More than 150 years after Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace formally proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection, evolutionary biology is a thriving, vibrant and dynamic science, at the core of all biological thought, and made even more so by recent comparisons of nucleic acid and amino acid sequences from DNA, RNA and proteins. Consequently, this is a class that pulls together your pre-requisite courses in biology.
Evolution is concerned with explaining how organisms adapt and how organismal diversity arises.
The recognition that natural selection is not the only agent of evolutionary change does not necessarily disprove its central role in these changes. Paradoxically, the very nature of these disagreements fosters even greater insight into how changes in gene frequencies in populations can lead to new lineages of organisms, as well as to the extinction of previously formed lineages. This course provides an overview of evolutionary theory and the opportunity to learn how to formulate and solve problems in evolutionary biology. I will take attendance, but not penalize you for absences. Rather, I will award 50 points to those students who have perfect attendance.