| Week |
Date |
Topic |
Homework |
| 1 |
Tuesday, March 31, 2026 |
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 2, 2026 |
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 7, 2026 |
Keystone species and trophic cascades. Robert Paine’s sea star experiment. Otters, urchins, and the Aleutians. |
|
| 2 |
Thursday, April 9, 2026 |
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 14, 2026 |
The whale. On the imperfections of the fossil record. On the perfections of the fossil record. |
|
| 3 |
Thursday, April 16, 2026 |
The genome. A revolution in our understanding of heredity. |
HW 2 due, HW 3 released |
| 4 |
Tuesday, April 21, 2026 |
The whale, part 2. DNA as a document of evolutionary history. The hidden story of whale evolution in DNA. |
|
| 4 |
Thursday, April 23, 2026 |
The ingredients of evolution. Heritable variation. Selection and drift. |
HW 3 due, HW 4 released |
| 5 |
Tuesday, April 28, 2026 |
The evolution of eye color. Population genetics. The power of stochastic simulations. |
|
| 5 |
Thursday, April 30, 2026 |
Where are the atoms? Ecological stoichometry. |
HW 4 due |
| 6 |
Tuesday, May 5, 2026 |
A green world. Eating the sun. |
|
| 6 |
Thursday, May 7, 2026 |
The paths of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus in living organisms. |
|
| 7 |
Tuesday, May 12, 2026 |
The cell: biology's atom. The puzzle of cellular structures. |
|
| 7 |
Thursday, May 14, 2026 |
Probability as the language of molecules. The Boltzmann distribution and binding. |
HW 5 due, HW 6 released |
| 8 |
Tuesday, May 19, 2026 |
The cell as a bag of protein. The cell as a bag of RNA. Packing and unpacking the bag. |
|
| 8 |
Thursday, May 21, 2026 |
The secrets of life. DNA. Allostery. Evolution. Nonequilibrium steady states. |
HW 6 due |
| 9 |
Tuesday, May 26, 2026 |
Making matter active. Pumps, motors, and gradients. |
|
| 9 |
Thursday, May 28, 2026 |
Locomotion of snakes, worms, and lizards. Taming the gait. Geometric phases. |
|
| 10 |
Tuesday, June 2, 2026 |
An interconnected planet. |
|
| 10 |
Thursday, June 4, 2026 |
Summary of our adventure. The place of life in the universe. The place of biology in science. The place of curiosity in our lives. |
|
