Course Syllabus
This is a graduate seminar course about the uses of phylogenetic trees in evolution and ecology, emphasizing historical inference and hypothesis tests of lineage diversification, phenotypic traits, geographic ranges, and community ecology. This is not a course on how to infer phylogenies, or their uses in studies of molecular evolution and population genetics.
** This year's readings and discussion will focus strongly on analysis of continuous traits with a very strong emphasis on regression-based methods. Students who exclusively interested in biogeography, categorical traits, or lineage diversification per se may find that this course is not to their liking.
We will work our way from model assumptions and statistical underpinnings to practical implementation of methods. The 3-hour weekly meeting will be split between discussion of primary literature, hands-on tutorials in data analysis, and student presentations of methods, providing hands-on tutorials in how to conduct analyses covered. Grades will be based on class participation and presentations.
Prerequisites:
- Systematics, or general familiarity with methods for estimating phylogenies
- Ability to work in R, and access to a laptop computer that can be brought to the course.
Students who do not already have R programming background should, at a minimum, install R and work through the first three chapters of An Introduction to R prior to the course.
Location: The field museum:
- Botany classroom (DATES TBA)
- Bill Stanley Zoology Classroom (DATES TBA)
Time: Winter quarter 2018, beginning 9 January 2018, Tuesdays, 9:00 a.m. to noon (10 classes altogether)
Course Summary:
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