Evolutionary biology

Evolutionary biology is a subfield of biology that studies how species start and change over time; or in other words, how species evolve. Someone who studies evolutionary biology is known as an evolutionary biologist.
History
Evolutionary biology became an academic subject  as a result of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s.Sterelny K. 2009. Philosophy of evolutionary thought. In Michael Ruse & Joseph Travis. Evolution: the first four billion years. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p313/4.   It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that universities had departments which used the term evolutionary biology in their titles.

As a result of the rapid growth of molecular and cell biology, many universities have split their biology departments into molecular and cell biology-style departments and ecology and evolutionary biology-style departments. These have absorbed older departments such as paleontology, zoology, botany and the like.

 Related pages 
Evolution
Modern evolutionary synthesis
Speciation
Natural selection

 References