Principles of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior
Stephen Stearns' Yale lecture course covering evolution, ecology, and animal behavior as one connected field, recorded on campus in Spring 2009. The 36 sessions move from natural selection and genetic drift through speciation, phylogenetics, island biogeography, foraging economics, sexual selection, and altruism, closing with lectures on evolutionary medicine and the impact of evolutionary thought on the social sciences. A special feature ties the course to a Galapagos website with video and images that students use to pose their own research questions, which then become the subject of a required 15-20 page paper. Stearns, the Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, wrote Evolution: An Introduction and The Evolution of Life Histories among his books. Two midterms and the paper make up the full grade.