Two general themes underlie much of the material covered in this course: (1) examining genetic variation from an evolutionary perspective; (2) considering the information in the genome (uncovering the patterns and processes of evolution from genetic data using bioinformatic analyses). The first half of the course will provide the necessary grounding in molecular evolution to understand the generation of genetic variation, including DNA structure and replication, mutation, neutral theory, selection, genome evolution and the gentics of complex traits. The second half of the course will put these principles into practice , covering the essential tools in bioinformatic analysis, database searching, sequence alignment, phylogenetic analysis and molecular dating.