This article focuses on some of the challenges of teaching science in a culture where science and religion sometimes appear to be or are set at odds with each other. Apparent conflicts between scholarly claims and religious claims are not limited to science, however--they occur in almost every subject. Many topics included in science education are…

An anonymous survey instrument was used for a ten year study to gauge college student attitudes toward evolution. Results indicate that students are most likely to accept evolution as a historical process for change in physical features of non-human organisms. They are less likely to accept evolution as an ongoing process that shapes all traits…

Evolution is a central underlying concept to a significant number of discourses in civilized society, but the complexity of understanding basic tenets of this important theory is just now coming to light. Knowledge about evolution is constructed from both formal and "free-choice" opportunities, like television. Nature programs are commonly…

Evolution was introduced into the senior secondary school Life Sciences curriculum in South Africa for the first time in 2008. Research in other countries shows that evolution is an extremely controversial topic to teach, raising serious concerns for teachers. Curriculum change theory dealing with "stages of concern" suggests that…

The federal government has repeatedly denied the introduction of creationism into public schools as it is a direct violation of the separation of church and state. Little is known about those who would opt to eliminate evolution in scientific curriculum altogether. The authors examined this more extreme anti-evolution perspective in a nationally…

The Answers in Genesis Creation Museum opened in May of 2007. During the opening day, a loosely affiliated group of scientists joined in a Rally for Reason as they termed it to protest the museum's potential effect on science in the United States. This paper discusses ethnographic data collected before and during the rally. Scientist narratives…

Is human ontogenesis a product of evolution or a result of individual decisions and actions? In the present paper we aim at solving this apparent conflict between a behavioral genetics approach and an action-theoretical perspective to human development. After a discussion of the idea of active and intentional self-development and the role of genes…

In addition to his pioneering studies on prenatal development of social responses in the mallard, Gilbert Gottlieb made important theoretical contributions to the study of the evolution of behavior. This tribute to Gottlieb presents his early view that prenatal behavioral development is the product of evolution and his revision of this view in his…

In this paper we examine the role of play in human ontogeny and phylogeny, following Surplus Resource Theory. We consider how juveniles use play to sample their environment in order to develop adaptive behaviors. We speculate about how innovative behaviors developed in play in response to environmental novelty may influence subsequent evolutionary…

Evolution is typically measured as a change in allele or genotype frequencies over one or more generations. Consequently, evolution is difficult to show experimentally in a semester-long lab course because most organisms have longer generation times than 15 weeks. In this article, the authors present an experiment to demonstrate and study…

To most students entering today's biology classes, evolution is something that occurred long ago, and is therefore irrelevant to their lives. Examples of evolution that are important concerns in the modern world, such as the resistance of insects to pesticides and antibiotic resistance, do not match students' concept of evolution. In this article,…

The marriage of evolution and development to produce the new discipline "evo-devo" in biology is situated in the general history of evolutionary biology, and its significance for developmental cognitive science is discussed. The discovery and description of the highly conserved, robust and "evolvable" mechanisms that organize the vertebrate body…

Individual performers, work teams, and organizations may be considered complex adaptive systems, while most current human performance technologies appear to assume simple determinism. This article explores the apparent mismatch and speculates on future efforts to enhance performance if complexity rather than simplicity is assumed. Included are…

Phylogenetic trees, which are depictions of the inferred evolutionary relationships among a set of species, now permeate almost all branches of biology and are appearing in increasing numbers in biology textbooks. While few state standards explicitly require knowledge of phylogenetics, most require some knowledge of evolutionary biology, and many…

Teaching students to make connections between what they learn in the classroom and what they see in everyday life is imperative. As biology instructors, they may choose to teach biology devoid of social context, believing that students can make these connections on their own. However, students model their instructors' behaviors, and follow their…