Evolution Thesis

By Alexander Rudin

When you search for the perfect topic for your evolution thesis, your first priority is to settle upon a topic that is so intriguing to you that you could see yourself studying it (or some variation thereof) for a good part of your career. You have a fabulous opportunity in a masters evolution thesis to explore different areas of your interest while you are in grad school and have the advice of scholars in the field.

Sometimes the greatest difficulty is to choose a topic that doesn’t have too wide of a scope to handle in the limited number of pages and time set aside for your to accomplish your evolution thesis. This is even more striking than with most topics when one considers that the very nature of evolution is to track the change of a species over the history of time. Combat this issue by choosing one aspect of the evolutionary change and hone in, making sure that your topic is neither too complex to be adequately handled in a masters thesis nor to simplistic to warrant intense scrutiny.

Here are some sample evolution thesis topics that are of the correct scope:

• Is there a molecular clock in protein evolution?
• How the evolution of human subpopulations relate to the evolution of linguistics
• How adaptations should be defined and recognized
• How homology applies to evolutionary biology
• Does modern anthropogenesis compare to mass historical extinctions?
• Are birds or lizards closer relatives of the dinosaurs?
• Evolutionary patterns of mitosis
• The evolution of antibiotic resistance
• How evolutionary biology relates to HIV
• The impact of host-switching in pathogenic organisms
• Mechanisms for concerted evolution
• How the sex ratio evolves
• The evolution of pesticide resistance and its impact on agricultural practices
• Gene for gene evolution in crop plants and their pathogens
• Were the mass extinctions selective?
• Do stable hybrid zones exist?
• The consequences of over fishing explained by evolution

Research

Database services like BIOSIS and those available through FirstSearch can help you locate articles on topics. They also provide the abstracts of these articles. These services can help you research a topic, assess how much material is available on a topic, and find potentially useful articles.

The down side is that you may not know the right key words to search for if you are unfamiliar with your subject matter. Read recent articles in science journals on your topic and note key words that may be useful to you. Make a long list. You may be surprised at which words reveal great results. Some useful journals for this purpose (not to be cited as scientific research) include:

• American Scientist
• Natural History
• BioScience
• Scientific American
• National Geographic
• Smithsonian

Reading abstracts are not substitutes for actually reading the articles and researching scientific journals. The abstract is what the author wants you to believe about the study. Like everything else in life, it’s better to draw your own conclusions. Some journals which report results of original research (and the journals you will cite in your evolution thesis) include:

• American Journal of Botany
• Hereditas
• American Naturalist
• Heredity
• Animal Behaviour
• Journal of Animal Ecology
• Behavioural Ecology
• Journal of Ecology
• Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
• Journal of Evolutionary Biology
• Biological Conservation
• Conservation Biology
• Journal of Molecular Evolution
• Ecology
• Molecular Biology and Evolution
• Evolutionary Ecology
• Molecular Phylogenetics
• Functional Ecology
• Oecologia
• Genetical Research
• Oikos
• Genetics
• Paleobiology
• Systematic Biology
• Theoretical Population Biology