Abstract
Teleological reasoning is viewed as a major hurdle to evolution education, and yet, eliciting, interpreting, and reflecting upon teleological language presents an arguably greater challenge to the evolution educator and researcher. This article argues that making explicit the role of behavior as a causal factor in the evolution of particular traits may prove productive in helping students to link their everyday experience of behavior to evolutionary changes in populations in ways congruent with scientific perspectives. We present a teaching tool, used widely in other parts of science and science education, yet perhaps underutilized in human evolution education—the causal map—as a novel direction for driving conceptual change in the classroom about the role of organism behavior and other factors in evolutionary change. We describe the scientific and conceptual basis for using such causal maps in human evolution education, as well as theoretical considerations for implementing the causal mapping tool in human evolution classrooms. Finally, we offer considerations for future research and educational design.
Highlights
Humans have evolved an elaborate capacity to develop and act on our own intentions and those we perceive in others
According to Varella (2018), teleological reasoning becomes problematic, among others, when: it is misapplied to all aspects within a domain, such as when all phenomena in biology are explained by having a function, or when attributing internal desires or needs to all actions of biological agents, or when attributing intention to all human actions; or when it is misapplied to a different domain, such as when human-specific mental states such as explicit beliefs are misapplied to other biological organisms, or when function and design are invoked to explain nonliving physical phenomena including those that are not artifacts
In concluding this review section, we argue that these developments in evolutionary and developmental biology point to opportunities to tackle a number of misconceptions in evolution education, including the question of how to deal with variations of seemingly teleological reasoning in students, the reference to “need” and other proximate factors
Summary
Humans have evolved an elaborate capacity to develop and act on our own intentions and those we perceive in others Even in light of such challenges, many education researchers have highlighted the potential for human evolution examples to cultivate understanding of general evolutionary concepts, e.g., because the topic is engaging, it connects to students’ lives, or because concepts like variation are more salient in our own species (Besterman and Baggot la Velle 2007; Nettle 2010; Pobiner 2016; Pobiner et al 2018; Werth 2009). Paleoanthropologists, paleoclimatologists, evolutionary anthropologists, archeologists, comparative psychologists, primatologists, and geneticists are among the scientists each contributing methods and lines of evidence about similarities, differences, and evolutionary changes in environment, behavior, cognition, morphology, brain, genes, social organization, and culture in humans and other primates These diverse streams of inquiry may help us construct a more interdisciplinary account of the evolution of our species, compared to other examples in biology education. We argue that causal mapping can be a potential teaching tool to visualize these dynamics across a range of traits
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