We examined whether a single visit to an evolution exhibition contributed to conceptual change in adult (n = 30), youth, and child (n = 34) museum visitors’ reasoning about evolution. The exhibition included seven current research projects in evolutionary science, each focused on a different organism. To frame this study, we integrated a developmental model of visitors’ understanding of evolution, which incorporates visitors’ intuitive beliefs, with a model of free-choice learning that includes personal, sociocultural, and contextual variables. Using pre- and post-measures, we assessed how visitors’ causal explanations about biological change, drawn from three reasoning patterns (evolutionary, intuitive, and creationist), were modified as a result of visiting the exhibition. Whatever their age, background beliefs, or prior intuitive reasoning patterns, visitors significantly increased their use of explanations from the evolutionary reasoning pattern across all measures and extended this reasoning across diverse organisms. Visitors also increased their use of one intuitive reasoning pattern, need-based (goal-directed) explanations, which, we argue, may be a step toward evolutionary reasoning. Nonetheless, visitors continued to use mixed reasoning (endorsing all three reasoning patterns) in explaining biological change. The personal, socio-cultural, and contextual variables were found to be related to these reasoning patterns in predictable ways. These findings are used to examine the structure of visitors’ reasoning patterns and those aspects of the exhibition that may have contributed to the gains in museum visitors’ understanding of evolution.

Background: How acceptance of evolution relates to understanding of evolution remains controversial despite decades of research. It even remains unclear whether cultural/attitudinal factors or cognitive factors have a greater impact on student ability to learn evolutionary biology. This study examined the influence of cultural/attitudinal factors (religiosity, acceptance of evolution, and parents' attitudes towards evolution) and cognitive factors (teleological reasoning and prior understanding of natural selection) on students' learning of natural selection over a semesterlong undergraduate course in evolutionary medicine.Method: Pre-post course surveys measured cognitive factors, including teleological reasoning and prior understanding of natural selection, and also cultural/attitudinal factors, including acceptance of evolution, parent attitudes towards evolution, and religiosity. We analyzed how these measures influenced increased understanding of natural selection over the semester. Results:After controlling for other related variables, parent attitude towards evolution and religiosity predicted students' acceptance of evolution, but did not predict students' learning gains of natural selection over the semester. Conversely, lower levels of teleological reasoning predicted learning gains in understanding natural selection over the course, but did not predict students' acceptance of evolution. Conclusions:Acceptance of evolution did not predict students' ability to learn natural selection over a semester in an evolutionary medicine course. However, teleological reasoning did impact students' ability to learn natural selection.

Modern women's reproductive lives vary considerably, in a patterned fashion. Although cultural factors are important, across societies-even across speciesthere exist strong patterns predicted by life history theory. For example, the shorter life expectancy e 0 is at birth, the earlier it pays in biological terms to reproduce. Few factors analyzed in women's life patterns in more than 170 nations influence the divergence. Studies on other species assume that (a) the variation is species specific and (b) the conditions are at equilibrium; the relationship between life expectancy and age at first birth is strong, but varies across populations, and is frequently not at equilibrium. Human patterns, like those of other species, may have ecological or life history underpinnings. The answers we find may have policy implications for women's lives and fertility. C ross-culturally and across time, women's lives-their reproductive costs and benefits-vary. These differences are patterned rather than random (e.g., Low, 2005aLow, , 2005bLow, , 2007 and produced by the interplay of natural selection imposed by ecological conditions and cultural constraints. In early biological models attempting to reflect ecological influences on fertility, the cost of succeeding (and thus the per capita cost of producing successful offspring) was only influenced by conspecific density; this is clearly too

Neisseria gonorrhoeae causes the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea exclusively in humans and uses multiple strategies to infect, including acquisition of host sialic acids that cap and mask lipooligosaccharide termini, while restricting complement activation. We hypothesized that gonococci selectively target human anti‐inflammatory sialic acid‐recognizing Siglec receptors on innate immune cells to blunt host responses and that pro‐inflammatory Siglecs and SIGLEC pseudogene polymorphisms represent host evolutionary adaptations to counteract this interaction. N. gonorrhoeae can indeed engage multiple human but not chimpanzee CD33rSiglecs expressed on innate immune cells and in the genitourinary tract––including Siglec‐11 (inhibitory) and Siglec‐16 (activating), which we detected for the first time on human cervical epithelium. Surprisingly, in addition to LOS sialic acid, we found that gonococcal porin (PorB) mediated binding to multiple Siglecs. PorB also bound preferentially to human Siglecs and not chimpanzee orthologs, modulating host immune reactions in a human‐specific manner. Lastly, we studied the distribution of null SIGLEC polymorphisms in a Namibian cohort with a high prevalence of gonorrhea and found that uninfected women preferentially harbor functional SIGLEC16 alleles encoding an activating immune receptor. These results contribute to the understanding of the human specificity of N. gonorrhoeae and how it evolved to evade the human immune defense.