Abstract
After having traveled from ecology to physiology, endocrinology, metabolism, and immunology, we will return once again to the basic drawing board of ecology. Ecology and evolution are the basic foundations of all these arguments, and one should not lose touch with the foundation at any time. The dynamics of populations is a very fundamental process of ecology and evolution, and it is certainly very important in physiology and medicine too, but its importance is not appreciated sufficiently in these areas of science. Population level processes and individual’s behavior and physiology have subtle but far-reaching influences on each other, but this is an area that has not yet received sufficient attention. Ecologists have realized the importance of it [1–3] to some extent, but physiologists have not paid sufficient attention to it. I would attempt to make a case below for why and how population level processes are bound to affect individual behavior and physiology and why physiology and medicine need to understand population level processes. If I am able to convince the reader about this point, it would logically follow that today’s unprecedented density of human population is a supernormal stimulus that could change human behavior as well as physiology substantially, ultimately having some consequences for health.
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Watve, M. (2012). Why Population Density Matters. In: Doves, Diplomats, and Diabetes. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4409-1_9
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