ecology
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A General Education Course introducing non-Life Science Majors to the Life Sciences, challenging them to explore and understand important issues in the field. Topics include chemistry of life, genetics, physiology, evolution, and ecology -- all explored in lecture and debates. Professor Jay Phelan has a Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard, and masters and bachelors degrees from UCLA and Yale. Some clips and images may have been blurred or rem...more
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This course presents the principles of evolution, ecology, and behavior for students beginning their study of biology and of the environment. It discusses major ideas and results in a manner accessible to all Yale College undergraduates. Recent advances have energized these fields with results that have implications well beyond their boundaries: ideas, mechanisms, and processes that should form part of the toolkit of all biologists and edu...more
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Environmental Politics and Law (EVST 255) The lecture reviews the legal and economic strategies that can be used to manage coastal development. Over half of the United States population lives in coastal areas and will be affected by sea level rise and more intense storms. The lecture looks at the conflict between property rights and efforts to protect coastal ecosystems through the use of eminent domain to create national seashores. Bar...more
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Environmental Politics and Law (EVST 255) The United States government employed a variety of approaches to protect citizens from danger, including public education, nuclear weapons testing, and gathering data about the effects of nuclear testing. The US government's testing of nuclear weapons at the Bikini Atoll is used as an example of government approaches. Nuclear testing led to ecological devastation, leading the US government to mo...more
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The movement of matter and energy around the planet is very important, and its study draws on geology, and meterology in addition to chemistry. Energy tends to flow upwards from plantlike producers to herbivores to carnivores before being decomposed by detritovores and cycling back into energy usable by producers, in addition to the photosynthesis or chemosynthesis used by producers to produce energy. Like energy, compounds vital to life s...more
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The Tree of Life must be discovered through rigorous analysis. Genetic information is crucial because appearances can be deceiving, and species that look similar can prove to be genetically very dissimilar and not share recent common ancestors. Two criteria, used to determine what the "correct" Tree is, are simplicity and whether the tree maximizes the probability of observing what we actually see.
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This lecture provides an overview of the physical aspects of earth's biomes. Temperature, water, latitude, and altitude all come into play. Regions with similar levels of these climatic features tend to have similar life-forms living there. These same climatic features can also affect weather patterns, which in turn affect life by altering habitats and ecosystems. On a large enough scale, such as El Niño, these weather patterns can affect ...more
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Genetic transmission is the mechanism that drives evolution. DNA encodes all the information necessary to make an organism. Every organism's DNA is made of the same basic parts, arranged in different orders. DNA is divided into chromosomes, or groups of genes, which code for proteins. Asexually reproducing organisms reproduce using mitosis, while sexually reproducing organisms reproduce using meiosis. Both these mechanisms involve duplicat...more
