Evolution - Biol 3306

Course details are on Blackboard.

Evolution is the bedrock concept that unifies all of biology. It has the power to explain the pattern of biological diversity seen on Earth, it can be used to inform conservation efforts or the management of wild populations, and it can be applied to advance agriculture, biotechnology and medicine. Thus, understanding evolution is essential for science literacy, for a successful career in the life-sciences, and in medicine. Evolution is a multidisciplinary, synthetic topic – combining geology, physiology, genetics, and animal behavior with mathematical formulizations of foreign concepts such as non-additive genetic effects, lifetime reproductive potential, senescence and the like. Thus, the topic is intellectually challenging and rewarding.

In the study of evolution, the focus is on developing a deep, synthetic understanding of evolutionary concepts and being able to apply this knowledge to explain how the living world works. Thus, the structure of a course in evolution is unlike that of many other biology classes you may have taken. Each lecture connects to earlier content, and to truly understand the material you must synthesize information from across all lectures; in other words, as the semester progresses, lectures from early in the year become more important, not less. Your goal should be much more than just developing the facility to drop values into equations and calculate a result, or to simply regurgitate memorized factoids about some biological example or process discussed in class. Instead, you should strive to learn the material from each lecture and integrate it across topics, to connect concepts presented in class in a way that reveals how they are relevant beyond only the context in which they were presented.

Student evaluations of the course frequently assert that the course is hard, that the tests are ‘tricky’ or that the exams do not cover what is presented in lecture. The course is challenging, because the nature of the material requires time and effort to integrate and master. Tests frequently require application of knowledge to novel situations/biological examples or interpretation of data not presented in class, making them rigorous, not ‘tricky’ or disconnected from lecture. If you focus on learning and integrating the material over the semester, you will master the content and perform well academically. Success.