"Biology teachers often fail to recognise misconceptions (Ruhr University Bochum, 4 Feb 2022). “What drives evolution?” asks the subtitle. “Many students have misconceptions about this question.” So do teachers, the article warns, and yet many of them are unprepared to help students overcome their lying eyes.
Random changes that result in a survival advantage – the principle of evolution is not in line with our intuition and experience. Biology teachers are therefore often confronted with misconceptions among students. Only about half of the teachers recognise them correctly and can take appropriate countermeasures.
For his Master’s thesis at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Tim Hartelt conducted a heartfelt survey to find out how widespread this crisis has grown. He interviewed 182 teachers and teachers-in-training, reading them statements about evolution (some of which were corrupted with teleological ideas) and asked them if they noticed any “misconceptions.” Those who did were asked what they would do to take countermeasures. The results were, as the quote above says, alarming: only half the interviewees were prepared to respond to a misconception, such as
“Cheetahs have become faster and faster because they have realised that it is necessary” – this statement should make teachers sit up and take notice when they teach the principles of evolution. Many students have incorrect ideas about it. They fail to recognise the principle of random variations that represent a survival advantage and instead assume that evolutionary processes are directed towards a goal, that a species has unchanging traits, that useful characteristics are inherited, or they anthropomorphise organisms by assuming that they act consciously. “In everyday life, such concepts are sometimes helpful, but scientifically they are inaccurate,” says Nina Minkley. “Teachers need to diagnose them in biology lessons and take targeted countermeasures, because they otherwise get in the way of a scientifically correct understanding.”
After a century of Darwin-Only education from earliest childhood to graduate school, how can it be that so many students and their teachers are so uninformed about the creative power of the Stuff Happens Law? The result must have been exasperating to Hartelt, who after years of training in the cult of Darwin is well on his way to achieving his dream job of becoming a respected Darwin shaman. He left the lab with renewed purpose to do something about it.
Hartelt, and his trainer Minkley and another enforcer published their recommendations in Science Education 3 Feb 2022. They elaborate on the persistent myth of teleology and what forms it takes.
There must be something perverse in human nature that cannot see the logic of random chance creating all the beauty and diversity of life.Teleological explanations are explanations “in which some property, process or entity is explained by appealing to a particular result or consequence that it may bring about” (Lennox & Kampourakis, 2013, p. 421). Additionally, teleological explanations may involve goal-directedness, purpose, an external designer, or the internal needs of individual organisms (Bishop & Anderson, 1990; Kelemen, 2012). Teleology is pervasive because it is fundamental to how people interpret the world around them. In everyday life, people perceive human actions as goal-directed or human-made artifacts as constructed for a specific purpose (Kelemen, 2012). Such social experiences can be associated with a teleological cognitive bias.
