Skip to main content

Free Course on Evolution and Genetics

If you're interested in genes v. environment, natural selection, evolution applications v. misapplications, check out this online course through Duke University:

Introduction to Genetics and Evolution is a college-level class being offered simultaneously to new students at Duke University. The course gives interested people a very basic overview of some principles behind these very fundamental areas of biology.  We often hear about new "genome sequences," commercial kits that can tell you about your ancestry (including pre-human) from your DNA or disease predispositions, debates about the truth of evolution, why animals behave the way they do, and how people found "genetic evidence for natural selection."  This course provides the basic biology you need to understand all of these issues better, tries to clarify some misconceptions, and tries to prepare students for future, more advanced coursework in Biology. No prior coursework is assumed.

I'm enrolled in the course, and the instructor gives terrific lectures. The first assignment is due January 12, so enroll while you can.
Labels:

Comments

Lowcarb team member said…
Hope you enjoy the course

All the best Jan
January 10, 2015
Lori Miller said…
Thanks, Jan.
January 11, 2015
Galina L. said…
I enrolled for two courses at the beginning of the year - "Innovation and Commercialization"from MIT because I want to get more profit from the dancing footwear I am making and selling, and "Introduction to nutrition" because my husband asked me to do it - he still worries that my diet is not "balanced".
January 16, 2015
Lori Miller said…
The "unbalanced diet" meme drives me crazy. The original "unbalanced diets" were so heavy on grains that people got severe nutrient deficiencies. "Balanced diets" included a variety of food so that people would get sufficient nutrients.

Good luck with your dancing footwear. Let us know how it goes.
January 16, 2015
Galina L. said…
The nutrition course could drive me crazy, but I am using it to show my husband that they derived almost all their recommendations from questionable observation studies.No wonder the scientific committee in Sweden found low-fat dogma questionable. The professor himself admits that such methods don't look convincing, and in the defense of the methodology climes that observation studies were good anyway because pointed into the right direction of health benefits of eating more fibers, fruits and vegetables.
I finally managed to came to really satisfying model of the dancing half-shoe , and people started to buy it, but all that is very far away from running own business. I have more ideas about the footwear design in my head than I can physically create, I don't have people who I can hire for a reasonable price to do it, and I don't know how to move farther.
January 19, 2015
Lori Miller said…
"...observation studies were good anyway because pointed into the right direction of health benefits of eating more fibers, fruits and vegetables."

Huh-uh. A broken clock that shows the right time is still broken.
January 19, 2015
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...
17 comments
Read more

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...
24 comments
Read more

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more