Stephen C Stearns

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Verified

Stephen verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Yale University

Significance The dominant view in both molecular and evolutionary biology is that genotype controls the adaptation to new environments. We propose an alternate hypothesis, in which the phenotype and genotype both play important roles in metabolic adaptation in the lifetime of the organism and in the evolutionary selection of adaptive metabolic trai...

As shown throughout this book, urbanization moulds evolutionary processes in many biological systems. But what are its effects on the species that is itself the cause of this radical habitat modification? At least two major cultural transitions in history have involved urbanization: the transition to agriculture, and the continuing transition to mo...

We critically review the use of the term “life history theory” in recent publications on evolutionary psychology, focusing on how the idea of a fast-slow continuum is deployed in that literature. We raise four issues: First, concerning plasticity, should we expect the effects of plasticity on the developmental response of a trait to mirror the effe...

This paper surveys some of the important insights that molecular evolution has contributed to evolutionary medicine; they include phage therapy, cancer biology, helminth manipulation of the host immune system, quality control of gametes, and pathogen outbreaks. Molecular evolution has helped to revolutionize our understanding of cancer, of autoimmu...

In Reply Four main issues were raised by Kitipornchai and Mackay and Lüscher et al. All of them appear invalid as challenges of our main results.

Importance Surgical removal of adenoids and tonsils to treat obstructed breathing or recurrent middle-ear infections remain common pediatric procedures; however, little is known about their long-term health consequences despite the fact that these lymphatic organs play important roles in the development and function of the immune system. Objective...

The Industrial Revolution and the accompanying nutritional, epidemiological and demographic transitions have profoundly changed human ecology and biology, leading to major shifts in life history traits, which include age and size at maturity, age-specific fertility and lifespan. Mismatch between past adaptations and the current environment means th...

Evolutionary medicine is a research frontier whose promise has only partially been realized. Here I discuss the advances that have built its foundation and point to where progress is most needed.

The emerging discipline of evolutionary medicine is breaking new ground in understanding why people become ill. However, the value of evolutionary analyses of human physiology and behaviour is only beginning to be recognised in the field of public health. Core principles come from life history theory, which analyses the allocation of finite amounts...

The emerging discipline of evolutionary medicine is breaking new ground in understanding why people become ill. However, the value of evolutionary analyses of human physiology and behaviour is only beginning to be recognised in the field of public health. Core principles come from life history theory, which analyses the allocation of finite amounts...

BACKGROUND Surgical removal of the adenoids and tonsils are common pediatric procedures, with conventional wisdom suggesting their absence has little impact on health or disease. However, little is known about long-term health consequences beyond the perioperative risks. Such ignorance is significant, for these lymphatic organs play important roles...

The emerging discipline of evolutionary medicine is breaking new ground in understanding why people become ill. However, the value of evolutionary analyses of human physiology and behaviour is only beginning to be recognised in the field of public health. Core principles come from life history theory, which analyses the allocation of finite amounts...

Traditional genome-wide scans for positive selection have mainly uncovered selective sweeps associated with monogenic traits. While selection on quantitative traits is much more common, very few signals have been detected because of their polygenic nature. We searched for positive selection signals underlying coronary artery disease (CAD) in worldw...

Testing whether CAD SNPs are associated with both LRS and CAD due to pleiotropy or confounding effects. Confounding effects would occur if coronary artery disease (CAD) SNPs modestly affected lifetime reproductive success (LRS), which in turn caused significant changes in CAD risk due to physiological, hormonal or social changes related to childbea...

Comparing cross-population candidate selection signals in PHACTR1. Per-SNP integrated Haplotype Scores (iHS) plotted by chromosome position within PHACTR1 (including LD plots below each) for 12 worldwide populations. Permuted p value significance for each score coded by color (grey, non-significant; orange, p < 0.05). Red dashed line indicates posi...

Selected Enrichr analysis outputs for top 10-ranked CAD genes with highest genetic risk-selection associations from Fig 1B. Enrichr outputs includes KEGG 2016 Pathways (http://www.kegg.jp/kegg/download/), MGI Mammalian Phenotype Level 3 (http://www.informatics.jax.org/), Cancer Cell Line Encyclopaedia (http://portals.broadinstitute.org/ccle/data/br...

Testing association of CAD SNPs with human fitness in the Framingham Heart Study women. First three columns give number of individuals available and used in analyses. Four FaST-LMM columns provide summary of leading results including leading and highest ranked SNP(s) (and associated genes). Three fastBAT columns provide leading gene(s). Final four...

Widespread candidate signals of positive selection on CAD loci. Extended discussion on candidate adaptive signals found on coronary artery disease (CAD) loci in relation to the polygenic model of selection and previous studies examining genomic selection on broader cardiovascular disease loci. (PDF)

Pleiotropic links between coronary artery disease (CAD) and early- life fitness-related traits due to shared genetic loci. The table below provides extensive support (143 studies) that antagonistic pleiotropy is likely to be present for CAD genes due to their consistent connections with fitness-related traits expressed early in life. See Fig 5 for...

Pleiotropic links between randomly chosen genes and early-life fitness-related traits. Fitness-related traits include fertility potential, reproductive outcomes, pregnancy outcomes, fetal growth and survival, i.e. affecting the ability of an organism to reproduce and transfer genes to the next generation. The first column gives coronary artery dise...

Association of coronary artery disease (CAD) risk and genomic signatures of selection in 12 worldwide populations. All 76 genes are shown ranked according to Fig 1B. Boxes show magnitude and significance of largest positive selection signal (integrated haplotype score, iHS) within each gene-population combination. P values (circles within squares)...

Testing for antagonistic pleiotropy for SNPs with significant effects on lifetime reproductive success (LRS) and coronary artery disease (CAD). Left table: provides statistics for CAD index SNPs derived directly from the CARDIoGRAMplusC4D 1000 Genomes-based GWAS meta-analysis (see [1] or http://www.cardiogramplusc4d.org/data-downloads/ for further...

Summary of types of pleiotropic connections between coronary artery disease (CAD) and fitness-related traits. Counts are based on S1 Table, ‘fitness class’ column. Most fitness-related traits were related to female potential fertility (29 of 40 genes had these effects) and pregnancy outcomes (25 of 40 genes had these effects). Some genes had broad...

Elephants have significantly reduced their risk of cancer by duplicating an important gene called TP53.

Traditional genome-wide scans for positive selection have mainly uncovered selective sweeps associated with monogenic traits. While selection on quantitative traits is much more common, very few signals have been detected because of their polygenic nature. We searched for positive selection signals underlying coronary artery disease (CAD) in worldw...

Although fitness is central to the evolutionary process, metrics vary by timescale. Different timescales may give rise to different estimates of selection, especially during demographic transitions caused by rapid environmental and socioeconomic change. In this study, we used a dataset of a human population in Finland from 1775 to 1950 to compare t...

An essay on teaching and learning

What is the level of quality and impact that we aim for in articles published in EMPH? This is an interdisciplinary journal that addresses a broad audience. Interdisciplinary work is often thought to suffer from a lack of rigor because it can escape the scrutiny that referees habitually apply to work in core disciplines. That is not what we intend...

This chapter addresses the concept of phenotypic plasticity in life history traits as I understood it in 1981 and as I have seen it develop since then, in part as a result of the Dahlem Conference. It also deals with my attempts to conceptualize the role of development in life history evolution and to teach about the role of development in evolutio...

Opposite phenotypic and behavioural traits associated with copy number variation and disruptions to imprinted genes with parent-of-origin effects have led to the hypothesis that autism and schizophrenia share molecular risk factors and pathogenic mechanisms, but a direct phenotypic comparison of how their risks covary has not been attempted. Here,...

Is there a trade-off between children ever born (CEB) and post-reproductive lifespan in humans? Here, we report a comprehensive analysis of reproductive trade-offs in the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) dataset using phenotypic and genotypic correlations and a genome-wide association study (GWAS) to look for single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that...

Recent human history is marked by demographic transitions characterized by declines in mortality and fertility [1]. By influencing the variance in those fitness components, demographic transitions can affect selection on other traits [2]. Parallel to changes in selection triggered by demography per se, relationships between fitness and anthropometr...

Because autosomal genes in sexually reproducing organisms spend on average half their time in each sex, and because the traits that they influence encounter different selection pressures in males and females, the evolutionary responses of one sex are constrained by processes occurring in the other sex. Although intralocus sexual conflict can restri...

This review is aimed at readers seeking an introductory overview, teaching courses and interested in visionary ideas. It first describes the range of topics covered by evolutionary medicine, which include human genetic variation, mismatches to modernity, reproductive medicine, degenerative disease, host-pathogen interactions and insights from compa...

The interface between evolutionary biology and the biomedical sciences promises to advance understanding of the origins of genetic and infectious diseases in humans, potentially leading to improved medical diagnostics, therapies, and public health practices. The biomedical sciences also provide unparalleled examples for evolutionary biologists to e...

The aspects of development that interest students of life history evolution are plasticity, canalization, and constraint. Plasticity has both an adaptive component modifiable by gene substitutions and a chemically and structurally inevitable component. Plasticity may be either continuous or discrete. Continuous plasticity in life history traits is...

Can one develop a syllabus for a course in evolutionary medicine that covers both its diversity and its depth? What topics generate the most interest and the best discussions? How can such a course be structured to help transform students into colleagues as fast as possible? Here, I draw on my experience teaching three courses in evolutionary medic...

Are humans currently evolving? This question can be answered using data on lifetime reproductive success, multiple traits and genetic variation and covariation in those traits. Such data are available in existing long-term, multigeneration studies - both clinical and epidemiological - but they have not yet been widely used to address contemporary h...

Background/Question/Methods The plasticity of life history traits depends on both environmental and genetic factors. It is important to consider the effects of genotypic variability, especially in non-neutral markers, on life history traits in ecological interactions. We address the interaction of environmental factors (resource availability and p...

Some of the greatest catastrophes in graduate education could have been avoided by a little intelligent foresight. Be cynical. Assume that your proposed research might not work, and that one of your faculty advisors might become unsupportive- or even hostile. Plan for alternatives. Nobody Cares About You In fact, some professor care about you and s...

It is now increasingly acknowledged that an evolutionary perspective can give us important new insights into issues central to medical research and practice. This fully revised and updated edition, which consists of roughly 95% new material, contains contributions from leading researchers who provide a fresh summary of this rapidly expanding field....

Today, human behavior drives many extinctions and preserves some species. To help understand such behavior, we published a book in 1999 that viewed selected endangered species through the eyes of those who have watched them decline and, in some cases, vanish from the wild. Here we revisit those stories to document what has happened in the interim 1...

Evolution and medicine started an immature romance in the late 19th century that broke up amid violent recriminations in the early 20th century. Thereafter, the relationship remained distant until the partners were reintroduced on a more mature basis by Nesse and Williams’ book, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (1). (See ref....

Telomere length in humans is emerging as a biomarker of aging because its shortening is associated with aging-related diseases and early mortality. However, genetic mechanisms responsible for these associations are not known. Here, in a cohort of Ashkenazi Jewish centenarians, their offspring, and offspring-matched controls, we studied the inherita...

Humans have evolved much longer lifespans than the great apes, which rarely exceed 50 years. Since 1800, lifespans have doubled again, largely due to improvements in environment, food, and medicine that minimized mortality at earlier ages. Infections cause most mortality in wild chimpanzees and in traditional forager-farmers with limited access to...

It is now increasingly acknowledged that an evolutionary perspective can give us important new insights into issues central to medical research and practice. This fully revised and updated edition, which consists of roughly 95% new material, contains contributions from leading researchers who provide a fresh summary of this rapidly expanding field....

New applications of evolutionary biology in medicine are being discovered at an accelerating rate, but few physicians have sufficient educational background to utilize them fully. This article summarizes suggestions from several groups who have considered how evolutionary biology can be useful in medicine, what physicians should learn about it, and...

It is becoming increasingly clear that under natural conditions parasitic infections commonly consist of co-infections with multiple conspecific strains. Multiple-strain infections lead to intraspecific interactions and may have important ecological and evolutionary effects on both hosts and parasites. However, experimental evidence on intraspecifi...

New applications of evolutionary biology in medicine are being discovered at an accelerating rate, but few physicians have sufficient educational background to use them fully. This article summarizes suggestions from several groups that have considered how evolutionary biology can be useful in medicine, what physicians should learn about it, and wh...

Our aims were to demonstrate that natural selection is operating on contemporary humans, predict future evolutionary change for specific traits with medical significance, and show that for some traits we can make short-term predictions about our future evolution. To do so, we measured the strength of selection, estimated genetic variation and covar...

Background/Question/Methods Species interactions depend on the plasticity of species traits, including induced life history response. Abiotic and biotic factors, such as resource availability and predation, mediate plasticity in life history traits, but metabolic costs and energetic limitations constrain life history response. Life history trade-o...

Edited by Eric Chivian and Aaron Bernstein New York:Oxford University Press, 2008. 542 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-517509-7, $34.95We share this planet with millions of other species, each of which is a unique store of precious information. We are driving those species extinct at 100 to 1,000 times the natural rate—a crime equivalent to tossing books from t...

For a long time, biologists focused on accruing data without having a general framework in which to interpret their results. A suitable analogy would be the way that one might use observation to discern the details of how pieces move on a chessboard without knowing the object of the game. In chess, once the object of the game is understood, the pat...

Evolutionary biology is an essential basic science for medicine, but few doctors and medical researchers are familiar with its most relevant principles. Most medical schools have geneticists who understand evolution, but few have even one evolutionary biologist to suggest other possible applications. The canyon between evolutionary biology and medi...

This chapter introduces the book, motivates it with examples of cases in which evolutionary approaches provide useful insights, and provides a brief sketch of evolutionary biology that describes key concepts and misconceptions. It argues that doctors need to know this about evolution: how natural selection works; why trade-offs are ubiquitous; how...

This commentary poses an evolutionary hypothesis about the nature of the human condition: that we are stalled part way through a major evolutionary transition from individuals to groups, a transition that may never be completed but that has already shaped our history, politics, psychology, and social life. The conditions causing the transition to s...

Detailed description of the evolutionary changes in population doubling time. This file contains an additional figure (S1) depicting changes in the population doubling time during 211 days of experimental evolution, based on daily measurement, as well as a description of the methods.

The effect of juvenile mortality on the age-specific strength of selection. This file contains a mathematical model used for analyzing the effect of juvenile mortality on the age-specific strength of selection. The strength of selection was calculated for populations that grow exponentially (additional figure S2) and for populations that are at equ...

Aging refers to a decline in reproduction and survival with increasing age. According to evolutionary theory, aging evolves because selection late in life is weak and mutations exist whose deleterious effects manifest only late in life. Whether the assumptions behind this theory are fulfilled in all organisms, and whether all organisms age, has not...

Evolutionary thinking in medicine draws both on the phylogenetic history of Homo sapiens and on the dynamics of natural selection and genetic drift to give insight into antibiotic resistance, vaccine production, variation in drug response and reproductive biology. In the future, evolutionary developmental genetics promises to contribute to limb and...

The Citation of “Evolution in Action” as Science 's 2005 Breakthrough of the Year confirms that evolution is the vibrant foundation for all biology. Its contributions to understanding infectious disease and genetics are widely recognized, but its full potential for use in medicine has yet to be

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This paper illustrates the utility of applying evolutionary thought to medical issues with three examples: selection arenas, aging, and tradeoffs. First, the human female reproductive tract functions as a selection arena at two levels: in the ovaries, where atresia reduces the number of oocytes by more than 99.99% before any are ovulated, and in th...

To understand the causes of tradeoffs, particularly those involved in ageing, to test the reproductive effort model of life history evolution, and to measure the rate of evolution of induced life history responses, we have been performing an artificial selection experiment on Drosophila melanogaster since November 1993. It consists of four treatmen...

Environmentally influenced variation in phenotypic expression or phenotypic plasticity is a fundamental property of organisms with consequences for developmental and ecological genetics, evolutionary biology, population and community ecology, conservation biology, and medicine. This chapter begins with definitions and distinctions that identify way...

In designing a biology book, two approaches are common. The first, question-oriented, organizes the book around a series of related questions and surveys the data, perhaps from many taxa, relevant to each question. Examples include books on sexual selection (Andersson 1994), adaptation (Rose and Lauder 1996), and life history evolution (Roff 2002)....

This book will appeal to investigators in each of the scientific disciplines it integrates-evolutionary biology, ecology, salmonid biology, management, and conservation. Variation in salmonids can be used to illustrate virtually all evolutionary questions, and so the work will also attract general scientific interest by ecologists and evolutionary...

Biological traits are buffered against genetic and environmental upset by a process called canalization. New work suggests this may be a general feature of regulatory gene networks, selected to survive gene loss.

Functional genomics provides new opportunities to address issues of fundamental interest in evolutionary biology and suggests many new research directions that are ripe for evolutionary investigation. New types of data, and the ability to study biological processes from a whole genome perspective, are likely to have a profound impact on evolutionar...

n the 19th century, when evolutionarybiologists focused on whole organisms,development played a central role in evo-lutionary theory. For much of the 20thcentury, genetic models and explanationsreplaced development at the center ofevolutionary thought. Connections to de-velopment resurfaced at mid-century (1,2) and accelerated after 1975, fueled by...

We characterized RNA transcript levels for the whole Drosophila genome during normal aging. We compared age-dependent profiles from animals aged under full-nutrient conditions with profiles obtained from animals maintained on a low-calorie medium to determine if caloric restriction slows the aging process. Specific biological functions impacted by...

This article surveys progress in Darwinian medicine since 1991. Evolutionary thinking has been providing an increasing flow of fresh ideas into medical science, ideas that would not be suggested by other perspectives. Recent contributions have shed new light on the evolution of virulence, of antibiotic resistance, of oocytic atresia, of menopause,...