Introductory description

This new Advanced Evolution module provides students with a combination of taught lecture elements about advanced evolutionary topics, flanked by classroom support sessions. It is run by a number of SLS members who study evolution. This module enables a significant amount of independent work that culminates in students making posters and films/videocasts about their evolutionary topics of choice on the basis of objects presented to them which they can photograph on the microscope and at the macro level. Because of this, we might have to cap the student number to 45. This module also contains the option of a joint museum visit to either the NHM (London) or the Oxford Museum of Natural history or the Lapworth Museum: to given students the opportunity to interact with local palaeontologists/experts there (some are alumni of our previous courses), and to showcase attractive careers within and beyond academia in the area of Evolutionary biology.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Lectures:This course will provide you with about 18 lectures on key topics of evolutionary biology.
Part of our syllabus are also several vignette lectures where local experts (this year: Prof Koentges, Prof Allaby, Dr Puxty, Prof Gifford, Dr Smith) will talk about their own research - to bring you as close to the cutting edge as possible. The composition of lecturers for these vignettes is anticipated to change from year to year.

Support sessions: Additionally, we will also provide, similar to the Evolution module LF263, in classroom support sessions that are based on object-based teaching (microscope slides, fossils, skulls, butterflies etc).

Workshop:Towards the end Prof Allaby will run a workshop on evolutionary genomics.

Museum visit: We will also organise as a voluntary component the visit to one of the Natural History Museums (NHM, Oxford Museum or Lapworth) that gives you access to other experts and an idea of the academic and non-academic work environments for Evolutionary Biologists.

The lectures we provide are meant to accompany your independent work that will for the basis of the assessment of this module. This module will be 100% in module assessed. Your work will have three components:

1. Production of a film (10-15mins)
2. Production of a poster.
3. evolutionary genomics workshop assignment (20%)
   For the film and the poster you will get the chance to take your own microscopy and macro images of interesting biological objects (microscopy slides of animals, plants, shells, butterflies, etc), with our guidance and help. The task is then to investigate the evolutionary reasons for the structures you are seeing. This will involve placing these objects into a phylogenetic context, understanding and deciphering the molecular, transcriptional,signalling pathways underpinning these structures. You will then turn these into stories you can tell to a scientific and non-scientific audience: in the shape of a film/video podcast and a poster.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Provide a deep molecular and cellular understanding of the drivers of evolutionary novelty and change in animals, plants and microbes.
• Critically assess developmental and molecular mechanisms underlying evolutionary novelty, including phylogenetic hourglass patterns and key transitions such as tetrapod evolution and hominid brain development.
• Analyse the evolutionary impact of major global events (e.g. mass extinctions such as the Permo–Triassic or end-Cretaceous) on biodiversity, ecosystem structure, and lineage diversification before, during, and after the crisis.
• Interpret genomic signatures of population processes, including bottlenecks, admixture, and horizontal gene transfer, and apply these to reconstruct evolutionary histories in humans and other taxa.
• Examine the interplay between evolution, development, and culture, including the genetic and developmental bases of communication and speech, and the genomic consequences of domestication and recent human evolution since the Neolithic.

Indicative reading list

Reading lists can be found in Talis

Research element

We will accompany and guide you to take microscopy and macro photos of interesting objects. Your task will be to explain the evolutionary underpinnings of the way they look: whether that is the wing patterns of butterflies, the presence of particular fossils and their shapes or genomic sequence comparisons.

Interdisciplinary

This work will traverse different areas of science, from transcription factor biology to biochemistry, genomics, chromatin biology, anatomy (animals and plants), palaeontology, and ecosystems research. The aim is to learn to assess how changes at each level of biological regulation can have impacts on the higher levels, from single amino acid changes to changes in brain anatomy. As part of our work, we will venture into the most recent human evolution (of the last 10,000 years), we are venturing into human history, and what one can learn from analysing human and plant genomic sequences.

Subject specific skills

You will learn
a. how to place animals and plants into phylogenetic trees.
b. how to derive from such placements information about character evolution that can explain morphology.
c. You will get in-depth knowledge of molecules, pathways at each level of biological organisation (from chromatin to gene regulatory regions to genes, proteins, networks, all the way to structures, populations and macroevolutionary perspectives. Such perspectives are usually part of different disciplines, from gene regulation to biochemistry to palaeontology and Ecosystems research.

Transferable skills

You will learn the underpinnings of how organisms are studied by evolutionary biologists using state of the art analytical and experimental tools, what inferences can be drawn from the data obtained.
Secondly, you will learn how you can present your work to a wider scientific and non-scientific audience: you will familiarise yourself with podcasting/video tools to explain complex causal connections that can explain things the way they are.