Welcome to the American Museum of Natural History's course on evolution.
I'm Joel Cracraft, I'm a curator of
ornithology here at the American Museum of Natural
History, and I'll be giving my lectures here in my office at the American Museum.
Now, the course is going to consist of four weeks.
And the first week we're going to learn about what is evolution.
We're going to learn about Darwin's two great
ideas the tree of life and adaptation with,
by natural selection.
We'll talk about species origins, how do new species arise.
And we'll give you some sense about the evolutionary
history of life and how to build these evolutionary trees.
And we too then will drill down on Darwin's
probably most famous idea, which is adaptation and natural selection.
And we'll also talk about other mechanisms that lead to adaptation,
such as sexual selection and, and then co-evolution.
And in the third week, we'll look at the grand scheme of life.
We'll, we'll start with the origin of life
and trace life's diversity up to the present.
And then we'll talk about extinction because
extinction is a major form of evolution.
It, it influences a lot of evolutionary patterns.
Finally, in the fourth
week, we'll talk about human evolution.
We'll start with how humans are related to the great apes.
we'll talk about all the fossil humans that are have been found.
And then in the second lecture we'll move to neanderthals and to homo
sapiens as we have moved out across the world over the last 60,000 years.