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Regional academic conferences provide a variety of benefits to attendants, but hosting them can be costly. Here, we share benefits and drawbacks of hosting regional evolution meetings from the vantages of a te...
Teleology is one of the critical aspects of students’ intuitive concepts about living beings and, specifically, their evolution. This cognitive bias imposes a substantial restriction on the process of learning...
We provide a brief overview of Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups by Paul Atkins, David Sloan Wilson, and Steven Hayes. The book offers a range of promi...
We describe the ubiquity of teleological language and thinking throughout biology, as a context for understanding how students think about evolution, as well. Examples can be found in molecular biology, physio...
Texas is home to four of the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. As would be expected, several large universities in Texas, public and private, offer courses in which the topic of human evolution is covered...
Teleology, explaining the existence of a feature on the basis of what it does, is usually considered as an obstacle or misconception in evolution education. Researchers often use the adjective “teleological” t...
I reviewed a book Population Genomics that fills in the noticeable lack of a general introductory textbook to population genomics, one of the most exciting and rapidly developing branches of life sciences nowa...
This is a review of de Waal’s Mama’s Last Hug, which shows how similar human emotions are to those of other social vertebrates, and how emotions shape thought, action and social life.
I review David Sloan Wilson’s This View of Life, which considers why a group’s members, if tightly interdependent, must treat each other sympathetically, justly and generously, and what actions could cause these ...
Despite evolution being the central idea in modern biology, considerable variation exists in its acceptance around the globe, and reports of anti-evolutionist and creationist movements are widespread. Educator...
Embedded in the emerging area of evolutionary medicine is the premise that evolutionary biology can serve a pedagogical function with widespread applications for education and outreach. Although great strides ...
In 2017 National Science Foundation data revealed that in the United States the professional biological workforce was composed of ~ 69.5% “whites”, 21.3% “Asians”, and only 3% “African American or Blacks” (Nat...
In 1956, evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane posed a question to anthropologists: “Are the biological differences between human groups comparable with those between groups of domestic animals such as greyhou...
A number of processes that involve large numbers are critical to civic scientific literacy, including many biological topics. Understanding the basic causes of such large-scale processes, such as population gr...
In his magnum opus, Natural History: General and Particular, Count Buffon, one of the leading natural historians of the 18th century, argued that all life in the New World, particularly North America, was degener...
Many topics in evolutionary biology have been the focus of little research about student thinking and learning. This lack of research limits the evidence base on which instructors can draw to inform their teac...
To realize the promise of the Next Generation Science Standards, educators require new three-dimensional, phenomenon-based curriculum materials. We describe and report on pilot test results from such a resource—E...
Evolution is a central, unifying theory for all of life science, yet the subject is poorly represented in most secondary-school biology courses, especially in the United States. One challenge to learning evolu...
Diagrammatic depictions of evolutionary relationships play an increasingly important role in scientific and educational literature. Reading evolutionary trees is seen as a major challenge for biologists in lea...
Charles Darwin viewed eyes as the epitome of evolution by natural selection, describing them as organs of extreme perfection and complication. The visual system is therefore fertile ground for teaching fundame...
Macroevolutionary time is a difficult idea to grasp and is considered to be a threshold concept in teaching and learning evolution. One way of addressing this subject is to use animations that represent evolut...
Misunderstandings of the nature of science (NOS) contribute greatly to resistance to evolutionary theory especially among non-scientific audiences. Here we delineate three extended instructional examples that ...
Over the past 25 years a number of instruments have been published that attempt to measure understanding and acceptance of evolution. Science educators have been administering these instruments and reporting r...
Despite widespread concern about the differential measurement of evolution acceptance among researchers, no one has systematically explored how instrument choice can impact research results and conclusions in ...
The religious or cultural objections by many people to the teaching of evolution in high school biology classrooms can impact both students’ willingness to explore a scientific understanding of evolutionary th...
Understanding evolution is critical to learning biology, but few college instructors take advantage of the body of peer-reviewed literature that can inform evolution teaching and assessment. Here we summarize ...
Evolution education research has focused on biology populations, while other disciplines organized around evolutionary theory—such as biological anthropology—remain understudied. Cognitive science and educatio...
The evolution education research community has defined the construct of “evolution acceptance” in different ways and measured it using different instruments. One of these instruments—the GAENE—has not been ana...
Current direct Likert measures for evolution acceptance include the MATE, GAENE, and I-SEA. Pros and cons of each of these instruments have been debated, and yet there is a dearth of research teasing out their...
For the last 59 years a team of Russian geneticists led by Lyudmila Trut have been running one of the most important biology experiments of the 20th, and now 21st, century. The experiment was the brainchild of...
Students’ knowledge of scientific principles of evolution is often inadequate, despite its recognized importance for understanding biology. Moreover, difficulties associated with underlying abstract concepts s...
In this article, I provide an analysis of my work (1985–present) with non-major biology students and science teacher candidates in developing strategies for teaching and enhancing learning with respect to evol...
This is a review of Ryan’s A Taste for the Beautiful and Prum’s The Evolution of Beauty, two books that show how sexual selection by female choice can favor the evolution of beauty.
Previous research has identified numerous factors to explain why students have difficulty learning about evolution. Some of these factors include a student’s background (including their religion and major of s...
For the past 32 years, we have polled first-year biology students annually at the University of New South Wales concerning their views about evolution and creationism. The purposes of the research were to iden...
Despite the overwhelming agreement among scientists regarding the fundamental importance of evolution to all areas of biology, a lack of evolution understanding and acceptance has been reported in studies of s...
The Galápagos archipelago is known worldwide for its contributions to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, and the islands continue to support studies in evolutionary biology. Yet despite...
Research in evolutionary biology has been progressively influenced by big data such as massive genome and transcriptome sequencing data, scalar measurements of several phenotypes on tens to thousands of indivi...
Acceptance and understanding of evolutionary ideas remains low in the United States despite renewed science education standards, nearly unanimous acceptance among scientists, and decades of research on the tea...
Concept inventories (CIs) are commonly used tools for assessing student understanding of scientific and naive ideas, yet the body of empirical evidence supporting the inferences drawn from CI scores is often l...
A review of L. Spinney. 2017
This research builds on a previous study that looked at the effectiveness of a simulation-based module for teaching students about the process of evolution by natural selection. While the previous study showed...
While recent research indicates that using human examples can be an engaging way to teach core evolutionary concepts such as natural selection and phylogenetic thinking, teachers still face potential conflicts...
Acceptance of evolutionary theory varies widely and is often associated with religious background. Some have suggested there exists an additional relationship between scientific reasoning ability and the accep...
Evolution education, in both schools and informal education, often focuses on natural selection and the fit of organisms through natural selection to their environment and way of life. Examples of evidence tha...
Evolution and its mechanisms of action are concepts that unite all aspects of biology, but remain some of the most difficult for students to understand. To address this challenge, we designed a hands-on activi...
Charles Darwin’s birthday, February 12th, is an international celebration coined Darwin Day. During the week of his birthday, universities, museums, and science-oriented organizations worldwide host events tha...
Evolution is everywhere in Galápagos, especially regarding the role the islands have played in the history of evolutionary thought. In turn, the Galápagos National Park guides are in a unique position as infor...
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