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Natural History

Interactive models of evolving populations help students understand natural selection, population genetics, and evolutionary engineering

Students learn science by doing science. I will demonstrate individual-based models of evolving populations that let students hone their understanding of fundamental concepts in evolutionary biology—by making predictions and checking them against data in real time.

Please bring a laptop or tablet (although even a phone will work). Please be ready to collaborate. There's nothing you need to install or do ahead of time, but this link will be useful during the seminar:

https://faculty.washington.edu/herronjc/vlabs/

How and why the jerboa got its long legs

The vertebrate skeleton is extraordinarily modular. The axial column is an array of segments grouped into cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacral, and caudal vertebrae, and the limbs are comprised of the upper and lower limb and hand or foot. Growth of the skeleton is also modular; adult human skeletal proportion is strikingly different from that of an infant, and one can imagine stretching the bones of the hand to give rise to the disproportionate wing of a bat.

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