{"id":130139,"date":"2026-04-02T11:55:51","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T09:55:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ffos.unios.hr\/odrzano-sesto-dogadanje-u-sklopu-14-ciklusa-otvorenog-cetvrtka\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T14:18:46","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T12:18:46","slug":"sixth-event-held-as-part-of-the-14th-open-thursday-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ffos.unios.hr\/en\/sixth-event-held-as-part-of-the-14th-open-thursday-cycle\/","title":{"rendered":"Sixth Event Held as Part of the 14th Open Thursday Cycle"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Thursday, 26 March 2026<\/strong>, the sixth popular science event within the 14th cycle of Open Thursday<\/strong> was held as part of FUZ&JA, the science popularisation project of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Osijek. The lecture, entitled Evolutionary Medicine: 3.5 Billion Years in the Service of Health (and Disease)<\/strong><\/em>, was given by Asst. Prof. Momir Futo, PhD<\/strong>, from the Faculty of Medicine at the Catholic University of Croatia in Zagreb. At the centre of the lecture was a fundamental question of evolutionary medicine: why does a particular disease exist at all?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unlike modern medicine, which treats and prevents the development of disease, evolutionary medicine seeks to explain where diseases come from, or why some diseases exist at all. In this sense, our bodies are the result of a long series of evolutionary compromises and adaptations to the conditions of life on Earth. If we consider the history of human development as a species, nature has primarily been concerned with whether we survive long enough to reproduce and thus ensure the survival of the species. One such example concerns childbirth and early childhood development. When our ancestors began walking on two legs, the human pelvis gradually became narrower. At the same time, the human brain, and therefore the head of a newborn child, became larger. This mismatch between the size of the mother\u2019s birth canal and the child\u2019s head makes human childbirth more difficult and dangerous than in other animals. As a kind of solution, human children are born developmentally \u201cunfinished\u201d, unlike an antelope that can run only a few hours after birth, and are therefore completely dependent on their parents for several years. Yet it is precisely this long childhood, during which the brain grows intensively, that enabled the development of the abilities that distinguish humans from other living species.<\/p>\n\n\t\t