As a group, western diseases such as type 2 diabetes,
cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, allergies and mental health
problems constitute one of the major problems facing humans at the
beginning of the 21st century, particularly as they extend into
poorer countries. An evolutionary perspective has much to offer
standard biomedical understandings of western diseases. At the
heart of this approach is the notion that human evolution occurred
in circumstances very different from the modern affluent western
environment and that, as a consequence, human biology is not
adapted to the contemporary western environment. Written with an
anthropological perspective and aimed at advanced undergraduates
and graduates taking courses in the ecology and evolution of
disease, Tessa Pollard applies and extends this evolutionary
perspective by analysing trends in rates of western diseases and
providing a new synthesis of current understandings of evolutionary
processes, and of the biology and epidemiology of disease.