The EEB faculty share a common interest in how organisms work and interact and how these mechanisms and interactions evolved. We offer all undergraduates an opportunity to become familiar with the plants and animals around them as well as how they interact and evolve.

• What is Ecology and Evolutionary Biology?
• What kinds of questions are we interested in?
• What relevance is Ecology & Evolutionary Biology to:
        Biology concentrators?
        Non-concentrators?

What is Ecology and Evolutionary Biology?

    The Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) is one of five affiliated departments in Biology and Medicine at Brown. The other four are: Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry (MCB), Molecular Microbiology and Immunology (MMI), Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology, and Biotechnology (MPPB), and Neuroscience (NS). All operate collaboratively within a Program in Biology. Rather than offering specialty degrees in each department, the Program in Biology offers A. B. and Sc. B. degrees in Biology.

     Ecology and Evolutionary Biology spans the gamut of biological organization from molecules and cells to communities and ecosystems. Thus we provide a broad and holistic perspective of the biological sciences. Our faculty and students study molecular evolution, plant and animal population, community and ecosystem ecology, animal behavior, functional morphology, paleoecology, genetics and xxx. However, our interests all converge around a common thread: the evolutionary paradigm. One of the preeminent scientists of the twentieth century, Theodosius Dobzhansky, noted that, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." We are distinctive among the five biological science departments in focusing on and studying phenomena using the evolutionary paradigm.

    We firmly believe that it is imperative for students with interests in ecology and evolutionary biology to obtain a broad view of biology, in order to place our own field in an appropriate context.

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What kinds of questions are we interested in?

    Nico Tinbergen, a famous ethologist and evolutionary biologist, identified four basic kinds of questions one could ask about the biology of an organism. He was referring to behaviors but they apply equally well to any aspect of an organism from its genes to its ecology:

1. How does it work?

2. How does it develop in the individual?

3. What is its function?

4. What is its phylogenetic history?

    Each of these questions could define a discipline within biology, and they often do. However, as Tinbergen made abundantly clear, the full understanding of any phenomenon in biology requires attention to all four questions. In a sense that is what evolutionary biology is all about.

    For example, we might be interested in how light affects the growth of a plant. We would seek the underlying mechanism that translates light energy into changes in a plant. We would so that in a broader context. First we would be interested in how that mechanism develops in any individual plant -- to what degree is its expression influenced by genes and environment? We would also be aware that the mechanism has an effect on the survival and reproduction of the plant -- in what way do or would variations in that mechanism affect the fitness of a plant? We might then broaden our perspective to ask when that particular mechanism showed up in the ancestry of the plant we are studying -- what relatives share or do not share that mechanism.

    Whether we study the way in which natural selection shapes an organism's phenotype or how muscles and nerves are coordinated in the flight of a bird, or the emergent properties of species interactions within a marine community, as evolutionary biologists we are at the very least aware of the other questions we might ask. What unites us and our curriculum, then, is the same thing that unites Tinbergen's four questions -- evolution. It is the realization that any aspect of an organism or species that we study is in someway a product of its interaction with present and past environments that integrates the faculty and curriculum in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

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What relevance is Ecology & Evolutionary Biology to:

The Biology Curriculum

    First and foremost we see ourselves as contributing to the curriculum in biology as a whole. Whether our courses are part of broadening someone's training in biology or a focus of their concentration, we offer perspectives that help a biology concentrator integrate and expand her concentration. This is a relatively easy task since we ourselves are formally integrated into the broader curriculum. We offer classes in three of the concentration areas: cell and molecular biology (genetics), structure and function (comparative morphology), and organismal biology (our main focus). Our faculty are involved in medical education as well as in undergraduate and graduate education. Our research covers both basic and applied problems. The very nature of evolutionary biology makes ours an integrative and holistic curriculum.

    Our undergraduate students will normally take either an A. B. or Sc. B. in biology, degrees coordinated by the Program in Biology of the Division of Biology and Medicine. Since ecology and evolutionary biology are subjects that depend on a wide range of expertise from other areas of biology, we feel it important that students avail themselves of these areas as well as ecology and related subjects.

    In the Brown tradition, we encourage students to generate individualized programs that uniquely fit their interests and needs. These may differ strikingly with your interests. As in all fields of biology, parts of our subject are becoming progressively more quantitative. We encourage our students to avail themselves of statistics, additional mathematics beyond the required year of calculus, computer science, geology, or chemistry. Obviously neither time nor space are adequate to do justice to all of these important areas. Suffice to say that if your interest is, say, population dynamics (the area concerned with population growth patterns of humans and other organisms) you would be well advised to bolster your mathematical skills. If, on the other hand, you are determined to become a limnologist (someone who studies fresh-water systems), you should expect to pick up extra analytical chemistry.

The University curriculum

    We are enthusiastic about sharing our expertise with students and offer a number of courses of interest to non-science and non-biology concentrators. Ecology forms a critical part of the expertise required to understand and remedy current environmental concerns. To that end, many of our courses provide important insight into environmental concerns and closely complement environmental studies courses that focus on environmental policy issues. We, along with the Center for Environmental Studies and the Department of Geological Sciences, are the major contributors to environmental science and the Environmental Science concentration at Brown.

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