ArticleEvolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society2020
WEIRD bodies: mismatch, medicine and missing diversity.
Article in Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The utility of dried blood spot measurement of bone turnover markers in biological anthropology.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2022Pooled it
- Reporting and representation of population descriptors in public RNA-seq databases.Cell genomics · 2026Article
- Review
- Why Do Humans Exercise? A Neuro-Evolutionary Framework for Discretionary Physical Effort.Evolutionary anthropology · 2026Review
- Homo sapiens, industrialisation and the environmental mismatch hypothesis.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Population attributable fraction of modifiable risk factors for dementia in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A community-based cross-sectional analysis.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Minimal Evidence of Inflammaging in Naturalistic Chimpanzee Populations.American journal of biological anthropology · 2026Article
- Not All Stress Is the Same: Variable Associations Between Psychosocial Stressors and Urinary Cortisol Rhythms in a Small-Scale Subsistence Society.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2026Article
- Dampened inflammation and reduced risk of osteoarthritis among non-industrialized societies.Osteoarthritis and cartilage · 2026Review
- Running wild: Forest running enhances performance, enjoyment, mood, and future exercise intentions.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2026Article
- On the importance of intersectionality: understanding how experienced, anticipated and internalized stigma intersect in people with non-normative identities.Frontiers in sociology · 2026Article
- Association between frequency of meeting daily step thresholds and all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease in older women.British journal of sports medicine · 2025Article
- Mother infant cortisol levels and maternal childhood adversity.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Positive Cortisol-Testosterone Hormonal Coupling Among Adolescents in Argentina and Jordan.American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Article
- Evaluation of a DNA methylation-based measure of chronic inflammation in two generations of adults in metropolitan Cebu, Philippines.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Bone health: Age-related changes in diaphyseal structural properties among European Holocene humans during the last 9000 years.Science advances · 2025Article
- Nonuniversality of inflammaging across human populations.Nature aging · 2025Article
- Inflammaging is minimal among forager-horticulturalists in the Bolivian Amazon.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The DCIDE framework: systematic investigation of evolutionary hypotheses, exemplified with autism.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Digital pathways beyond Western-centric participants.Behavior research methods · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Despite recent rapid advances in medical knowledge that have improved survival, conventional medical science's understanding of human health and disease relies heavily on people of European descent living in contemporary urban industrialized environments. Given that modern conditions in high-income countries differ widely in terms of lifestyle and exposures compared to those experienced by billions of people and all our ancestors over several hundred thousand years, this narrow approach to the human body and health is very limiting. We argue that preventing and treating chronic diseases of aging and other mismatch diseases will require both expanding study design to sample diverse populations and contexts, and fully incorporating evolutionary perspectives. In this paper, we first assess the extent of biased representation of industrialized populations in high profile, international biomedical journals, then compare patterns of morbidity and health across world regions. We also compare demographic rates and the force of selection between subsistence and industrialized populations to reflect on the changes in how selection operates on fertility and survivorship across the lifespan. We argue that, contrary to simplistic misguided solutions like the PaleoDiet, the hypothesis of evolutionary mismatch needs critical consideration of population history, evolutionary biology and evolved reaction norms to prevent and treat diseases. We highlight the critical value of broader sampling by considering the effects of three key exposures that have radically changed over the past century in many parts of the world-pathogen burden, reproductive effort and physical activity-on autoimmune, cardiometabolic and other mismatch diseases.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.