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. What were you going to take back to the classroom? Well we're going to give you a lot of material. Dave Randall is co-teaching this course and will give you a ton of information that follows up on the lectures. We have a, a staff that's going to give you a lot of support in teaching. Dave's going to talk about activities such as building trees of life that you can do with your students. We're going to be addressing student misconceptions about evolution and how to deal with that. And then we'll be talking about how we're, how, how one deals with the topic of evolution and teaching evolution to socially diverse classes. So, thank you very much for signing up for this course. We're going to have a wonderful time teaching this course. We're going to try to provide you with all the information you need to really help teach evolution in the classroom and give you a lot of support on how to teach that. So thanks very much and enjoy the class.
