Randolph Nesse

Randolph M. Nesse is a professor of life sciences and an Arizona Foundation Professor at Arizona State University, where he moved in 2014 to become the founding director of the Center for Evolution, Medicine, & Public Health. He took his undergraduate degree at Carleton College, and his medical training at the University of Michigan. He is a board certified psychiatrist and distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association who treated patients and conducted research at one of the world’s first anxiety disorders clinics that he helped to start in conjunction with his early research on the neuroendocrinology of anxiety. His studies on the origins of senescence led to a deep commitment to evolutionary biology. Nesse collaborated with George Williams on several early works in Darwinian Medicine, including "The Dawn of Darwinian Medicine" in The Quarterly Review of Biology (1991) and the book Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (Vintage, 1995). He is executive editor of The Evolution and Medicine Review, and president of the Foundation for Evolution, Medicine & Public Health. Dr. Nesse's primary current research focus is on how selection shapes mechanisms that regulate defenses such as pain, fever, anxiety and low mood. His work emphasizes the utility of negative emotions, and how a signal detection analysis (the "smoke detector principle") explains why defense expression so often seems excessive. His work shows that low mood is useful to disengage effort from unreachable goals, and that failure to disengage often leads to depression. Closely related is his work on how runaway social selection can shape human capacities for altruism, empathy, and complex sociality that are otherwise difficult to explain, the topic of a recent CARTA symposium. Dr. Nesse’s main mission in his new position at ASU is to establish evolutionary biology as a basic science for medicine, worldwide. He will be recruiting new faculty for the Center, creating new education programs online and at ASU, and helping to coordinate widely dispersed efforts at many universities to apply evolutionary principles to medicine and public health. He is especially eager to make contact with physicians and researchers who share these interests.