Calls for Papers
Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health are currently seeking submissions for the following virtual special issues of the journal:
Closed calls for papers of upcoming virtual special issues include:
- Mental Health in Non-Industrialised Populations
- Evolution of Water Needs, Heat Stress, & Climate Change
- Evolutionary Medicine & Palaeopathology
- Evolutionary and Biopsychosocial Perspectives on Sickness Communication
- Evolutionary Medicine and Health Disparities
Exploring Eco-Evo Applications In Cancer
Cancers are essentially large communities of cells, and the individual members act and interact in complex ways. Long-established principles of ecology and evolution have provided an encompassing framework to understand the short- and long-term behavior of such communities in the natural world, ranging from bacteria to ecosystems. We are now finding that cancer communities share many fundamental features with their counterparts elsewhere-diversity, niche construction and overlap, competition and mutualism, drift, adaptive and maladaptive change. It is therefore germane to ask if existing ideas in ecology and evolution apply to cancer systems as well.
This Special Issue aims to explore and cultivate this frontier between ecology-evolution and cancer as a meaningful new perspective with which to understand the spatio-temporal dynamics of cancer populations as eco-evolutionary systems. It also aims to elucidate the potential in such a perspective to produce functional insights into cancer dynamics that might result in more effective strategies for cancer control and cure. Submission are open until December 31, 2025.
Mental Health in Non-Industrialised Populations
This call for papers is now closed.
Questions as to the biological, psychological, social and evolutionary causes of the conditions diagnosed as mental disorders are unresolved, despite decades of effort. Plenty of evolutionary perspectives provide potential hypotheses explaining mental disorders, yet most research focuses on industrialised and urban populations. Studies of how mental disorders present in non-industrialised cultural settings have rarely taken an evolutionary perspective, but offer the possibility to observe whether and how such traits arise under diverse environmental conditions. Moreover, as many people living traditional subsistence lifestyles are being exposed to new stressors and risk factors as they transition into the global market economy, there is also the possibility of insight into which environmental factors are causing poor mental health, which may help identify possible avenues for prevention and mitigation.
This virtual special issue aims to report critical evidence, theoretical perspectives and practical considerations regarding the study of mental health outside of urban, industrialised contexts. It aims to summarize the current state of evolutionary research on mental health, highlight novel empirical contributions, and address important methodological issues, all of which should inspire the research community and equip it with the tools to conduct further studies on this topic.
We seek contributions in the form of Original Research Articles, Reviews and Commentaries, particularly which utilise existing or novel data to provide insight into mental health in non-industrialised communities. Topic areas could include, but are not limited to, the effects of environmental stressors on mental-health related outcomes, outcomes associated with personality types and emotions, individual differences in behaviour or personality which might be interpreted as mental disorder, mental health questionnaire results and prevalence, social responses including rituals, and emic understandings of mental health and disorder. Please reach out to Adam Hunt ([email protected]), Elspeth Ready ([email protected]) or Adrian Jaeggi ([email protected]) if you have an interest in preliminary feedback on whether your proposed article would fit the issue.
Evolution of Water Needs, Heat Stress, & Climate Change
This call for papers is now closed.
Water problems are increasing globally as more than half of the world’s population deals with water-related stress for at least a month each year. With climate change, the share of the global population experiencing extreme heat (mean annual temperatures above 29C) is expected to reach 1-3 billion people by 2070. Water and adequate hydration underpin physiological function and are critical to individual and population health. Homo sapiens have evolved in diverse environments and experienced multiple climatic changes. Yet, we still lack clear evolutionary insights into the many of the key underlying processes and adaptations that help shape variation in water needs and how humans deal with heat stress.
Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health is announcing a special issue to explicitly examine water needs and heat stress from an evolutionary perspective to better understand how we can use the past to inform present and future public health recommendations. We call for articles that examine dimensions of water needs and heat stress, including (but not limited to) sweating, thirst, water turnover, neurobiology of thirst, fetal responses to maternal heat stress, kidney programming or development, chronic dehydration, evolution of sweating, heat acclimatization, sex differences in thermoregulation, age differences in thermoregulation/water needs/thirst. Developmental origins of health and disease, genetic and behavioral adaptations, human adaptability, evolutionary medicine, and biocultural perspectives are welcome. Please reach out to Asher Rosinger ([email protected]) or Herman Pontzer ([email protected]) if you have interest in the issue to get preliminary feedback on fit of your proposed article.
Evolutionary Medicine & Palaeopathology
This call for papers is now closed.
Bioarchaeology and its sub-discipline palaeopathology provide direct insight into the appearance, prevalence, manifestations, and impact of particular health problems through thousands of years of human history and prehistory. As such, these disciplines help to explain how and why certain diseases have emerged and evolved in humans. Additionally, the information gained from these archaeological contexts has the potential to identify possible aetiological factors that can be difficult to see in smaller, more locally confined clinical studies.
Currently, palaeopathology is under-represented in evolutionary medicine. With this in mind, we are launching a Virtual Issue of Evolution, Medicine and Public Health (EMPH) that will address questions in evolutionary medicine from the unique perspective of paleopathological research.
For this special virtual issue, we welcome and encourage the submission of data-driven research papers from scholars who use bioarchaeology and evolutionary theory to answer questions about medical issues affecting humans. If you or your lab are conducting such research, please consider submitting a paper to EMPH for consideration.
Please contact the organizers for more information: Kimberly Plomp at [email protected], Gillian Bentley at [email protected], or Frank Rühli at [email protected].
Evolutionary and Biopsychosocial Perspectives on Sickness Communication
Guest Editors: Eric Shattuck ([email protected]) and Chloe Boyle ([email protected])
This call for papers is now closed.
As in other animals, sickness in humans is characterized by multiple changes in behavior and physiology that may adaptively communicate health status to others. These include changes in skin coloration, vocalizations, movement, sociability, and more. Such changes can be used – consciously or unconsciously – to maintain “social distance,” elicit care, and shape doctor-patient interactions. These signals are also embedded in, and likely modulated by, social networks and hierarchies and by sociocultural norms. Understanding the evolved biology of sickness communication and its situated nature could therefore improve public health messaging.
This Virtual Issue of Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health aims to present the latest research on sickness communication from an evolutionary perspective. We approach “sickness” broadly in order to encompass chronic and acute conditions, individual symptoms or components of sickness (e.g., pain, fever), or specific diseases. Similarly, communication can be considered as conscious or unconscious and occurring across a range of interactions, e.g., family members, in-group vs. out-group, and doctor/patient.
Evolutionary Medicine and Health Disparities
2020 was a memorable year, dominated by global events that drove large societal conversations about wellness, equity, and justice. Specific topics ranged from the inequities in COVID-19 outcomes globally to the roots of health disparities in chronic disease across populations around the world. These areas are a sampling of the many health problems where evolutionary forces manifest and offer a useful lens into the factors that underlie inequities in prevalence and outcomes.
In light of this, C. Brandon Ogbunu (Yale University) and Fatimah Jackson (Howard University) are curating a Virtual Issue of Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health (EMPH) that focuses on Evolutionary Medicine and Health Disparities. We aim to publish a collection of papers that investigate how evolutionary reasoning can aid in our understanding of the origins, persistence, and dynamics of disparities in diseases of various kinds.
By “disparities,” we are referring to a definition provided by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC): “preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health that are experienced by socially disadvantaged populations.”
We seek contributions in the form of Original Research Articles, Reviews and Commentaries that make use of existing data, and move beyond speculation. Instead, submissions should critically examine the interactions between evolutionary forces, environments, and ecologies. Multidisciplinary takes are encouraged, including those that involve methods from the social sciences and humanities.
Topic areas include, but are not limited to, the following: maternal and child health, infectious disease, chronic disease, cancer, aging, and autoimmune disease. We encourage submissions on non-traditional or non-standard disease systems and phenomena. International perspectives--from scholars around the world--are especially welcome.
This call for papers is now closed.
For more information, please contact C. Brandon Ogbunu: [email protected]
Authors should follow our standard guidelines.
In addition, authors should mention the virtual issue on Evolutionary Medicine and Health Disparities in their cover letter, with a brief explanation for how their paper fits into the virtual issue description.
