Author: William McGeehan

Seminar: Evolutionary Biology 

Through the study of malaria, this unit teaches the basics of evolutionary biology and population genetics.
Section 1: Sickle Cell Disease: here students learn about the circulatory system, anemia, alleles, and gene expression.
Section 2: The life cycle of malaria: here students learn about ecological relationships (especially parasitism), prokaryotic vs. eukaryotic cells, disease types, transmission, and vectors.
Section 3: History of malaria: Here students learn how malaria and other diseases evolve. Topics include balancing and directional selection, the trade off between virulence and transmissibility, and disease ecology (specifically, how agriculture changed malaria’s ecology and drove its evolution).
Section 4: Human evolution in response to malaria: Here students learn how to tell when traits are not under selection (using the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium), how adaptations arise (mutation) and how a selection pressure like malaria can cause evolution (frequency change in alleles). The Sickle cell allele is explained as an adaptation to malaria.
Section 5: Disease ecology. Students will learn why malaria was mostly eradicated in the Northern hemisphere, but not in Africa, why the evolution of resistance makes DDT and other biochemical solutions impermanent, and how public health citizenship should be informed by an awareness of how diseases evolve and spread.