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...from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
—Charles Darwin
Fall 2009 Evolution, Diversity and Change
Public Lecture - Optimal Virulence: Pathogen Life History Evolution
James Holland Jones,
Stanford University
When: Friday, September 11, 2009 @ 10:30 a.m.
Where: Wylie Hall, Room 015
Departmental Sponsor: Department of Economics
Abstract: For various applications, like the evolution of virulence or antimicrobial resistance, it's instructive to think about infectious diseases from the pathogen's perspective. Pathogens bear biological information in their nucleic acids. This information varies from one copy of a pathogen to another, and the ability of a pathogen to persist and multiply can be a function of this variability. Pathogens thus fulfill the necessary and sufficient conditions for natural selection. Pathogens evolve. We can use simple evolutionary optimization models to understand the conditions that favor increased or decreased virulence and use this information to design evolutionarily-informed interventions to eradicate and control infectious diseases.
