Evolutionary Biology

What you'll learn

• Explain how evolutionary biology developed as a science, distinguish the fact of evolution from theories of its mechanisms, and evaluate the major independent lines of evidence for common descent, including experimental evolution data.
• Model natural selection with different patterns of dominance, distinguish directional, stabilizing, disruptive and frequency-dependent selection, estimate selection gradients from field data and explain the limits of adaptation.
• Simulate genetic drift, calculate effective population size from census data, apply fixation probabilities for neutral and selected mutations and use the neutral theory and the McDonald–Kreitman test to detect selection.
• Explain how mutation, recombination and gene flow supply and redistribute variation, describe the distribution of fitness effects and the advantage of sex, and relate migration to population differentiation in the island model.
• Estimate heritability from relatives, apply the multivariate breeder’s equation with a G matrix and explain why long-term responses to selection plateau.
• Explain sexual selection through competition and mate choice, apply Hamilton’s rule to social behaviour and find evolutionarily stable strategies in games such as hawk–dove.
• Compare species concepts, combine reproductive barriers into total isolation, explain Dobzhansky–Muller incompatibilities and Haldane’s rule and evaluate geographic modes of speciation.
• Build phylogenetic trees with corrected distances, neighbour-joining, parsimony and likelihood, and assess support with the bootstrap.
• Date divergences with fossil calibrations and relaxed clocks, reconstruct ancestral states and use independent contrasts to test for correlated evolution.
• Describe major events in the history of life, mass extinctions and adaptive radiations, evaluate gradualism and punctuated equilibrium and explain how developmental genes and gene duplication shape the evolution of form.
• Interpret the hominin fossil record and genetic evidence for the African origin of Homo sapiens and archaic introgression, analyse recent human adaptation and explain why human variation is clinal and race is not a biological category.
• Apply evolutionary principles to antibiotic stewardship, pest resistance management and conservation, analyse resistance data to estimate selection and costs, and describe how evolution is taught under Canadian provincial curricula compared with US case law.