The laboratory portion of the course is
a combination of hands-on lab exercises and tutorial discussions.
Our intention is to give you an opportunity to clarify through
practice principles that you learn in lecture. We also want you
articulate the results of lab exercises as well as your opinions
about philisophical issues in evolutionary biology. You will submit
written reports of lab exercises. This handout outlines the nature
of those reports as well as the nature of tutorial discussions.
Lab Exercises and Reports. Each
week we will present you with some exercises. Most of them will
be short problems or demonstrations intended to illustrate some
principle discussed in lecture. We will ask specific questions
about them. You should answer all questions. Although we will
not ask you to turn in the answers to these short exercises, some
of these problems will be used as the basis for questions on the
mid-term and final. The final problem presented in each laboratory
will be a small project or puzzle for you to solve. This final
problem will be the focus of your lab reports.
Lab reports should be no more than 1-2 type
written pages (we will ask for an explicit number each time).
Answers to questions should be concise, about 1 or 2 sentences.
If you collected data to answer the question, your answer should
present supporting summary statistics. (e.g., Q: Are lectures
delivered on Tuesdays longer than those presented on Thursdays?
Why? A: Tuesday lectures actually tend to be shorter than Thursday
lectures (Tuesday lectures average 75 minutes whereas Thursday
lectures average 90 minutes [n=4 weeks]). The reason for this
is unkown, although a likely explanation is that the professor
has prepared material on a week-by-week basis and must squeeze
things in on Thursday to finish off the week on schedule.) The
majority of your report should present your method of solving
the puzzle and your solution. Lab reports will be marked. The
format of the lab report will often follow the Intro, Methods,
Results, Discussion format. Exceptions to this standard will be
noted.