9:30-10:45 TR JH 239
The concept of evolution is central to biology, certainly as
practiced in the Department of Biology at Indiana University.
Nonetheless, it remains true that even the word "evolution" elicits a
strong and negative response from many people who reject the concept—
or at least what they have been told is the concept— of evolution. It
shall be an essential purpose of this course to present for
discussion and evaluation the actual principles of the theory of
evolution. These were stated explicitly by Charles Darwin more than a
century ago and this summary remains valid in 1998.

Students will be asked to evaluate these principles in discussions
and in writing. Every student in this course has lived about two
decades, which is longer than most organisms on this planet live. Two
decades of life provide an immense amount of experience. Students
will be challenged to consider principles of evolution and to attempt
to confirm or to falsify these within the limits of proper scientific
inquiry. Arguments about politics, religion, or social policy will
not be tolerated since they cannot be evaluated by the methods
available to and appropriate for science. It should also be noted
that no attempt will be made to challenge or change the religious
perspective of any student. (And I insist that no student attempt to
change mine.)

There will be brief written assignments each week. These will be
evaluated by AIs and UTIs with faculty supervision. There will be
three one-hour exams during the semester and a cumulative final exam.
The hour exams will include objective questions and questions that
require an essay response. Each hour exam and the final exam will be
worth 100 points. The lowest hour exam score will be dropped for each
student in determining the course score. All students will be
required to complete the final exam and the score on this exam will
be included in the final score of each student.

GRADES: It is imperative that students understand that there is no
curve. In this course, as in all my courses, grading practices are
defined quantitatively. Moreover, all students will have the same
requirements and all will be evaluated in exactly the same way. No
one will be given any opportunity to "do extra work to improve my
grade".

In too many courses, grades become a Zero Sum Game. (For each winner,
there is a loser. For each (A) there is an (F)). In this course, the
game is non zero sum. One possible effect of this is that cooperative
learning is encouraged since a student does not jeopardize a personal
grade by helping another student understand an idea. Grades will be
assigned according to the following absolute scale (which will be
further subdivided to accommodate (+/-) grading):

Required book: Dawkins, Richard. Climbing Mount Improbable. Norton,
New York, 1996.

Score           Grade
90 - 100         A
80 - 89.99      B
65 - 79.99      C		
50 - 64.99      D
Below 50       F