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 note that we are no longer running the MSc Evolutionary Medicine and Evolutionary Anthropology programmes. For an alternative on the Masters course, please see www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology/postgraduatestudy/taughtprogrammes/mscmedicalanthropology/