BIOL 443Evo-devo: Evolution of Developmental Mechanisms
Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Evo-Devo) is an interdisciplinary field that combines developmental biology, comparative genetics, and evolution to understand how organisms have attained their diversity in form. While the field of developmental biology aims to understand how a given organism develops, Evo-Devo focuses on how form evolves through alteration of these developmental mechanisms. Course instruction involves lectures, discussion, and student presentations/projects and features case studies from the scientific literature across the diversity of life, towards developing a predictive framework for the evolution of form.