Abstract

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. Educators need to re-evaluate the approaches used for teaching students about evolution in order to facilitate its understanding and acceptance. A major hurdle in understanding the concepts of evolution is that humans tend to view the world in a teleological way. Learners create obstacles to understanding the concepts of evolution by ascribing purpose or intent-driven actions to animals, processes, or inanimate objects. An indispensable learning tool in the field of evolution is the evolutionary tree, as it is a direct representation of evolutionary hypotheses. The ability to read and understand this form of representation is prerequisite to fully understanding the concepts of evolution. In this work, we present issues faced when attempting to teach students to read evolutionary trees as well as troublesome diagrammatic properties that may foster teleological thinking. Further, we present teaching practices and methods that may be used to avoid the above challenges (from diagrammatic and instructional perspectives). With this work, we aim to raise awareness among educators about the different potential teleological pitfalls in the field of teaching how to read evolutionary trees, and to present different approaches for minimizing teleological reasoning and thinking in evolution education.

Highlights

  • In modern biology, evolution and evolutionary analyses play an increasingly important role (Futuyma 2013; Taylor et al 2018), further corroborating Dobzhansky’s claim that evolution is biology’s unifying principle (Dobzhansky 1973; Futuyma 2013; Kelemen 2012)

  • Students at all educational levels struggle to grasp the central concepts of evolutionary biology, which hinders their understanding of biology in general (Abrams and Southerland 2001; Ariew 2003; Cunningham and Wescott 2009; Gregory and Ellis 2009; Kattmann 2008; Werth 2012)

  • As evolutionary trees are the most direct representation of macro-evolutionary processes and are used as hypotheses concerning the relative relatedness of species, they are an indispensable tool in the learning and communication about evolution (Baum et al 2005; Meisel 2010; Nehm and Kampourakis 2014)

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Summary

Background

Evolution and evolutionary analyses play an increasingly important role (Futuyma 2013; Taylor et al 2018), further corroborating Dobzhansky’s claim that evolution is biology’s unifying principle (Dobzhansky 1973; Futuyma 2013; Kelemen 2012). In the later part of a learning period, the educator could test in how far students changed their interpretations of evolutionary processes and representations from teleological to scientific reasoning by not asking simple questions of how a certain species or trait developed, but by posing questions that challenge the students’ reasoning (González Galli and Meinardi 2011) These challenging questions could be about concepts such as the loss of function, lateral gene-transfer, or polytomies in an evolutionary tree, or a context, which is likely to conflict with the students’ prior knowledge, such as the closer relative relationship of crocodiles to birds, rather than lizards (Baum and Offner 2008). Different instructional practices can affect teleological tendencies, ranging from the way the unit about phylogenetics commences, to concrete practices with evolutionary trees, or general aspects relating to language use

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