BISC 495-010, Evolution, Spring 2008

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 11:15 a.m. to 12:05 p.m.
116 Gore Hall

Instructor: John McDonald
322 Wolf Hall (office)
026B Wolf Hall (lab)
Phone: 831-2007
E-mail: mcdonald@udel.edu
Web page: http://udel.edu/~mcdonald

Goals: In this course, I hope that you:

• learn how biologists reconstruct the evolutionary history of life on earth;
• learn how biologists infer the processes that result in evolution;
• learn how an understanding of evolutionary patterns and processes is important to many disciplines of biology;
• get practice in reading the primary scientific literature;
• get practice writing about science;
• learn how to deal with advocates of creationism;
• learn some facts about evolutionary patterns and processes.

Note that learning facts is last on the list. I will place very little emphasis on memorizing, say, which animal phyla evolved in the Cambrian, the evolutionary relationships of vascular plants, or the assumptions of the Hardy-Weinberg relationship. Instead, I will emphasize evolutionary biology as a "way of knowing," a set of approaches to answering questions that is of broad importance to all kinds of biologists. I will present many examples of evolutionary research, some of which may seem trivial or irrelevant (we'll spend a whole lecture on the evolution of the hippopotamus!), but they will all illustrate how evolutionary biologists make our discoveries. I realize that very few of you will become professional evolutionary biologists, but whether you become a medical professional, a biomedical researcher, a teacher, a forensic detective, or a zookeeper, I hope that when you think about biology, you will think like an evolutionary biologist.

Exams: There will be three exams, on Friday, March 9; Wednesday, April 18; and during finals week. The exams will be cumulative. Study guides, with lists of topics to be covered and some example questions, are linked below (at this point, these are the study guides from 2007; I'll let you know when I update them). The first exam will be worth 15 percent, the second exam 25 percent, and the third exam 35 percent of the total grade. The grades will not be curved, and there will be no extra credit assignments.

Term paper: You will write a paper on an evolutionary topic. It must be at least 15 pages long, and it must cite at least 25 references. This will count for 25 percent of your grade, broken down as follows: topic choice, 2 percent; initial reference list, 3 percent; finished paper, 20 percent. You must choose a topic by March 7, turn in the initial reference list by March 21, and turn in the paper on May 2. If you get more than 4 points deducted on the paper, you must revise it and turn in the revised version on May 11.

Integrity: If you copy another student's work or cheat in some other way on an exam, you will receive an F for the course. See the term paper instructions for the policy on plagiarism.

Grade scale: A 93-100; A- 90-92.9; B+ 87-89.9; B 83-86.9; B- 80-82.9; C+ 77-79.9; C 73-76.9; C- 70-72.9; D+ 67-69.9; D 63-66.9; D- 60-62.9; F 0-59.9.

Students who are less than 3 points below the minimum grade needed for their program (such as an undergraduate biology major with 67 to 69.9 points) will be given the opportunity to take an incomplete grade and complete an extra credit project. This project will be a lot of work, such as writing a 15-page term paper on a topic of my choice. Upon satisfactory completion of the project, you'll get the minimum grade needed for your program (such as C- for undergraduate biology majors). There will be no other extra credit.

Attendance: You are not required to attend the lectures, and your class participation will not affect your grade. It would be a bad idea to skip lots of lectures, however, since you won't be able to learn many of the skills needed for the exams from the reading assignments. If you have a valid reason to miss one of the exams, let me know as soon as possible so that we can schedule a makeup exam. Note that I do not consider having other exams on the same day to be a valid excuse.

Reading assignments: There is no textbook. Instead, there will be reading assignments from the primary scientific literature (papers from scientific journals). Each lecture will have one or two focal papers on the general topic of the lecture. I'll talk about them, and other related papers, in class. Hopefully the lectures will help you understand the papers, and vice versa. I don't expect you to understand every technical detail or bit of specialized jargon in the papers; learning how to get the gist of a paper, even though you don't understand all of it, is an important skill.

I'll put a link for each paper on the class schedule. It's up to you whether you read the papers before or after the lecture, but you definitely should read them; the exams will include questions that you'll only be able to answer if you've read the papers.

Office hours: I will not have formal office hours; if you'd like to talk to me, feel free to call me, e-mail me, or drop by. I'm generally at my office or lab from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. On other days I'm working at home and can be reached by e-mail.

Tentative schedule: This is a tentative schedule of lecture topics; check back here for updates as the semester progresses.

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This page was last revised May 10, 2008. Its URL is http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/495syllabus.html