This is an interview with Frans de Waal who gave the Kohlberg Memorial Lecture at the AME Conference in St. Louis in November 2017. Frans de Waal's research with non-human primates documents that primates share our tendencies towards fairness, reciprocity, loyalty, self-sacrifice, caring for others, strategies for conflict avoidance and for…

Recommendations for teaching the nature of science (NOS) are grounded in a deficit view of students and/or the public--wherein people accept pseudoscientific claims, particularly about evolution, because they do not adequately understand what counts as being "scientific." Under the deficit view, correct views of science are defined by…

The teaching of evolution in American high schools has long been a source of controversy. The past decade has seen an important shift in the rhetoric of anti-evolutionists, toward arguments of a strongly mathematical character. These mathematical arguments, while different in their specifics, follow the same general program and rely on the same…

In an ethnographic study set within a biology department of a public university in the United States, incongruity between the ideals and practice of science education are investigated. Against the background of religious conservative students' complaints about evolution in the curriculum, biology faculty describe their political intents for…

Stan Metzenberg offers a critical analysis of the draft "Massachusetts Science and Technology/Engineering Standards," which are for pre-Kindergarten to Grade 8 and introductory high school courses. Metzenberg claims that the document reveals significant, unacceptable gaps in science content, as well as some notable errors and…

Genes are often described by biologists using metaphors derived from computational science: they are thought of as carriers of information, as being the equivalent of "blueprints" for the construction of organisms. Likewise, cells are often characterized as "factories" and organisms themselves become analogous to machines. Accordingly, when the…

Even 150 years after Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species," public school teachers still find themselves dealing with student resistance to learning about biological evolution. Some teachers deal with this pressure by undermining, deemphasizing, or even omitting the topic in their science curriculum. Others face the…

A survey of the literature on evolution instruction provides evidence that teachers' personal views and understandings can shape instructional approaches and content delivered in science classrooms regardless of established science standards. This study is the first to quantify evolutionary worldviews of in-service teachers in the Caribbean,…

As the authors stated early in their article (Machalek and Martin 2010), evolutionary ideas have been gaining traction in the work of a growing number of sociologists in recent years. Much of their thinking derives from work inspired by sociobiology. However, many sociologists are critical of and unreceptive to incorporating evolutionary biology…

Joseph McCabe (1867-1955) was one of the most prolific and gifted polymaths of the twentieth century. Long before such a thing was thought respectable, and almost a century before any university established a chair in the public understanding of science, McCabe made a living as a populariser of science and a critic of philosophical and religious…

After accepting the editor's invitation to write a response to Richard Machalek and Michael W. Martin's "Evolution, Biology, and Society: A Conversation for the 21st-Century Sociology Classroom," the author took up their recommendation to learn more about recent work on biology and social behavior. She considered seriously Machalek and Martin's…

Are you interested in using argument-driven inquiry for high school lab instruction but just are not sure how to do it? You are not alone. This book will provide you with both the information and instructional materials you need to start using this method right away. "Argument-Driven Inquiry in Biology" is a one-stop source of expertise,…

Dr. David C. Geary's article centers on the concept of inherited folk psychology modules, together with the idea of a transition from primary to secondary learning. This article suggests that there exist only effective folk psychology modules, which are the result of interaction of inherited primary emotional systems with the physical, biological,…

Teachers are often exhorted by creationists to "teach the controversy." Although such encouragement sounds on the surface like a proposal for critical thinking instruction, the history of the creationist movement in North America belies this claim. Rather than teach students to analyze and evaluate actual scientific controversies, the intent of…

Evolution education is of increasing interest to the science education community. This special issue of the "Journal of Research in Science Teaching" has been devoted to the subject of evolution. The following articles are included: (1) "Evolution: Biological Education's Under-Researched Unifying Theme" by Catherine L. Cummins, Sherry S. Demastes,…