Evolution History of Evolutionary thought: Lamarckism; Darwinism; Modern Synthesis Fundamentals: Variation; heritability; natural selection; fitness and adaptation; types of selection (stabilizing, directional, disruptive) Diversity of life: Origin and history of life on earth; diversity and classification of life; systems of classification (cladistics and phenetics) Life history strategies: Allocation of resources; tradeoffs; r/K selection; semelparity and iteroparity Interactions: Co-evolution (co-adaptations, arms race, Red Queen hypothesis, co-speciation); prey-predator interactions (mimicry, crypsis, etc) Population and Quantitative genetics: Origins of genetic variation; Mendelian genetics; HardyWeinberg equilibrium; drift; selection (one-locus two-alleles model); population genetic structure (panmixia, gene flow, FST); polygenic traits; gene-environment interactions (phenotypic plasticity); heritability Molecular evolution and phylogenetics: Neutral theory; molecular clocks; rates of evolution; phylogenetic reconstruction; molecular systematics Macroevolution: Species concepts and speciation; adaptive radiation; convergence; biogeography

Mathematics and Quantitative Ecology Mathematics and statistics in ecology: Simple functions (linear, quadratic, exponential, logarithmic, etc); concept of derivatives and slope of a function; permutations and combinations; basic probability (probability of random events; sequences of events, etc); frequency distributions and their descriptive statistics (mean, variance, coefficient of variation, correlation, etc). Statistical hypothesis testing: Concept of p-value; Type I and Type II error, test statistics like t-test and Chi-square test; basics of linear regression and ANOVA.