Rick Morris’s research while affiliated with University of California, Davis and other places

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Publications (2)


Fig. 1: Mismatch at a glance
Stranger in a strange land: an optimal-environments account of evolutionary mismatch
  • Article
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September 2020

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83 Reads

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4 Citations

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Rick Morris

In evolutionary medicine, researchers characterize some outcomes as evolutionary mismatch. Mismatch problems arise as the result of organisms living in environments to which they are poorly adapted, typically as the result of some rapid environmental change. Depression, anxiety, obesity, myopia, insomnia, breast cancer, dental problems, and numerous other negative health outcomes have all been characterized as mismatch problems. The exact nature of evolutionary mismatch itself is unclear, however. This leads to a lack of clarity about the sorts of problems that evolutionary mismatch can actually explain. Resolving this challenge is important not only for the evolutionary health literature, but also because the notion of evolutionary mismatch involves central concepts in evolutionary biology: fitness, evolution in changing environments, and so forth. In this paper, I examine two characterizations of mismatch currently in the literature. I propose that we conceptualize mismatch as a relation between an optimal environment and an actual environment. Given an organism and its particular physiology, the optimal environment is the environment in which the organism's fitness is maximized: in other words, the optimal environment is that in which the organism's fitness is as high as it can possibly be. The actual environment is the environment in which the organism actually finds itself. To the extent that there is a discordance between the organism's actual and optimal environments, there is an evolutionary mismatch. In the paper, I show that this account of mismatch gives us the right result when other accounts fail, and provides useful targets for investigation.

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Be fruitful and multiply: Fitness and health in evolutionary mismatch and clinical research

June 2019

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14 Reads

Evolutionary mismatch is, roughly, poor fit between an organism and its environment. Researchers in evolutionary medicine have proposed mismatch as a possible cause for morbidity and mortality in contemporary Homo sapiens populations. Mismatch hypotheses are often taken to provide an evolutionary explanation for the health outcome in question, while simultaneously offering possible interventions for researchers and clinicians to pursue. A problem: fitness outcomes and health outcomes are distinct. Natural selection operates on fitness, not on health per se. There are cases where increased health may not contribute to fitness in the modern environment. I propose an approach for using evolutionary mismatch in clinical research which sidesteps this problem. The gist of the proposal: given structural analogies between environmental causes of morbidity and environmental causes of fitness reductions, evolutionary mismatch can be used as a heuristic to shrink the space through which clinical and public health researchers must search for possible interventions in response to contemporary health problems.

Citations (1)


... This definition is also inconsistent with how the concept is used in evolutionary medicine, and, furthermore, it is not clear that the concept retains its explanatory value. The reason is that the optimal environment, according to Morris (2020), "is the environment in which the organism's fitness is maximized: in other words, the optimal environment is that in which the organism's fitness is as high as it can possibly be." But if evolutionary mismatch is understood with reference to the optimal environment in this manner, it follows that all organisms exist in a state of mismatch. ...

Reference:

Mismatch Resistance and the Problem of Evolutionary Novelty
Stranger in a strange land: an optimal-environments account of evolutionary mismatch

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