Since 2010, our physics department has offered a re-imagined calculus-based introductory physics sequence for the life sciences. These courses include a selection of biologically and medically relevant topics that we believe are more meaningful to undergraduate premedical and biological science students than those found in a traditional course. In this paper, we highlight new aspects of the first-semester course, and present a comparison of student evaluations of this course versus a more traditional one. We also present the effect on student perception of the relevance of physics to biology and medicine after having taken this course.
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Genetic drift is the random process—it can be conceived as a random walk—by which “neutral” mutations that offer no selective (dis)advantage become fixed in a population, leading the population's genomes to evolve, or drift, away from their initial state over many generations as such neutral mutations accumulate.