Evolution Makes More Sense in the Light of Development

Abstract

We highlight some important conceptual issues that biologists should take into account when teaching evolutionary biology or communicating it to the public. We first present conclusions from conceptual development research on how particular human intuitions, namely design teleology and psychological essentialism, influence the understanding of evolution. We argue that these two intuitions form important conceptual obstacles to understanding evolution that should be explicitly addressed during instruction and public communication. Given that a major issue in evolution is understanding how very different forms may share common ancestry -antievolutionists have argued that this is inconceivable -we suggest that evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), which provides concepts and evidence that large morphological change is possible, could be used to address the intuitions that organisms have fixed essences (psychological essentialism) and that their structure indicates some kind of intentional design (design teleology).

Accepting, understanding, teaching, and learning (human) evolution: Obstacles and opportunities

“…In more detail, essentialism is the belief that membership in a category with sharp boundaries leading to observable properties stems from an unobservable underlying causal reality or fixed, immutable core “essence” that is transmitted from parent to offspring—and has been viewed as a barrier to understanding population‐level phenomena in evolution because it causes people to overlook individual differences within a species (variation) and randomly occurring differences between parents and offspring (inheritance) (Evans et al, ; Gelman and Rhodes, ; Shtulman and Calabi, ; Herrmann et al, ; Kampourakis and Minello, ; Emmons and Kelemen, ). Essentialist reasoning arises arguably as early as infancy (Setoh et al, ), and sources of evidence that young children are biological essentialists include that they privilege species kind over similarity when reasoning about the properties of novel organisms and that they assume an organism will retain its species identity across changes in appearance, upbringing, and environment (Shtulman and Calabi, ).…”

“…Teleology includes beliefs that organisms have the traits they currently possess because those traits perform functions or roles that aid survival, that natural phenomena are intentionally created (or designed) for a purposeful goal, albeit not necessarily by a human agent (though often times the agent—and end goal—is thought to be supernatural), and that organisms can make conscious decisions to change (Jensen and Finley, ; Kelemen, ; Evans et al, ; Kampourakis and Minello, ). This may be a serious issue if it reflects an underlying belief that the only explanation of why traits evolve is functional; need‐based rationales tend to have a mistaken corollary assumption that transformational changes occur within an animal's lifetime and are genetically heritable (Kelemen, ).…”

“…Over a quarter of teachers in one study agreed with the erroneous idea that we can never test predictions about events in the past related to evolution (Moore and Kraemer, ). Although not explicitly referring to human evolution, Kampourakis and Minello () suggest that evolutionary developmental biology (evo‐devo) could be an important educational tool to help students for overcoming essentialist and teleological misconceptions by helping them understand why species do not have fixed essences (because organisms exhibit plasticity, accommodation, and eventually evolution of form) and why they are not designed (because they exhibit idiosyncrasies that are products of their evolutionary history).…”