I just finished watching the lectures from Principles of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior, taught by Stephen Stearns at Yale. It’s available at Open Yale Courses as well as through iTunes U. The course includes 36 lectures, mostly about 45 minutes long and is an excellent introduction to these topics. It starts at microevolution and genetics, moves on to present macroevolution from several perspectives, leading into ecology and then a few lectures on behavior, including foraging, breeding and altruism.

It seems that many introductory biology courses available online are geared more towards pre-med students, with a focus on biochemistry and disease, while this course really is an overview of life on earth, how it evolved and how it interacts within species, across species and within the physical environment. I downloaded the lower-resolution videos through iTunes, and definitely could not read the slides. This wasn’t a problem, as it would work almost as well as an audio course, and I could still see more or less what was going on in the charts. There is a higher resolution version available at the Yale site, along with transcripts of the lectures and other materials.

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