1. SimBio's EvoBeaker These, along with 2 interactive book chapters will cost you $29. You register for these directly with SimBio, according to the following instructions. 
   
   Please follow the instructions below to subscribe to SimUText for your Introduction to Evolution SU12 class at University of Kentucky.

   1. To subscribe to your SimUText please visit: https://simutext.com/student/pages/Welcome.jsp?accesskey=Dmm5-rJ8b-XTjT-KNJY-wz4f

   2. You will need to supply your email address as a login name, your name and student id, and select a password.

   3. Should you encounter a problem during registration, the access key for this course is Dmm5-rJ8b-XTjT-KNJY-wz4f.

   4. Follow the remaining instructions to subscribe to your SimUText and download the software you will need.

   If you experience any difficulties registering or downloading and installing the software, please visit the SimUText Support FAQ pages.

   If your questions are not answered, use the link on those pages to email SimUText technical support.
    

2. Your textbook coauthor, Jon C. Herron has written several exercises that are available free on his website, and on your textbook's website, under "activities" within individual chapter web pages. Dr. Herron also helped write several of the SimBio exercises we will be doing.
3. Finally, I have adapted one of Dr. Krupa's and Dr. Bouwma-Gearhart's labs for online.

Lab Schedule

• Week One: Darwinian Snails (SimBio). This lab investigates evolution by natural selection of shell thickness in snail populations with and without crab predators. Here's a link to video demo of this lab.
• Week 2: Flowers and Trees (SimBio): This lab simulates evolution of flower morphology for isolated populations of columbines. It introduces you to the concept of evolutionary trees, by demonstrating how they unfold as populations split and evolve independently. At the end of the lab, you will be given only the present set of phenotypes for several populations, and be challenged to construct the evolutionary tree that best describes their past evolution, which is grouping species by shared derived characters or traits.
• Week 3: Bugsville (be sure to download and install the "zipped" simulation file, and tutorial and worksheet pdf files). This simulation models the number of spots on lady bugs as a quantitative trait. The set of exercises will introduce you to the field of quantitative genetics, the concept of heritability, and the Breeder's Equation. Among other things, you conduct breeding experiments and artificial selection experiments, and will estimate heritability with two methods:  1. as the slope of the offspring/midparent regression line, and 2. from the Breeder's Equation, as the ratio of the selection response, R, divided by the selection differential, S.
• Week 4: Domesticating Dogs (SimBio). This lab also simulates evolution of isolated populations, like the Flowers and Trees lab, except here you keep track of sequence divergence among populations in a hypothetical sequence of DNA. You begin by observing patterns of sequence divergence among populations as they split and evolve independently of one another, and you end by inferring the best evolutionary tree based only on knowledge of present DNA sequences.
• Week 5: Conch Phylogeny. This lab was created by Dr. James Krupa and Dr. Andrew Bouwma-Gearhart of the UK Biology Department. In this lab you will examine 18 species of conchs (gastropod mollusks of the family, Strombidae) and one outgroup species, the pelican's foot, of the family,  Aporrhaidae. You will construct their evolutionary trees from two sets of data: morphology and DNA sequence. You will get your morphological measurements from photographs and 3D models on the this website, and you will get your DNA sequences from GenBank. You will use online programs at a bioinformatics portal to construct your trees, and get a real taste for the internet resources in bioinformatics.
• Week Six: Sickle-Cell Alleles (SimBio). In this lab, you will explore the forces of natural selection and genetic drift in a series of simulations that examine the fitness costs (sickle cell anemia) and benefits (protection from malaria) of the human sickle-cell allele under a variety of different environments and conditions.