Meeting Abstract
Biology, relative to physics and much of chemistry, lacks strict organizing principles. Whereas physicists can predict with exquisite accuracy how far a ball will fly when thrown, biologists lack the mathematical and conceptual framework to make precise predictions. Conversely, biologists have become extremely adept at collecting massive and often complex datasets, even from a variety of non-model organisms living in diverse habitats. Our goal for this symposium is to lay a foundation for describing the general principles that explain the relationships between variation in immune defenses and the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases. This goal is derived from the perplexing observation that hosts and parasites vary so much their propensities to resist and infect each other, respectively. What are the principles that determine whether a host is infected by one or many parasites, whether a single or many hosts transmits parasites to other susceptibles, and whether a parasite kills or keeps its host alive upon infection? These questions are fundamental, yet we have only recently taken the multidisciplinary and multi-scale approach necessary to develop principles for host-parasite interactions, as some recent work shows. In this symposium, we hope to challenge participants and attendees to conceive scientific approaches that connect individual-, landscape-, or species-level variation in immune defense to their eco-evolutionary and epidemiological outcomes.
