Evolutionary Biology

• The evolutionary thought (10 Ηours): Evolutionary Biology as science — Epistemological background — Historical flashback — Evolutionary theories: Lamarckism, Darwinism, modern evolutionary synthesis (Neo-Darwinism),neutralists — Current -molecular- view.
• From the Big Bang to the Protobiont (12 Hours): Creation of the universe — The solar system and the abiotic environment in the primitive Earth — Stochastic events and the nature of Natural Selection — The chemical basis of the origin of life: abiotic synthesis of organic substances, abiotic synthesis of polymers and complex molecular aggregates — The RNA world — The RNP world and the transition to the DNA world. 
• First organisms (10 Hours): Hypotheses about the protobiont’s genome — Hypotheses about the origin of the eukaryotic cell — Taxonomic levels — How many species are there? — Cladistics versus phenetics — Elements of evolutionary trees — Constructing the universal evolutionary tree — Kingdoms or Domains? The molecular approach — “Rooting” the universal tree).
• Evolutionary time and patterns of life (16 Hours): Evolutionary time and evolutionary events — geological divisions, dating methods — Stromatolites and fossils — Precambrian life — Cambrian explosion — Factors affecting the radiation of organisms — “Missing links” or “punctuated equilibrium and stasis”? — Isolation mechanisms and patterns of speciation — Adaptive and non-adaptive radiation — Mass extinctions and their consequences — Human evolution. 
• Mechanisms of evolution in organismic and molecular level (17 Hours): Elements of population genetics — Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium — Linkage disequilibrium — Origin of mutations, nucleotide substitutions and the genetic code bias — The concept of the evolutionary divergence and convergence — Molecular mechanisms for DNA duplications and deletions, unequal crossing over, slippage of DNA strands, transposition and retrotransposition — Sequence convergence via reciprocal and not reciprocal recombination — Factors affecting the fate of a new mutation — Deterministic and stochastic mathematical models — Natural selection — The importance of the “fitness” concept — Codominance and overdominance — Models and examples of action of natural selection — Random genetic drift — Probability, time and rate of fixation under stochastic models — Estimation of phylogenetic distances.

Book [25276]: Introduction to Evolutionary Biology, G. K. Rodakis Details

Book [345]: Evolutionary Biology, Douglas Futuyma Details

Book [4705]: Introduction to Evolution, Stamatis N. Alahiotis Details

Book [12465721]: Evolution, Nicholas H. Barton, Derek E. G. Briggs, Jonathan A. Eisen, David B. Goldstein Details