3.0

credits

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The size, composition, and genetics of populations fluctuate over time. These fluctuations are the product of dynamics between individuals, the interactions between populations, and the context of a population within a broader ecological landscape. The quantitative tools developed to study population genetics allow biologists to discover the simple fundamental principles that govern these complex systems. This course will introduce the basic theory of population genetics while teaching students the fundamental skills of programming in the R programming language, which will allow them to directly implement and visualize theoretical concepts. Students will model and simulate theoretical populations and analyze population-scale genomic data. This course will examine evolution on a variety of scales, ranging from the competition between cells within a single organism, to population dynamics in conservation biology that span decades, to the evolution of contemporary human populations over hundreds of thousands of years.