Evolutionary applications

Teacher(s)

Van Dyck Hans;

Language

English

Main themes

The famous quote of Theodosius Dobzhansky ' « Nothing makes sense in biology, except in the light of evolution » (referring to his essay published in 1973) is well known among students in biology. However, the significance of evolutionary thinking is by no means limited to pure biology. Evolution played no significant role in psychology, sociology, agriculture, natural resource management and medicine for the better part of a century or so. But the intellectual times are changing. There are now new handbooks on evolutionary psychology, evolutionary medicine, Darwinian agriculture, etc. 'Evolutionary Applications' is also the title of a young scientific journal. Hence, students who are well trained in evolutionary thinking should be well armed for making significant contributions to several applied fields that are highly relevant for our society and current and future environment.
In this course we will train evolutionary thinking within the context of several applications covering fields including agriculture, aquaculture, biomedicine, climate change, conservation biology, disease biology, forestry, invasion biology, fisheries, wildlife management, psychology and sociology. There is no syllabus or textbook, but we will use a number of papers and book chapters as study material (will be available on Moodle). I will lecture about different concepts and their application, and we will frequently discuss about case studies in the different fields of the natural and human sciences.

Aims

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :
1	1.     Démontrer une maîtrise des processus de l¿évolution des êtres vivants à long et court terme. 2.     Se confronter à l¿application des connaissances acquises en biologie évolutive dans une série de domaines en biologie et en dehors de la biologie dans le sens strict.

The contribution of this Teaching Unit to the development and command of the skills and learning outcomes of the programme(s) can be accessed at the end of this sheet, in the section entitled “Programmes/courses offering this Teaching Unit”.

Faculty or entity

SC