Stephen C. Stearns is the Edward P Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. His previous books include The Evolution of Life Histories (1992), Evolution: An Introduction 2e (2005), and Evolution in Health and Disease 2e (2007), all published by OUP. A founder of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (and its journal) as well as the Tropical Biology Association, Stearns has served as President of both. He is a Fellow of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences (1987) and a Distinguished Fellow of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (2007). He was awarded the Devane Medal for undergraduate teaching (2011) and the Harwood F. Byrnes/Richard B. Sewall Teaching Prize (2021).

Ruslan Medzhitov is the David W. Wallace Professor of Immunobiology at Yale University School of Medicine. He is also an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. His research interests include inflammation and inflammatory diseases, allergy, infection and immunity, and evolutionary medicine.

• 1: Evolutionary thinking


• 2: Mismatch, the transition to modernity, and the diseases of civilization


• 3: A system perspective on health and disease


• 4: Tradeoffs


• 5: What is an ill person?


• 6: What is a disease?


• 7: Defenses


• 8: Aging


• 9: Pathogens I: Diversity, lifecycles, genetics, and emergence


• 10: Pathogens II: Evasion, suppression, virulence, and resistance


• 11: The microbiota in health and disease


• 12: Cancer


• 13: Reproductive medicine


• 14: Mental disorders


• 15: Applying evolutionary thinking in the clinic


• 16: Applying evolutionary thinking to public health