Basics of evolutionary theory
The first workshop will be hands-on, to give you a chance to check your understanding of the basics of the comparative method and evolution by natural selection.
NB. these apps work in Chrome, your success in other browsers may vary, if necessary try a different browser! You can access the Evolution Lab game with a guest account if you don’t want to log in with google.
Using the Evolution Lab game (click “play game”), complete at least the three training trees (Red, green and gecko; Familiar faces; Tree of life: Vegetarian edition). The aim here is to understand why closely related species might be expected to share many traits, and how patterns of shared and differing traits between organisms can be informative about evolutionary history of traits and species (e.g. the patterns of relatedness between species, and when certain traits are likely to have evolved). In this course we’ll be looking at the language-relevant behaviours and cognitive capacities of species which are closely (and distantly!) related to humans, to answer exactly these kinds of questions.
Use the interactive simulator linked below (from a suite of simulation tools provided by the PhET team at the Unversity of Colorado Boulder) to run the four experiments below. The aim here is to get a basic understanding of the effects of selection on frequencies of traits (and genes) in a population.
Use this link to access the simulation, then click “Intro” and then “Play” to begin. You can speed things up or restart the simulation by clicking the buttons in the bottom right.
Behind the scenes in this simulation, each bunny has two parents and inherits two versions (alleles) of a gene that affects fur colour, one from each parent. There are two possible alleles: a brown allele and a white allele. If a bunny inherits two white alleles, it has white fur; if it inherits at least one brown allele, it has brown fur (i.e. in technical terms, the brown allele is dominant and the white fur allele is recessive).
Use this simulation to run these experiments.
Experiment 1: Starting with the population of 5 brown and 5 white bunnies, predict what will happen to the population over time (say five generations). Run it to find out if you were right.
Experiment 2: What do you predict will happen if you select the “Limited food” option? Restart the simulation, click “Limited food”, and run it.
Experiment 3: Repeat Experiment 1, but introduce wolves. Predict what happens to the frequency of brown fur, then run it.
Experiment 4: Repeat Experiment 3, but switch from the sunny to snowy environment (sun vs snowflake icon). Predict what happens to the frequency of brown fur. Does your prediction change? Why? Run it to find out what happens.
Experiment 5: Start in the sunny environment, add wolves, and run the simulation for 5 generations. Then flip to the snowy environment and pause the simulation. What do you predict will happen when you restart the simulation? Run it to find out if you were right. NB. this simulation doesn’t always play out the same way, so run it a few times and see if you can figure why not!
Is there a way of interpreting the bunny simulation as being (quite abstractly!) about language? If you wanted to interpret it that way, you would need to decide how to interpret:
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