1. THE IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES IN EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY Douglas J. Futuyma and Albert F. Bennett

2. The major approaches to analyzing evolutionary processes: Experimental Evolution Studies of Natural Populations Comparative methods

3. Experimental Evolution Advantages- Replication and control. Disadvantages – suited to laboratory rather than to natural situations.

4. Natural Populations Advantage- offer ecological realism Disadvantage - lack of ability to replicate results and control variables.

5. Comparative Methods Advantage- widely used method to understand evolution of characters in the natural world. Disadvantage- Correlational Assumption of parsimony

6. 2 Examples of the Contribution of Experimental Studies to understand Evolution Trade-offs- adaptive gain and correlated loss. Escherichia Coli Genetic Drift – a founder event (or bottleneck in population size) may initiate new paths of adaptive evolution. Drosophila pseudoobscura