Specialty Topics: Biology Across Disciplines

This course will examine the relationship between biology and the arts, business, psychology, and other areas. We will first discuss art as a foundational science of biology. Next, we will explore how biology can help us understand how we interact with the arts. Next we'll discuss biology's business and how it finances research, as well as the processes of human subjects research and clinical trials. We will then discuss two topics that are at the intersection of biology and psychology: (1) Human development from conception through adulthood and (2) how cognition affects how we make decisions about biological questions and best practices to evaluate biological evidence. This is based on what we know about how evidence is used to make decisions. The discussion will end with education, and why evidence-based education can be so important in promoting science literacy.