Undergraduate Course: Evolution and Ecology of Ageing (ZLGY10029)
Course Outline
| School | School of Biological Sciences |
College | College of Science and Engineering |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 10 |
ECTS Credits | 5 |
| Summary | Ageing is one of the most complex and variable of biological processes. Understanding its causes and consequences is one of the central challenges currently facing by biologists and biomedics. Evolutionary theory provides a unifying framework with which to study and understand ageing. This course will offer students a brief overview of the challenge that ageing poses to modern human society, and recent developments in our understanding of the causes and consequences of ageing from mechanism-oriented laboratory studies and demography. We will then discuss in detail evolutionary theories of ageing, which can explain both near universality of the phenomenon of ageing and the great diversity of ageing rates across plant and animal species. From there we will move onto more specific lectures relating to important topics in the evolutionary study of ageing, including comparative studies of ageing, studies of ageing in wild animals, how and why the sexes differ in ageing rates, and the effects of social interactions on the ageing process. We aim to provide students with an up-to-date understanding of how evolutionary thinking is shaping our understanding of the ageing process. |
| Course description |
The course is based around 10-12 lectures, but will also involve group discussion sessions centred on salient topics covered in these lectures and in-course assessment based on critical reading of papers from the primary literature which each student will be assigned.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | No |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- An understanding of the main evolutionary theories of ageing.
- An understanding of how these theories help us explain variation in the ageing process observed in the natural world.
- An understanding of how an evolutionary approach might help researchers from more medical and molecular backgrounds understand the ageing process.
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Reading List
| Recommended Reading: Flatt, T. & Partridge, L. (2018) Horizons in the evolution of aging. BMC Biology, 16: 93. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Prof Daniel Nussey
Tel: (0131 6)50 5494
Email: dan.nussey@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Rachel Law
Tel: (0131 6)51 3689
Email: Rachel.Law@ed.ac.uk |
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