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BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY AND CHANGE:
FOUNDATIONS OF EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
- COURSE MATERIALS
Syllabus
Subject Matter Outline
Term Paper Standards
Term Paper Topics
Bibliography Standards
Seminars
RESOURCES
Biology Resources
Recommended Field Equipment
Taking Field Notes- Lecture Notes
COMMUNICATIONS
Communication Page
LINKS
Argumentation and the Methods of Science
Biodiversity and Systematics
Anatomy and Embryology
Problems and Issues - Lecture Notes
How living things change genetically and physically through time.
 http://www.stonecompany.com/fossils/index.html |
This course introduces students to the diversity of life on earth and to the origins of that diversity: the physical, biochemical, geological, developmental, genetic, and ecological evidence which forms the foundations of the science of evolutionary biology. Evolution is the central concept upon which all modern biology is based. It is as important to an accurate understanding of biology as Newton's and Einstein's ideas are to a proper understanding of physics. |
Theodosius Dobzhansky:
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
Ernst Mayr:
"The theory of evolution is quite rightly called the greatest unifying theory in biology. The diversity of organisms, similarities and differences between kinds of organisms, patterns of distribution and behavior, adaptation and interaction, all this was merely a bewildering chaos of facts until given meaning by the evolutionary theory."
Charles Darwin:
"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. . . . There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."