Textbook

Charlesworth, B., and D. Charlesworth. 2010. Elements of Evolutionary Genetics. Roberts & Company, Greenwood Village, CO.

We'll use the text primarily as a supplement to the lecture notes that I put on line. You could easily get away without buying the text. I haven't used a text at all most times I've taught this course. but I highly recommend that you get yourself a copy anyway. It is a very good reference on principles of modern evolutionary genetics, and you'll find it handy to have around as a reference both for your own research and for looking up unfamiliar concepts when you're reading papers others have published.

Grading

Three of the larger problems (assigned on 15 September, 11 October, and 3 November) will involve reading of the primary literature and analysis of some associated data. You will be asked to prepare a 4-5 page written summary of your conclusions and to present details of your data analysis. The final larger problem (assigned 6 December) will involve a critique of several papers in which very prominent authors disagree with one another. You will be asked to prepare a 4-5 page written analysis of the dispute, to explain which set of authors is correct (if either), and to justify your conclusion. The smaller problems assigned (8 September, 29 September, and 19 November) will involve analysis and interpretation of smaller data sets. There may be primary literature associated with the data, but the problem won't require you to compare your results with those that have been published. You will be asked to write a 1-2 page summary of your analysis and interpretation.

The concepts you will be working with are complicated and often confusing. The software we'll use, though powerful, often isn't as friendly as you might like it to be. As a result, you will enhance your understanding of the material and find it far easier to do well on the problems if you work together with other students. You will, of course, be graded on your individual performance, so please be sure to write up your results independently.

In addition to graded problems and projects, I expect to provide some practice problems. These aren't to be handed in or graded, but they will provide practice on the types of questions you'll encounter in the problems and projects. Working through the practice problems will help you apply the concepts you'll need to know well for your projects.¹

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 within lineages.

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 you can see with your bare eyes, like phenotypic differences among individuals, we intoduce abstract concepts, like additive genetic variance, that are pure statistical artifacts 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 and fairly abstract genetic concepts. Just what you were looking for, right?
2. Population genetics involves a fair amount of mathematics, probability theory, and statistics.² 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, algebra, and probability, so we'll be doing almost everything from scratch. The last bit of good news is that I'll try to emphasize how to apply the basic principles of population genetics, not the math involved in deriving those principles.

I'll be placing particular emphasis on using different computer pacakages for for analysis and interpretation of data encountered in population genetics, and the problems and projects will involve using those packages. They will evaluate your ability to use the principles and methods of population genetics, not your ability to derive them.³