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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.
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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.
Joel Cracraft, Ph.D.Chair and Lamont Curator
David Randle, Ph.D.Senior Manager of Professional Development
