GENET 453 Genetics of the Evolutionary Process (3) NW Beerli, Kuhner [they taught it in 2001]
Contributions of genetics to the understanding of evolution. Processes of mutation, selection, and random genetic events as they affect the genetic
architecture of natural populations and the process of speciation. Emphasis on experimental data and observation, rather than mathematical theory.
Prerequisite: either GENET 371 or GENET 372.
Instructor course description:
Joseph Felsenstein
(I know it makes everyone insecure, but at the graduate level it is standard not to have a textbook. If you go to grad school you'll have to get used to it.) Mostly it's because I can't come up with one that covers adequately the particular mix of topics I give. Make a suggestion on the course newsgroup and we'll discuss it. I have considered or even used Futuyma, Maynard Smith's "Evolutionary Genetics", and others but they don't work. I will be handing out detailed outlines of the material covered in lecture, and see below for electronically accessible lecture outline and projection materials.
As the lectures are prepared (usually on the day they are to be given) I will put links here to the lecture outlines and the computer projection images. These will be available as PDFs. The computer projection images will often have blue backgrounds, so don't try to print those if you value your printer! The versions in the rightmost column have white backgrounds instead and are the ones to use when printing out the PDFs.
If the PDFs display on your computer rather than offer you the ability to download them, you should be able to use the Save As option on your browser to save them as PDFs.
There are many:
Electronic journals
There is of course, the professional literature in evolutionary biology. Some of these journals (links given below) are available in electronic versions for UW people. Here are some:
Newsgroups
Some brief descriptions of some of the major ones covering evolution. These groups have many participants who are novices to evolutionary biology. I have provided links to the groups through Google, but UW students can read them using UW's newsreading facilities too.
sci.bio.systematics
bionet.molbio.evolution
sci.bio.paleontology
bionet.population-biology
sci.bio.evolution
talk.origins
Web Pages
There are three computer programs that students in the course will be asked to run, and submit a report of the results. The details of the assignment will be handed out later. One program simulates evolution of gene frequencies of two alleles at a single locus in the presence of genetic drift, natural selection, mutation, and migration. The second simulates the evolution of a quantitative character which is controlled by 5 loci, under the action of natural selection towards an optimum phenotype. The third simulates the branching of a phylogeny, the evolution of a DNA sequence along those branches, and allows the user to search by manually rearranging the tree for the most parsimonious tree, and see whether this recovers the true tree.
The first program is available in newly updated form. The other two are older and have a clunkier interface.
(1) PopG -- Simulation of gene frequency evolution
This program is freely distributable.
It is available from my workstation by anonymous ftp
(see directory pub/popgen on
evolution.genetics.washington.edu. There you will find:
(2) Evolution of a quantitative character
This program is available by anonymous ftp from my workstation. It is available from evolution.genetics.washington.edu in directory pub/contevol. There you will find:
(3) Simulation of phylogeny and inferring phylogeny
This program is also available, also from my workstation by anonymous ftp.
It is available from
directory pub/dnatree on
evolution.genetics.washington.edu. There you will find: