Evolution and Biodiversity

Overview

Google, IBM & Meta Certificates – 40% Off

One plan covers every Professional Certificate on Coursera.

Discover how natural selection acts upon biodiversity to drive long-term changes in populations, a fundamental process of evolution. This course examines how advantageous traits are retained while others are lost, and how isolated populations can genetically diverge to become entirely new species. By the end of this course, you will be able to explain how the natural environment "selects" for certain traits and how this can lead to the formation of new, distinct species.

Syllabus

Evolution and Biodiversity

In this course, we will step back and look at how the natural environment selects winners and losers from the biodiversity created in the previous module, resulting in long-term changes in populations. We’ll see how traits that help a species thrive will be retained in populations and traits that are not useful will get lost. And we’ll see how when populations of a species no longer share a gene pool, they can drift apart genetically and become separate species, no longer able to interbreed.