The rise of ‘big data’ in medical research, including genetics, should help us understand more fully the natural history and prevalence of disorders and what can be expected from our interventions, and so help us counsel our patients. Obtaining data for accreditation and revalidation purposes is a bonus, but of secondary importance. Agreement on what data need to be collected prospectively for ...

In this issue of Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, Lea and colleagues argue that there are major advantages to bringing together biomedical and evolutionary perspectives on plasticity. To develop this approach, they propose two contrasting scenarios for 'developmental plasticity as adaptation': that it reflects adjustments to resolve the effects of early 'constraints', or that it adjusts p...

Numerous studies have established that inferior frontal cortex is active when hand actions are planned, imagined, remembered, imitated, and even observed. Furthermore, it has been proposed that these activations reflect a process of simulating the observed action to allow it to be understood and thus fully perceived. However, direct evidence for a perceptual role for left inferior frontal corte...

This article is a brief review of Ibn Sīnā’s practical philosophy. It begins with a discussion of the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neo-Platonic influences on Ibn Sīnā’s practical philosophy, as well as the influence of Fārābī and of Islamic religious teachings. The creative synthesis invented by Ibn Sīnā requires a particular view of the relation between religion and philosophy in such a manner ...

As claimed by many behavioral scientists, designing should be based on the knowledge of interaction between human and environment. Environmental quality is also created in the context in which humans interact with their environment. To achieve such quality, designers should develop appropriate models for explaining this relationship, and this requires an understanding of human nature and the en...

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals has proven to be a real challenge. Providing evidence on cost-effective interventions did not prove to be sufficient to secure the trust of national authorities, health care providers and patients. Introducing change in a health system requires a good understanding of the relationships between the actors of the system. Social network analysis can provi...