Principles of Evolution

Catalog description

This lecture course explores the role of evolution as the discipline central to our understanding of biology. The basic principles and major topics of evolutionary biology will be explored, including evolution by natural selection, the history of evolutionary thought, population and quantitative genetics, sexual selection, evolutionary trees, how new species form, how they go extinct, and human evolution. Common misconceptions about evolutionary biology will be addressed, as will applications of evolutionary biology in fields such as medicine and conservation biology. This course satisfies the Population Biology/Ecology breadth requirement of the B.A. and B.S. in Biology and the Ecology/Evolutionary Biology Core Course requirement for the B.S. in Neuroscience. Students taking the graduate level course will prepare an additional literature review project. Offered as BIOL 350 and BIOL 450 . Prereq: Graduate Student status.