Students investigate how, through the process of evolution, animals have solved their engineering problems and how people have mimicked those natural solutions.

This interactive tool is based on the classic story of evolution by natural selection - the story of the peppered moths in England during the Industrial Revolution. The simulation uses green and orange bugs to demonstrate how natural selection influences the changes in species over time.

This hands-on activity uses simulations with beads to teach students about population genetics, the Hardy-Weinberg principle, and how natural selection alters the frequency distribution of heritable traits.

This brief video lesson discusses the evolutionary reasons for pruney fingeres. Discussion/assessment questions and suggested supplemental resources are also included.

Students read and analyze excerpts from texts written by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and answer questions about the information presented, developing their nonfiction reading comprehension. This activity serves as a supplement to the HHMI short film The Origin of the Species: The Making of a Theory.

Students will become familiar with the bird-of-paradise expeditions and the scientists involved, learn how the scientists applied the scientific processes while studying the birds, and understand why the birds-of-paradise are a topic of interest to evolutionary biologists.

Students will study and interpret data about changing snail populations using ideas about natural selection and make predictions about how populations might change in the future.

This lesson delves into the fascinating process and products of sexual selection: the process by which traits become more or less common depending on an individual's ability to mate with more or better partners. Understanding sexual selection allows a deeper understanding of natural selection and evolution.

Students study a variety of gastropod shells and consider how they provide evidence of coevolution.

Students investigate sickle cell anemia to teach the principles of inheritance, genetic diagnostics, and bioethics.

Students use grains of rice to models small organisms and students acts as predators selecting food during limited time spans. Over a number of generations, the proportion of grains of rice of each color in each population will change if the students select one color in preference to another. This is a simple model for natural selection resulting from predation.

Students first examine the bodies and behavior of live slugs or snails, then use water balloons to model their unique style of locomotion, and finally tackle a series of analytical questions designed to cultivate a grasp of divergent evolution.

This series of activities complements the HHMI DVD Evolution: Constant Change and Common Threads, and requires simple materials such as M&Ms, food storage bags, colored pencils, and paper cups. An extension of this activity allows students to model Hardy-Weinberg and selection using an Excel spreadsheet. This part of the activity requires computer/printer access. The overall goal of Battling Beetles is to engage students in thinking about the mechanism of natural selection through data collection and pattern recognition.

This series of hands-on activities complements the HHMI DVD Evolution: Constant Change and Common Threads, and requires simple materials such as M&Ms, food storage bags, colored pencils, and paper cups. This activity has been designed to engage students in thinking about the mechanism of natural selection by encouraging them to formulate questions that can be answered through scientific investigation, data collection, and pattern recognition.

This resource is a simulation that models the way fish and other organisms live in nature. Students will learn about the relationships between many different aspects of fish life: genes, traits, variation, survival and reproduction.

In this high school unit on evolution, students initially investigate the case of young girl with a life-threatening infection of pan-resistant bacteria. This case sparks questions that lead them to investigate the growing prevalence of such cases and the discrepancies between antibiotic use in their communities and CDC recommendations. They expand their investigations to look at population changes occurring in a population of birds (juncos) which exhibit noticeable differences in physical and behavioral traits from the past 60 years.

Individual bacteria that have an advantageous trait variation, like fewer pores, have a better chance of surviving exposure to antibiotics, than those without that variation.

Individual bacteria with trait variations that allow them to survive exposure to antibiotics, reproduce. Over time this leads to a shift in the distribution of traits in bacteria populations, so that those variations become more prevalent over time.