Evaluating Non-STEM Students’ understanding of Evolution: Basis for designing Pedagogical Intervention

Teaching human evolution, for it to yield fruitful results, should be initialized by understanding the perspective of the learners. This study was conducted to aid in achieving that objective, and also to provide ways for educators to come up with strategies that can be perceived and appreciated by learners, particularly those who are not inclined with science. The majority of the respondents are believers in the theory of human evolution. Most of the respondents expressed their belief that modern humans are successors of ape-like organisms. The majority of the same set of informants mentioned their need for clarity about the stages that humans underwent during the course of history, while almost all of those respondents stated that the utilization of various graphic materials to elucidate these evolutionary concepts. It was recommended that educators engage in learning methods that call the attention and those that can be easily understood by the students

The business model as a generative replicator

This paper proposes a new conceptualization of business model (BM) that rigorously exploits the important insights this notion offers and links them to related views developed in economics and business studies. We develop the foundations of a BM concept consistent with the principles of generalized Darwinism (GD) and with contributions already developed within this framework. Thus, we demonstrate the relevance of GD as a unifying framework for developing the evolutionary theory of firm and industry. We suggest analysing BM as a generative replicator hosted by the firm, which structures interactions between the members of this organization and the social entities of its industrial environment. We argue that GD allows us to clarify the nature and boundaries of the BM concept and to specify its relationships to other key evolutionary concepts, such as organizational routines.

Teaching Evolutionary Concepts in Elementary School

Charles Darwin would be pleased to know that elementary school children in states that have adopted the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are expected to demonstrate their understanding of several core evolutionary concepts, including trait variation and inheritance, fossils and extinct organisms, common ancestry, natural selection, and adaptation. However, he might also wonder how this is accomplished in the demanding 21st-century science curriculum. In files linked to this article, we provide four lesson plans – with engaging examples, natural selection games, and other interactive activities – that were designed to cover the NGSS Disciplinary Core Ideas in evolutionary biology for grades 3–5, in two one-hour lessons. The lesson plans were developed by college students under the guidance of evolutionary biologists and in consultation with elementary school teachers, and then field tested in elementary school classrooms, as described in an accompanying research article.

Developing & Testing Curricula for Teaching Evolutionary Concepts at the Elementary School Level

Evolution by natural selection is key to understanding life and of considerable practical importance in public health, medicine, biotechnology, and agriculture. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) include natural selection among several evolutionary concepts that all third-graders should know. This article explores a novel approach to developing and testing curricula for teaching natural selection and related concepts to children. College students developed lesson plans with specific evolutionary learning objectives based on the NGSS and taught them at elementary schools. Learning was assessed with a pre/post-test design, and a subset of students was retested after two years. After just two hours of instruction and active-learning activities, students of all three grade levels tested (grades 3–5) demonstrated substantial improvement in their understanding of evolutionary concepts. Students who were retested in grade 5 scored higher than fifth-graders who had not participated previously. The most challenging concepts for all grade levels were common ancestry and natural selection, but fifth-graders showed more improvement than third- and fourth-graders. If this finding is substantiated by further research, an adjustment to the NGSS schedule might be warranted. Spacing evolutionary biology concepts out might be a better strategy than concentrating them all in grade 3.

Woolsey’s Snakes

This chapter applies the evolutionary concepts explained in Chapter 2 to a series of case studies of nonstate adversaries. It explores how specific nonstate adversaries have adapted and evolved since 1993; these include Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and the Lebanese Shi’a group Hezbollah. The chapter shows that each of these irregular armed groups, despite differences of ideology, origin, operating environment and structure, are all responding in their own ways to a fitness landscape created by Western dominance of a particular, narrow, technology-centric form of warfare. Their patterns of adaptation indicate the ways in which evolutionary processes identified in the previous chapter have played out in practice.