Mismatch is a prominent concept in evolutionary medicine and a number of philosophers have published analyses of this concept. The word ‘mismatch’ has been used in a diversity of ways across a range of sciences, leading these authors to regard it as a vague concept in need of philosophical clarification. Here, in contrast, we concentrate on the use of mismatch in modelling and experimentation in evolutionary medicine. This reveals a rigorous theory of mismatch within which the term ‘mismatch’ is indeed used in several ways, not because it is ill-defined but because different forms of mismatch are.distinguished within the theory. Contemporary evolutionary medicine has unified the idea of ‘evolutionary mismatch’, derived from the older idea of ‘adaptive lag’ in evolution, with ideas about mismatch in development and physiology derived from the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) paradigm. A number of publications in evolutionary medicine have tried to make this theoretical framework explicit. We build on these to present the theory in as simple and general a form as possible. We introduce terminology, largely drawn from the existing literature, to distinguish the different forms of mismatch. This integrative theory of mismatch captures how organisms track environments across space and time on multiple scales in order to maintain an adaptive match to the environment, and how failures of adaptive tracking lead to disease. Mismatch is a productive organising concept within this theory which helps researchers articulate how physiology, development and evolution interact with one another and with environmental change to explain health outcomes.

中文翻译：

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进化医学中的错配理念

错配是进化医学中的一个突出概念，许多哲学家已经发表了对这个概念的分析。“不匹配”一词在一系列科学中以多种方式使用，导致这些作者将其视为需要哲学澄清的模糊概念。相反，在这里，我们专注于在进化医学的建模和实验中使用失配。这揭示了一种严格的失配理论，其中“失配”一词确实以多种方式使用，不是因为它定义不明确，而是因为不同形式的失配在该理论中是有区别的。当代进化医学统一了“进化不匹配”的概念，源于进化中“适应性滞后”的旧观念，与源自健康与疾病的发育起源 (DOHaD) 范式的关于发育和生理学不匹配的想法。许多进化医学的出版物试图明确这一理论框架。我们以此为基础，以尽可能简单和普遍的形式呈现该理论。我们引入了主要来自现有文献的术语，以区分不同形式的不匹配。这种不匹配的综合理论捕捉了生物体如何在多个尺度上跨空间和时间跟踪环境以保持与环境的自适应匹配，以及自适应跟踪的失败如何导致疾病。错配是该理论中的一个富有成效的组织概念，可帮助研究人员阐明生理学、