AHS18

Evolutionary mismatch occurs when the current environment contains features that are different from the statistically-recurrent features present throughout a species’ evolutionary history. When this happens, adaptations selected to operate well in the context of those ancestral features may fail in the novel environment. Mismatches are occurring in the wild (as well as in captive environments) often due to human-induced rapid environmental change—frequently causing organisms to be caught in what are called “evolutionary traps,” and researchers are starting to recognize and actually employ these traps to control certain species Ancestral health, as a field of Darwinian medicine, can benefit from adopting a species-spanning, abstract understanding of mismatch such that mismatch effects—which can be thought of as “environmental mutations”—can provide the conceptual breakthrough that is needed to make serious progress at combating chronic disease, similar to how understanding microbes provided the conceptual breakthrough that made the germ theory possible.