Evolutionary biology is way of thinking about the natural world that provides new insights into why life on earth is the way it is, and how it is impacted by our actions. Evolution is central to all our undergraduate degree programs and across all years.
1st year:
Evolution and Genetics: The most important module you’ll ever take…
2nd year:
Evolutionary Ecology: How evolution is the key to understanding nature. Why is there sex? Why do we fall apart as we age? Why do parasites make us sick?
Behavioural Ecology: The study of how evolution allows us to understand behaviour. Why do animals help each other? Why do parents cooperate? Why do babies cry? Why do we fall in love?
Wildlife Disease: It’s a battlefield out there. Selection has created viruses, chemicals that evolve and take over living cells to make copies of themselves. No organism is safe from disease.
3rd year:
Whoa! Nearly every course in 3rd year is super-evolutionary:
| BIO3135 | Human Behavioural Ecology | Understanding human behaviour through its evolutionary context |
| BIO3400 | Living in Groups | The selective costs and benefits of living in groups |
| BIO3407 | Literature Review in Evolution and Ecology | You choose, but it’s going to be evolution right? |
| BIO3409 | Symbiosis in Marine Systems | How replicators cooperate even between the organisms they have built |
| BIO3410 | Sensory Ecology | How animals evolve to hide and seek |
| BIO3411 | Science in Society | Why is the fact of evolution still controversial? |
| BIO3413 | Animal Life Histories | How genes evolve so that their carriers live, reproduce and die at different rates |
| BIO3420 | Evolutionary Biology of Health and Disease | To understand why we’re healthy and why we get sick we need evolutionary biologists and not just doctors |
| BIO3421 | Animal Migration | The genes that suggest to their carriers that they fly round the world increase in frequency |
| BIO3428 | The Complexity of Human Societies | Focusses on using evolutionary and ecological thinking to understand how human societies develop |
| BIO3434 | Major Transitions in Evolutionary History | Evolution in the deep past |
| BIO3443 | The Genome: Applications, Evolution and Ecology | The instructions for building and running organisms that have survived until now |
Third year honours projects and MSc and MSci projects in Evolution aim to involve students in genuine cutting edge research. Students taking evolution projects have published their work in peer-reviewed journals including:
Archer, C. R., Alper, C., Mack, L., Weedon, M., Sharma, M. D., Sutter, A. & Hosken, D. J. 2023. Alcohol reduces choosiness and relaxes mate preferences in female Drosophila simulans. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, blad165. link
Cabrera, D., Andres, D., McLoughlin, P. D., Debeffe, L., Medill, S. A., Wilson, A. J. & Poissant, J. 2017. Island tameness and the repeatability of flight initiation distance in a large herbivore. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 95, 771-778. link
Dyer, E. & Stevens, M. 2024. Behaviourally mediated camouflage in the furrowed crab (Xantho Hydrophilus). Evolutionary Ecology. link
Hawkes, W. L., Davies, K., Weston, S., Moyes, K., Chapman, J. W. & Wotton, K. R. 2023. Bat activity correlated with migratory insect bioflows in the Pyrenees. Royal Society Open Science, 10, 230151. link
Maskrey, D. K., White, S. J., Wilson, A. J. & Houslay, T. M. 2018. Who dares does not always win: risk-averse rockpool prawns are better at controlling a limited food resource. Animal Behaviour, 140, 187-197. link
Trissi, N., Troczka, B. J., Ozsanlav-Harris, L., Singh, K. S., Mallott, M., Aishwarya, V., O’Reilly, A., Bass, C. & Wilding, C. S. 2023. Differential regulation of the Tor gene homolog drives the red/green pigmentation phenotype in the aphid Myzus persicae. Insect Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 153, 103896. link
Young, E. A. & Postma, E. 2023. Low interspecific variation and no phylogenetic signal in additive genetic variance in wild bird and mammal populations. Ecology and Evolution, 13, e10693. link
The Evolution group are a major part of our MSc in Evolution, Behaviour and Ecology. This course focuses in particular on putting animal behaviour and life histories in their evolutionary context and includes a 2 week field course that you can choose to take in the UK or abroad.