BIO 202 — Evolution
Interactive simulations · Coe College
What's holding this thing together across generations, and how can you tell when transmission stops?
Explore
Open sandboxes — no rounds, no score. Poke at the machinery directly and watch what happens.
Interactive
Descent
A small diploid pedigree grown from a single founding pair. Click a mutation to see which descendants inherited it; click an individual to trace its line of descent.
Lessons
Unit 1 — Measuring spread and the best single summary
Lesson 1
Adding up coin flips until a bell appears
Lesson 2
Resampling to ask if new data still belongs
Lesson 3
Subtracting the line and reading what's left
Lesson 4
Finding the cloud of lines that all fit the data
Lesson 5
Two species, and whether their lines come apart
Lesson 6
Building a model of a population, one cause at a time
Lesson 6b
Fitting on half the record and being scored on the other half
Lesson 7
Fitting a cause to a pattern, then asking it about next year
Unit 2 — How proportions move when tokens get copied
Lesson 8
A resemblance is a number, whatever is causing it
Lesson 9
Dragging chromosomes out of a cell to make gametes
Lesson 10
Drift as differential reproduction with no trait attached
Lesson 11
Reading a population's hidden size from how fast it loses variety
Lesson 12
Selection at the gene
Lesson 13
Selection as regression
Lesson 14
Births, deaths, and crowding
Lesson 15
The bridge: snakes, salamanders and hawks
Scaffolds — small, repeated practice
Short guess-and-check exercises. Each drills a single move across five rounds with different data, before the move gets a name.
Scaffold S1
"No trend" is a distribution
Scaffold S2
Reading the leftovers across datasets
Scaffold S3
Counting the well-mixed baseline
Scaffold S4
Odds a wandering token takes over
Scaffold S5
How long the wandering takes
Scaffold S6
Wandering, a push, or both?
Scaffold S7
How far the finches shift, year by year
Scaffold S8
Reading the push from the change
Scaffold S9
Where making and removing balance
Scaffold S10
Reading the deficit off the counts
Scaffold S11
The gap and the trickle between patches
Scaffold S12
When helping pays across relatedness
Scaffold S13
Reading trees with rotated nodes
Scaffold S14
How the rate shrinks with the window
Scaffold S15
Slopes before and after family history
Scaffold S16
Clashes pile up faster than time
Scaffold S17
How big a target chance has to hit
Scaffold S18
Reading a bias off two kinds of change
Scaffold S19
One end state, three ways to reach it
Scaffold S20
One kind or two — and what would flip it
Cross-cutting drills — bridge two lessons each
Scaffold S21
When holding something fixed helps, and when it hurts
Scaffold S22
What may you legitimately claim?
Scaffold S23
The cloud and the histogram are one cloud
Scaffold S24
When agreeing methods earn trust
Scaffold S25
A line where some points count more than others
Scaffold S26
Got it from someone, or came up with it
Scaffold S27
Counting what is left after something did the removing