Quantitative Biology (BIOL 504, Fall 2000)

Class hours: Tuesday 9:00 - 11:00, Thursday 10:00 - 11:00
Lab hours: Friday 10:00 - 11:00 and 12:00 - 14:00

Last updated: 11 November 2000

This is the homepage for Biology 504, Fall 2000 (D. Goodman). This page will contain lecture notes, examples of programs (hopefully in FORTRAN and C), and any other relevant information to Dr. Goodman's lecture.   For any suggestions and questions regarding this homepage, please email Tomo Eguchi.

Index:
Course Description
Contact Information
Additional Information
Lecture Notes
Programming
 

Course Description:
This course will pursue two parallel lines of study in (1) computer programming and (2) modeling evolutionary processes.  The goal in (1) is to make sure that every student in the class knows how to write efficient, computationally demanding programs that have good user interfaces and nice graphic output capability, and can run on ALL three major platforms: Windows PC, UNIX workstation, and web serving.  We will share experiences with FORTRAN, C, HTML, and MATLAB, among others.  I will try to get a guest lecturer to talk about JAVA.  The strategy will be "if you already know how to program in language X on platform Y, here is the most convinient way to get good graphics and to make your programs run on the other platforms."  The goal in (2) is to write simulation programs that mimic evolutionary processes, and to learn some theoretical modeling, such as the ESS concept (Evolutionary Stable State), that help to find analytical solutions to evolutionary problems.  A set of illustrations will be built around life histroy evolution.  Depending on the interests of the class, we can add some other topics for simulation modeling, as well.

Contact Information:
Dan Goodman: goodman@rivers.oscs.montana.edu

Tomo Eguchi:        eguchi@montana.edu
Jeff Fennell:          fennell@montana.edu
Dan Hennen:        hennen@torrent.msu.montana.edu
Andy Hulting:       ahulting@montana.edu
Chris Jerde:           jerde@rapid.msu.montana.edu
David Richards:     davidr@montana.edu or mudsnail1@ hotmail.com
Nicole Wagner:      nwagner@montana.edu
Eric Ward:            eward@montana.edu
Doug Williams:      williams@wildweb.org

Send a message to the entire class.
 

Additional information:

• Because some of us have taken a series of similar classes during the last two years, I posted a summary of lecture notes from the series in PDF format.  If you are interested in what you will be exposed to, please take a look.  This is probably a lot more than you want to know about quantitative/theoretical biology at the beginning of the semester.  There is no guarantee that he will cover all of the materials in this summary.  Similarly, he will most definitely add other information to his lecture during this semester.

• Here are some books and other additional papers/summary that are relevant to the class (in a random order):
• Primer of Ecological Theory, J. Roughgarden, Prentice Hall, 1998
• Population Biology, A. Hastings, Springer, 1996
• A Primer of Population Biology, E.O. Wilson and W. H. Bossert, Sinauer Associates, 1971
• Modelling Biological Populations in Space and Time, E. Renshaw, Cambridge University Press, 1991
• Structured-Population Models in Marine, Terrestrial, and Freshwater Systems, S. Tuljapurkar and H. Caswell (eds.), Chapman and Hall, 1996
• The Ecological Detective, R. Hilborn and M. Mangel, Princeton University Press, 1997
• Daniel Goodman 1982. Optimal life histories, optimal notation, and the value of reproductive value. The American Naturalist 119(6): 803-823. It is in the pdf format and split in two parts: part 1 and part 2.
• Summary of maximum likelihood estimator

• Lecture 1 (12 September 2000)
• Lecture 2 (14 September 2000)
• Lecture 3 (15 September 2000)