Those who survive). What do secondary school boys understand about evolution and heredity before they are taught the topic? Events generally have a beginning and end, occur in a specific sequential order, consist of distinct actions, and may be goal-oriented.
Evolution, natural selection, and genetics.
Variation in a species. A modeling approach to teaching evolutionary biology in high schools. This could be due in part to the perception, unfortunately reinforced by many biologists, that natural selection is so logically compelling that its implications become self-evident once the basic principles have been conveyed. Without a working knowledge of natural selection, it is impossible to understand how or why living things have come to exhibit their diversity and complexity. By continuing you agree to the use of cookies. Evo Edu Outreach. Studies have indicated that belief in soft inheritance arises early in youth as part of a naïve model of heredity (e.g., Deadman and Kelly 1978; Kargbo et al. 1992;14:51–61. Palumbi SR. 2009;2: In press. Development and evaluation of the conceptual inventory of natural selection. Moore R, Mitchell G, Bally R, Inglis M, Day J, Jacobs D. Undergraduates' understanding of evolution: ascriptions of agency as a problem for student learning. Student conceptions of natural selection and its role in evolution. And, whereas levels of understanding and acceptance may be positively correlated among teachers (Vlaardingerbroek and Roederer 1997; Rutledge and Mitchell 2002; Deniz et al. Mutations occur with all three possible outcomes: neutral, deleterious, and beneficial. As Nobel laureate Jacques Monod once quipped, “What is true for E. coli is also true for the elephant,” and indeed, Darwin (1859) himself used elephants as an illustration of the principle of rapid population growth, calculating that the number of descendants of a single pair would swell to more than 19,000,000 in only 750 yearsFootnote 4. doi:10.1002/tea.3660320509. Kampourakis K, Zogza V. Students’ intuitive explanations of the causes of homologies and adaptations. Changes in students' understanding of evolution resulting from different curricular and instructional strategies. 2003;87:181–206. Student understanding of natural selection. There also is evidence that levels of understanding do not differ greatly between science majors and non-science majors (Sundberg and Dini 1993). Wood-Robinson C. Young people's ideas about inheritance and evolution. Pedersen S, Halldén O. Intuitive ideas and scientific explanations as parts of students' developing understanding of biology: the case of evolution. 2001;85:328–48. Jeffery WR.
Evo Edu Outreach. 2008).
Evolution: Education and Outreach doi:10.2307/1005592. 1993;23:34–41. Other authors suggest that students do not actually maintain coherent conceptual frameworks relating to complex phenomena, but instead construct explanations spontaneously using intuitions derived from everyday experience (see Southerland et al.
Attenborough D. Life on earth. This subset of Generation 2 proceeds to reproduce. A recent experiment in a natural setting shows that selection acts on behavior and morphology, but acts on each trait independently of the other. Ridley M. Evolution. Even a very slight advantage is sufficient to cause new beneficial mutations to increase in proportion over the span of many generations. 2006;28:843–70. J Res Sci Teach. Res Sci Educ. Packard AS. doi:10.1080/09500690500404722. Thus, adaptations in any taxon may be described as “innovations,” “inventions,” or “solutions” (sometimes “ingenious” ones, no less). doi:10.1111/j.1558-5646.2007.00126.x. The incorrect belief that species are uniform leads to “transformationist” views of adaptation in which an entire population transforms as a whole as it adapts (Alters 2005; Shtulman 2006; Bardapurkar 2008). J Res Sci Teach.
Evolution. New York: Norton; 1980. p. 76–84. doi:10.1126/science.210.4474.1139. It must be noted that the persistent tendency to label the inheritance of acquired characteristics as “Lamarckian” is false: Soft inheritance was commonly accepted long before Lamarck's time (Zirkle 1946).
doi:10.1002/tea.3660270907. Geraedts CL, Boersma KT.
J Biol Educ.
2008a;1:46–52. doi:10.1002/sce.3730680412. 2008;45:420–43. : a classroom study with natural selection. On a broader scale, it is also how physical, physiological, and behavioral features that contribute to survival and reproduction (“adaptations”) arise over evolutionary time.
Conversely, differences in fecundity alone can create differences in fitness, even if survival rates are identical among individuals. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press; 2005.