Articles

Paleontology and Evolution in the News

This paper is a review of recent media publications and journal articles about evolution and paleontology.

Authors: Sidney Horenstein

Virtual Fossils: a New Resource for Science Communication in Paleontology

Computer-aided 3-D reconstruction of fossils, or virtual paleontology, is an increasingly common and powerful technique. It is now regularly used for research in paleontology, yet to date has impacted little o...

Authors: Imran A. Rahman, Keith Adcock and Russell J. Garwood

From Tree to Map: Using Cognitive Learning Theory to Suggest Alternative Ways to Visualize Macroevolution

Diagrams can be important tools for communicating about evolution. One of the most common visual metaphors that unites a variety of diagrams that describe macroevolution is a tree. Tree-based diagrams are desi...

Authors: Sonia Stephens

Influence of Sociocultural Factors and Acceptance of Creationism in the Comprehension of Evolutionary Biology in Freshman Brazilian Students

The creationist movements in Brazil, although considered weak, are on the increase. The Brazilian legislation neither imposes any objection in teaching evolution nor obliges the teaching of creationism as an a...

Authors: Pierre R. Penteado, Karine F. Kavalco and Rubens Pazza

Teaching Tree Thinking to College Students: It’s Not as Easy as You Think

The ability to understand and reason with tree-of-life diagrams (i.e., cladograms), referred to as tree thinking, is an essential skill for biology students. Yet, recent findings indicate that cladograms are c...

Authors: Brenda C. Phillips, Laura R. Novick, Kefyn M. Catley and Daniel J. Funk

Evolution and the Cumulative Nature of Science

One of the characteristics of science is its cumulative nature. As more discoveries are made and more is learned, we progressively come to a more and more complete understanding of the physical universe. Evolu...

Authors: David Zeigler

Paleontology and Evolution in the News

This is a review of recent media publications and journal articles about evolution and paleontology.

Authors: Sidney Horenstein

The Origin and Early Evolution of Life: Where, When and How?

Authors: Antonio Lazcano

Introducing "The Origin of Life"

Authors: Niles Eldredge and Gregory Eldredge

Prebiotic Chemistry: What We Know, What We Don't

How life on Earth began remains an unexplained scientific problem. This problem is nuanced in its practical details and the way attempted explanations feedback with questions and developments in other areas of...

Authors: H. James Cleaves II

The Soft Underbelly of Evolution?

Evolution and the origin of life are separate, if connected, topics, but they are frequently conflated—especially by creationists. Regarding the natural origin of life as “the soft underbelly” of evolution, cr...

Authors: Glenn Branch and Eugenie C. Scott

Erratum to: A Review of Undergraduate Evolution Education in U.S. Universities: Building a Unifying Framework

Authors: Jenny D. Lloyd-Strovas and Ximena E. Bernal

The Origin and Evolution of Metabolic Pathways: Why and How did Primordial Cells Construct Metabolic Routes?

The emergence and evolution of metabolic pathways represented a crucial step in molecular and cellular evolution. In fact, the exhaustion of the prebiotic supply of amino acids and other compounds that were li...

Authors: Renato Fani

Witnessing Phenotypic and Molecular Evolution in the Fruit Fly

This multi-day exercise is designed for a college genetics and evolution laboratory to demonstrate concepts of inheritance and phenotypic and molecular evolution using a live model organism, Drosophila simulans. ...

Authors: Caiti S. S. Heil, Mika J. Hunter, Juliet K. F. Noor, Kathleen Miglia, Brenda Manzano-Winkler, Shannon R. McDermott and Mohamed A. F. Noor

Human Evolution and Education in Slovene Schools

This article discusses the importance and benefits of providing lower secondary school students with some knowledge of human evolution and its educational context. The author surveyed science teaching in secon...

Authors: Barbara Bajd

Cognitive Apartheid: On the Manner in Which High School Students Understand Evolution without Believing in Evolution

High school science students are often unwilling to learn about evolution due to a perceived conflict with their religious beliefs. Other students are able to understand evolution despite the fact that they do...

Authors: Ronald S. Hermann

Origins for Everyone

The origin of life on Earth remains a mystery, but the question can still be approached with scientific rigor. Identifying life’s origins requires the definition of life itself, which has been described as a s...

Authors: Andrew D. Ellington

Where Do I Come From? Using Student’s Mitochondrial DNA to Teach About Phylogeny, Molecular Clocks, and Population Genetics

Phylogenetic reconstruction, divergence times, and population genetics are critical concepts for a complete understanding of evolution. Unfortunately, students generally lack “tree-thinking” skills and are oft...

Authors: Luana S. Maroja and Jason A. Wilder

Cenancestor, the Last Universal Common Ancestor

Darwin suggested that all life on Earth could be phylogenetically related. Modern biology has confirmed Darwin’s extraordinary insight; the existence of a universal genetic code is just one of many evidences o...

Authors: Luis Delaye and Arturo Becerra

Viruses in Biology

During the first half of the twentieth century, many scientists considered viruses the smallest living entities and primitive life forms somehow placed between the inert world and highly evolved cells. The dev...

Authors: Purificación López-García and David Moreira

Darwinism and the Origin of Life

Historically, ideas on the origins of life have been mingled with evolutionary explanations. Darwin avoided discussing the origin of the very first species in public although he acknowledged the possibility th...

Authors: Juli Peretó and Jesús Català

Beads and Dice in a Genetic Drift Exercise

Natural selection driving adaptive changes is a powerful and intuitive explanation for the evolution of the living world around us. Evolution at the molecular level, however, is chiefly ruled by random genetic...

Authors: Claudia A. M. Russo and Carolina M. Voloch

Evolutionism and the Teaching of Science: How Portugal Has Been “Playing with the Big Tree of Evolution”

The concept of evolution is fundamental to the teaching of biological sciences. Nevertheless, it seems frequently neglected and/or forgotten in our classrooms and absent from the school syllabus. These difficu...

Authors: Sandra Assis and Susana Carvalho

Relationships among Teachers’ Knowledge and Beliefs Regarding the Teaching of Evolution: A Case for Turkey

The research study investigated the possible associations among science and biology teachers’ knowledge and belief variables concerning teaching evolution in science and biology classes. Specifically, this stu...

Authors: Ceren Tekkaya, Gülsüm Akyol and Semra Sungur

A Review of Undergraduate Evolution Education in U.S. Universities: Building a Unifying Framework

Despite a considerable amount of scientific evidence, evolution is still a highly controversial issue in American education. This review analyzes studies that investigate the relationship between evolution edu...

Authors: Jenny D. Lloyd-Strovas and Ximena E. Bernal

Oyun: A New, Free Program for Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Tournaments in the Classroom

Evolutionary applications of game theory present one of the most pedagogically accessible varieties of genuine, contemporary theoretical biology. We present here Oyun (oy-oon,

Authors: Charles H. Pence and Lara Buchak

Evolutionary Attitudes and Literacy Survey (EALS): Development and Validation of a Short Form

The Evolutionary Attitudes and Literacy Survey (EALS) is a multidimensional scale consisting of 16 lower- and 6 higher-order constructs developed to measure the wide array of factors that influence both an ind...

Authors: Stephen D. Short and Patricia H. Hawley

Students’ Mental Models of Evolutionary Causation: Natural Selection and Genetic Drift

In an effort to understand how to improve student learning about evolution, a focus of science education research has been to document and address students’ naive ideas. Less research has investigated how stud...

Authors: Elizabeth P. Beggrow and Ross H. Nehm

PsychTable.org: The Taxonomy of Human Evolved Psychological Adaptations

We announce the launch of PsychTable.​org, a collaborative web-based project devoted to classifying and evaluating evolved psychological adaptations (EPAs), g...

Authors: Niruban Balachandran and Daniel J. Glass

Coming to Grips with Evolvability

To explain the evolution of complex organisms by random mutation, drift, and selection is not a trivial task. This becomes obvious if we imagine an organism in which most genes affect most traits and all mutat...

Authors: Mihaela Pavlicev and Günter P. Wagner

Evolution by Squinches

Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth provides a lively, accurate, and delightful explanation of evolution in the form of a graphic novel.

Authors: Glenn Branch

An Archosaurian Adventure: Integrating the Evolutionary History and Paleoecological Context of the Dinosaurs

Authors: David M. Lovelace

Editorial

Authors: Niles Eldredge and Gregory Eldredge

Historical Biogeography: Evolution in Time and Space

Biogeography is the discipline of biology that studies the present and past distribution patterns of biological diversity and their underlying environmental and historical causes. For most of its history, biog...

Authors: Isabel Sanmartín

A Global Perspective of the Variables Associated with Acceptance of Evolution

The controversy of biological evolution due to conflicts with personal beliefs and worldviews is a phenomenon that spans many cultures. Acceptance of evolution is essential for global advancement in science, t...

Authors: Benjamin C. Heddy and Louis S. Nadelson

An Introduction to Evolutionary Developmental Biology

Authors: Katherine E. Willmore

Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Evo-Devo): Past, Present, and Future

Evolutionary developmental biology (evo–devo) is that part of biology concerned with how changes in embryonic development during single generations relate to the evolutionary changes that occur between generat...

Authors: Brian K. Hall

Heterochrony: the Evolution of Development

Heterochrony can be defined as change to the timing or rate of development relative to the ancestor. Because organisms generally change in shape as well as increase in size during their development, any variat...

Authors: Kenneth J. McNamara

Evolution and Religion: Attitudes of Scottish Bioscience Students to the Teaching of Evolutionary Biology

In a questionnaire-based survey, the proportion of Glasgow University first year biology students who rejected evolution in 2009–2011 was about 7%, similar to the previously reported average figure for 1987–19...

Authors: Ronan Southcott and J. Roger Downie

A Century of Progress in Evolutionary Genetics

Authors: Diddahally R. Govindaraju

The Geography of Evolution and the Evolution of Geography

Insights into the geography of life have played a fundamental role in motivating major developments in evolutionary biology. The focus here is on outlining some of these major developments, specifically in the...

Authors: Bruce S. Lieberman

The Geography of Speciation: Case Studies from Birds

Our understanding of the origin of species, or speciation, is sometimes viewed as incomplete, a “mystery of mysteries.” We in fact know a lot about speciation, especially when we consider its two basic compone...

Authors: Robert M. Zink

Using Marine Snails to Teach Biogeography and Macroevolution: The Role of Larvae and Dispersal Ability in the Evolution and Persistence of Species

While some marine animals are capable of traveling great distances, many have limited mobility as adults and spend the majority of their lifetimes in a small geographical area or may even be cemented to a sing...

Authors: Jonathan R. Hendricks

The (Paleo)Geography of Evolution: Making Sense of Changing Biology and Changing Continents

During the voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, Charles Darwin quickly realized that geographic isolation led to significant changes in the adaptation of local flora and fauna (Darwin 1859). Genetic isolation is one of t...

Authors: Joseph G. Meert

Assessing “The Framework” for Kindergarten Through Fifth Grade Biological Evolution

Authors: Ron Wagler

The Sorites Paradox, “Life,” and Abiogenesis

The ancient Greek philosopher Eubulides of Miletus drew attention to the impossibility of defining a point of transition between two states or conditions at opposite ends of a continuum. The ensuing “drawing t...

Authors: Barend Vlaardingerbroek

Children’s Intuitive Teleology: Shifting the Focus of Evolution Education Research

Research has shown that children usually provide teleological explanations for the features of organisms and artifacts, from a very early age (3–4 years old). However, there is no consensus on whether teleolog...

Authors: Kostas Kampourakis, Eirini Palaiokrassa, Maria Papadopoulou, Vasiliki Pavlidi and Myrto Argyropoulou

Improved “Origami Bird” Protocol Enhances Japanese Students’ Understanding of Evolution by Natural Selection: a Novel Approach Linking DNA Alteration to Phenotype Change

Authors: Takahiro Yamanoi, Kazuomi Suzuki, Masaharu Takemura and Osamu Sakura

Toward Tracing the Tangled Paths of Genes During Development

Authors: Diddahally R. Govindaraju

Species’ Geographic Distributions Through Time: Playing Catch-up with Changing Climates

Species’ ranges are often treated as a fixed characteristic, rather than a fluid, ever-changing manifestation of their ecological requirements and dispersal abilities. Paleontologists generally have had a bett...

Authors: A. Townsend Peterson and Bruce S. Lieberman