Week |
Date |
Topic |
Homework |
1 |
Tuesday, April 1, 2025 |
Where the animals go. How do we know what we know? Fear and death on the Serengeti. The great migrations. Flocking and field theory. |
|
1 |
Thursday, April 3, 2025 |
Where the animals go, part 2. The bar-tailed godwit and its 10,000 km nonstop journey. Humpback whales, from Alaska to Maui and back again. |
HW 1 released |
2 |
Tuesday, April 8, 2025 |
Keystone species and trophic cascades. Robert Paine’s sea star experiment. Otters, urchins, and the Aleutians. |
|
2 |
Thursday, April 10, 2025 |
The species question. The distribution of species in space and time. Island biogeography and the puzzle of amphibians on oceanic islands. |
HW 1 due, HW 2 released |
3 |
Tuesday, April 15, 2025 |
The whale. On the imperfections of the fossil record. On the perfections of the fossil record. |
|
3 |
Thursday, April 17, 2025 |
The genome. A revolution in our understanding of heredity. |
HW 2 due, HW 3 released |
4 |
Tuesday, April 22, 2025 |
The whale, part 2. DNA as a document of evolutionary history. The hidden story of whale evolution in DNA. |
|
4 |
Thursday, April 24, 2025 |
The ingredients of evolution. Heritable variation. Selection and drift. |
HW 3 due, HW 4 released |
5 |
Tuesday, April 29, 2025 |
The evolution of eye color. Population genetics. The power of stochastic simulations. |
|
5 |
Thursday, May 1, 2025 |
Where are the atoms? Ecological stoichometry. |
HW 4 due |
6 |
Tuesday, May 6, 2025 |
A green world. Eating the sun. |
|
6 |
Thursday, May 8, 2025 |
The paths of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus in living organisms. |
|
7 |
Tuesday, May 13, 2025 |
The cell: biology's atom. The puzzle of cellular structures. |
|
7 |
Thursday, May 15, 2025 |
Probability as the language of molecules. The Boltzmann distribution and binding. |
HW 5 due, HW 6 released |
8 |
Tuesday, May 20, 2025 |
The cell as a bag of protein. The cell as a bag of RNA. Packing and unpacking the bag. |
|
8 |
Thursday, May 22, 2025 |
The secrets of life. DNA. Allostery. Evolution. Nonequilibrium steady states. |
HW 6 due |
9 |
Tuesday, May 27, 2025 |
Making matter active. Pumps, motors, and gradients. |
|
9 |
Thursday, May 29, 2025 |
Locomotion of snakes, worms, and lizards. Taming the gait. Geometric phases. |
|
10 |
Tuesday, June 3, 2025 |
An interconnected planet. |
|
10 |
Thursday, June 5, 2025 |
Summary of our adventure. The place of life in the universe. The place of biology in science. The place of curiosity in our lives. |
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