The risk of kidney disease among individuals is highly variable, in part related to genetic and environmental factors, but also likely to be modulated by developmental programming of the number of nephrons and kidney function in fetal life.
The global burden of kidney disease is high and rising. A new approach also considers how evolutionary selection pressure might fail to select for long-term robustness of kidney function. What advances does it highlight? Population-level studies now show convincingly that low birth weight, fetal growth restriction and preterm birth are associated with and have a synergistic impact on the risk of kidney disease in later life. What is the topic of this review? In this report, we summarize the latest clinical evidence linking developmental programming in the kidney to later life blood pressure and kidney disease. This article is a brief history of the efforts to merge genealogical trees and map-like cross sections of affinities into one three-dimensional image. The naturalists Max Fürbringer and Richard Bowdler Sharpe were aware of this fact, but even Darwin himself twice combined the basic intuitions underlying the two modes of representation to produce three-dimensional images. Surprisingly, these resulted in three-dimensional images that, in order to be observed, had to be projected on paper. Although the two seem unrelated, various naturalists made attempts to combine them. Genealogical trees follow the diachronic, evolving logic of a timeline, whereas maps depict a synchronous pattern of extant taxa. Linnaeus suggested that “all plants show affinities on all sides, like a territory on a geographical map,” while Darwin thought that it was virtually impossible to understand the affinities between living and extinct species without a genealogical tree. The two great modern naturalists, Linnaeus and Darwin, expressed their intuition about how best to visualize patterns of affinities, that is, morphological similarities and divergences between taxa.