BIOL 365 - Evolving Evolution

Credit Hours: 4
Frequency of Offering: Alternate Spring Terms

Science is a process. No theory or concept you’ve learned in your science classes came into the world fully formed and ready for the pages of a textbook. Ideas must be presented and tested and re-tested and refined over time as our understanding grows and our investigative tools improve. This class will be an investigation into the process of scientific discovery around evolutionary theory. Evolution is the ever-present thread tying the broad field of Biology together. When we think of the origins of evolutionary theory, the names “Darwin” and “Wallace” are often the first that come to mind. However, evolutionary theory predates the publications of Darwin and Wallace and has continued to change even since Darwin’s work was combined with Mendelian genetics to create the “modern synthesis”. Evolution as we understand it today is the culmination of a host of ideas that have been tested using methodologies that range across biological disciplines. Ideas around evolution have been cast aside, revisited, reincorporated, and restructured across centuries, and understanding the process of the
formation of modern evolutionary theory is essential to understanding where the field is going. In this course, we will examine the process of developing evolutionary theory to incorporate the complex tapestry of ideas we see today, including some ideas that are still “in process”.

Prerequisite(s): BIOL 271 and BIOL 271L