Journal of Evolution and Health: A joint publication of the Ancestral Health Society and the Society for Evolutionary Medicine and Health

The COVID-19 pandemic seems to be unending and is creating challenges all over the world. Confirmed cases in Hong Kong are comparatively low, but the four waves are caused by imported carriers from abroad. Thus, the government claims that its efforts have been effective in coping with this disease. However, the public observes other dimensions of this claim. The discussion in this paper argues that policy loopholes, violation of normal practices and government estrangement from the community all damage anti-pandemic outcomes. The root cause of this failure comes from distrust in the government. Such a fiction of power brings negative reactions. On the one hand, the community suffers from tight disease-control measures which are disproportionate to the infection risk, and people are fighting not only the coronavirus but also poor leadership, policy loopholes and hidden agenda in social control. On the other hand, people are already self-motivated and self-disciplined enough, with the aid of mutual support, to adopt basic preventive methods, such as masking and personal hygiene, showing a robust civil society and social mobilisation.

The field of evolutionary health is relatively new, and over the last several decades, has come to signify the interest in the extent of mismatch between factors common in our modern world, and our evolutionary milieu, which is a combination of genetic and environmental interactions that have influenced our development over the course of many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years.

We have covered a wide variety of topics during our conferences; this includes, brain function, sleep and light, various components of the diet, aging, cardiovascular disease, human brain development, exercise, bone health, obesity, vitamin levels, hormonal regulation, inflammation and cancer, with the emphasis on the degree of mismatch between our hominid ancestors and modern humans today. With this most recent conference, we have added topics such as psychological and physical stress, the gut microbiome and the potential role of biomimetics in environmental stressors.

We’d like to thank the Journal of Evolutionary Health for allowing us to publish some of the abstracts from our most recent conference.