The School of Life · biology, medicine & health
Genetics & Evolution
How traits pass from parent to child, and how living things reshape themselves across deep time.
How Mendel's pea plants revealed the hidden rules by which traits pass from parents to offspring.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~18 hours
Unit I — Mendel's Experiments
Traits, characters, and true-breeding lines · The monohybrid cross · Dominant and recessive · The law of segregation
Unit II — Predicting Offspring
Genotype and phenotype · The Punnett square · The test cross · Probability in genetics
Unit III — Two Traits at Once
The dihybrid cross · The law of independent assortment · Ratios and what they reveal · Exceptions to expected ratios
Unit IV — Beyond Simple Dominance
Incomplete dominance and codominance · Multiple alleles and blood type · Sex-linked traits · Reading a pedigree
How genes are switched on and off, and how whole genomes are read, compared, and edited.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~30 hours
Unit I — Regulation of Gene Expression
The operon in bacteria · Promoters, enhancers, and transcription factors · Epigenetics and chromatin · RNA interference
Unit II — Reading Genomes
DNA sequencing methods · The Human Genome Project · Comparative genomics · Genes, introns, and non-coding DNA
Unit III — Genetic Tools
PCR and amplification · Cloning and plasmids · CRISPR and genome editing · Gene therapy in outline
Unit IV — Genomics in Practice
Genome-wide association studies · Personalized medicine · Bioinformatics and databases · Ethics of genetic data
How variation, inheritance, and differential survival reshape living things across generations.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~26 hours
Unit I — The Idea of Descent
Pre-Darwinian views of life · Darwin, Wallace, and natural selection · The evidence from fossils · Homology and vestigial structures
Unit II — The Mechanisms
Variation and its sources · Fitness and selection · Sexual selection · Genetic drift and gene flow
Unit III — The Origin of Species
What a species is · Reproductive isolation · Allopatric and sympatric speciation · Adaptive radiation
Unit IV — Macroevolution and Deep Time
Reading the fossil record · Mass extinctions · Convergent evolution · The tree of life
The mathematics of how gene frequencies shift in populations over time.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~24 hours
Unit I — Frequencies in Populations
Allele and genotype frequencies · The Hardy-Weinberg principle · Testing for equilibrium · Assumptions and their violations
Unit II — Forces of Change
Selection and fitness coefficients · Mutation and migration · Genetic drift and effective population size · The founder effect
Unit III — Structure and Relatedness
Inbreeding and its coefficients · Population subdivision · Molecular markers · Coalescent thinking
Unit IV — Evolution in Action
Detecting selection in genomes · Quantitative traits and heritability · Molecular clocks · Applications to conservation
How inherited variation shapes health, and how genetic conditions are traced through families.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~22 hours
Unit I — Patterns of Inheritance
Autosomal dominant and recessive disease · X-linked conditions · Mitochondrial inheritance · Reading a clinical pedigree
Unit II — When Chromosomes Change
Nondisjunction and aneuploidy · Down syndrome and the trisomies · Structural rearrangements · Karyotyping
Unit III — Complex and Common Disease
Multifactorial inheritance · Genetic risk and environment · Cancer as a genetic disease · Pharmacogenetics
Unit IV — Genetics in the Clinic
Genetic testing and screening · Genetic counseling · Newborn screening · Ethical and privacy questions