Schedule

Lecture Schedule

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.