TEACHING

For current and upcoming course offerings please go to the departmental site

If you are associated with Yale you can view course information at the Classesv2 site.

Undergraduate courses

EEB122 Principles in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior

Professor Steve Stearns is currently teaching this course.

EEB240 Animal Behavior

Course description:  In this course you will be introduced to the study of animal behavior using a combination of lectures, discussion and an independent research project. Lecture will focus on understanding animal behavior from an ecological and evolutionary perspective. You will learn about interesting (and sometimes crazy) behaviors that are observed. In the beginning of the course, we will start by going over how the evolution and ecology of animal behavior is studied. The second part of the course reviews current knowledge of key topics in animal behavior ranging from sexual selection to cooperation. We will focus on how scientists study animal behavior and what has been learned about the evolution and ecology of animal behavior. However, the general goal of the course is to develop the ability to think as a scientist. By the end of this course you should be able to identify an interesting scientific question, determine how it could be studied and critically evaluate existing evidence.

Graduate courses:

EEB678: Mathematical models and quantitative methods in evolution and ecology (with David Post)

Course description: In this course, we focus on how quantitative approaches are used to allow scientific inference. We will first discuss general principles for generating hypotheses that are testable (i.e. quantifiable). This course will also examine a variety of approaches used to model population level processes in evolution and ecology including an overview of population genetics, quantitative genetics, optimality models, game theory and population dynamic equations. We will also discuss experimental design, statistical analyses, inference and other quantitative methods. The course assumes a basic background in algebra, calculus, probability theory and statistics.

New Course

EEB710 Sexual Selection and Social Evolution (Spring 2010)

Course description: This course examines theoretical and empirical research on topics in the field of sexual selection (such as mate choice, mating systems, sperm competition, sexual conflict and parental care evolution) and social evolution (cooperation, kin selection, communication, group living, and cooperative breeding). After covering topics within sexual selection and social evolution separately, the course will then examine recent research that brings these fields together to form an understanding of how social interactions shape evolutionary dynamics, especially in the context of reproduction. Students will help lead weekly discussions and develop an individual project to conduct (such as a meta-analysis, development of new theory or synthetic review) on which they give a presentation and write a paper by the end of the semester.