Course Description

This course is an introduction to the field of population genetics, the branch of evolutionary biology concerned with the genetic structure of populations and how it changes through time. Some of us see population genetics as the core discipline in evolutionary biology, since changes in the genetic composition of a population are the basis for all other evolutionary change.

There are two aspects of this course that sometimes cause students~problems.

1. Geneticists think differently from most other biologists (and most other human beings, for that matter). They love monohybrid and dihybrid crosses, linkage, penetrance, dominance, and the like. We population geneticists are even worse. To explain things that we can see easily, like phenotypic variation, we intoduce abstract concepts, like additive genetic variance, that no one can see. By the time you finish this course, you'll not only have had a good review of basic Mendelian genetics (and even a little bit of molecular genetics), you'll be familiar with a bunch of new genetic concepts. Just what you were looking for, right?
2. Population genetics involves a fair amount of mathematics. That's because we deal with genetic variation in populations, which is measured in terms of gene and genotype frequencies. The phenomena of Mendelian genetics are themselves inherently statistical. So it shouldn't be surprising that when we apply these principles to a whole population the problems become even more mathematically involved.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the math we need is (mostly) quite simple -- some basic algebra and probability theory. When we need things that are more advanced, I'll explain them in class. The other good news is that I expect you to have lost any familiarity you once had with genetics, so we'll be doing all the genetics from scratch. The last bit of good news is that I emphasize how to apply the basic principles of population genetics to selected problems in evolutionary biology, not the math involved in deriving those principles. The exams and projects will evaluate your ability to use the principles, not derive them. (I lied. There's one more piece of good news. There are quite a few people around who have already survived this course. That means it is possible. It also means that there are quite a few copies of old exams, problem sets, and projects floating around and that there are quite a few people who are already familiar with the intricacies of marginal fitness, additive effects, and Jukes-Cantor whom you can ask for advice and help.)

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