Cool Classes in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder

Get to know more about the life on Earth, from plants to reptiles with any of the great courses at CU this year. Not only can you find out how to study biology, but Teaching Biology will help you educate others in biology. Listed below are the coolest of this extremely cool program at CU.

What is Ecology and Evolutionary Biology?

Ecology is the scientific study of the distribution and abundance of living organisms and how the distribution and abundance are affected by interactions between the organisms and their environment. The environment of an organism includes both physical properties, which can be described as the sum of local abiotic factors such as insolation (sunlight), climate, and geology, and biotic factors, which are other organisms that share its habitat.

Evolutionary biology is a sub-field of biology concerned with the origin and descent of species, as well as their change, multiplication, and diversity over time. One who studies evolutionary biology is known as an evolutionary biologist, or less formally, an evolutionist.

Evolutionary biology is an interdisciplinary field because it includes scientists from a wide range of both field and lab oriented disciplines. For example, it generally includes scientists who may have a specialist training in particular organisms such as mammalogy, ornithology, or herpetology, but use those organisms as case studies to answer general questions in evolution. It also generally includes paleontologists and geologists who use fossils to answer questions about the tempo and mode of evolution, as well as theoreticians in areas such as population genetics and evolutionary psychology. In the 1990s, developmental biology made a re-entry into evolutionary biology from its initial exclusion from the modern synthesis through the study of evolutionary developmental biology.

Coolest courses in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology