Evolutionary biology and its applications (in Eng.)

The class is designed to complement biology related curricula, like limnology, wild life management, animal sciences and other. It covers the principles of evolutionary biology and links these to relevant scientific fields like molecular ecology, conservation genetics, genetic resources and breeding.
The class is organized in two major parts. The first part introduced general evolutionary biology, i. e. covers the development of the theory of Evolution from an historical perspective towards the modern synthesis, the integration of natural selection and genetics and discusses the major forces for adaptation and change with time for populations, selection and genetic drift. It also introduces population genetic principles the basics of theoretical population genetics. The part will end with the discussion of new developments, the ecological synthesis, and looks at evolutionary forces shaping the ecology of species, their distribution and the composition of communities.
The second part will introduce the relevance of evolutionary biology to activities related to resources and conservation. Examples are breeding, selection during resource management for forestry and fishery and other harvesting activities. A special emphasis will be put on the population genetic principles relevant for conservation (conservation genetics) and restoration. Conservation genetics will be used to introduce examples for molecular evolutionary analyses using genotype and genome data