutionary perspective.  For example, the recent epidemic of metabolic disorders including obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases is attributed to a "mismatch" between our current modern environments and the environment in which we spent the majority of our human past - one where access to food (and particularly high calorie foods such as sugars and fats) would have been restricted, and where exercise was more or less a daily feature of human life. 

Please follow this link to find out more about the Evolutionary Medicine MSc or alternatively you can contact us by sending an email to: c.l.o'neill@durham.ac.uk