LITERARY HISTORIES OF THE NATURAL HISTORICAL BOOK

Inspired in part by the coincident bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the sesquicentennial of The Origin of Species in 2009, scholars have been hard at work these last ten years writing substantial histories of nineteenth-century natural history and geology. These histories include exceptional books by scholars trained primarily in literary studies: Cannon Schmitt's Darwin and the Memory of the Human (2009); Daniel Brown's The Poetry of Victorian Scientists (2013); and Gowan Dawson's Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (2007). With a few notable exceptions, however, the books I was invited to review here are written mostly by historians of science. And yet they are no less literary for that. All are marked by a tacit, pragmatic adoption of actor-network theory; by the extraordinary resources of the Darwin Correspondence Project and online databases of British periodicals; and often, too, by glossy illustrations. Further, nearly all of these histories share a methodological investment in what we call the history of the book, including all the economics of publishing (formats, sizes, fonts, prices, print runs, reviews, sales, generic conventions) and a political and heuristic stake in popularization and the general reading public. While Darwin (and Lyell, Herschel, Hooker, Huxley, and Spencer) remain at the center of the discussion, the empirically-minded history-of-the-book approach and investment in everyday readers reconstructs and legitimates a robust popular science that was engaged with, but not subordinate to, and often more liberal than the elite science of the X Club, the Royal Society, and other exclusive institutions. With the help of museums, lectures, tour guides, and other natural scientific literature, everyday readers produced their own knowledge of evolution, stratigraphy, speciation, animal emotion, and the sex life of plants.

Boosting Students’ Attitudes & Knowledge about Evolution Sets Them Up for College Success

Students who enter college with a solid grounding in, and positive attitudes toward, evolutionary science are better prepared for and achieve at higher levels in university-level biology courses. We found highly significant, positive relationships between student knowledge of evolution and attitudes toward evolution, as well as between introductory biology course achievement and both precourse acceptance of evolution and precourse knowledge of evolution, among students at a medium-sized private northeastern university. Teachers who scant the teaching of evolution or who do not foster good attitudes toward evolution are compromising their students’ potential for success in science at the college level.

The Evolution of Knowledge and Knowledge of Evolution

SummaryHuman knowledge is a human creation: we seek to make sense by creating patterns, which are tested in various ways and with differing degrees and kinds of rigour. For each individual cognition is a scarce resource, but different people can apply it in diverse ways and to diverse subjects: each application has its own range of convenience and its own dangers. Thus the growth of knowledge is an evolutionary process of trial and error, the rate and content of which depends on its organization, both conscious and unconscious. In seeking to develop knowledge methodological choices are unavoidable, but often unconscious. As Simon pointed out, all evolution, of life, economic and social systems, and ideas, depends on quasi-decomposability, the limits of which can never be fully anticipated. Thus uncertainty is inescapable - but it is a condition of innovation.

Models and Strategies for Teaching Evolution to Non-Science Majors in a Seminar Format

A cornerstone of paleontological education is the topic of evolution. While formal evolutionary biology classes made up of lectures and labs are essential for students of biology and paleontology, these classes are closed to most non-science majors because they often require multiple prerequisites. Because of a combination of anti-evolution cultural forces and shortcomings in evolution-based education at the K-12 level, many American college students have not received accurate or effective evolution instruction before entering college. Because a working knowledge of evolution is essential for developing biological scientific literacy, some colleges and universities now offer seminar-style evolution courses designed for non-science majors that can help reverse this trend. Seminars such as these offer students the added opportunity to develop more sophisticated writing, speaking, and critical-thinking skills in the context of evolutionary biology. This chapter highlights two successful course models and two shorter course modules, provides lists of teaching resources, and details a number of different writing and discussion-based pedagogical strategies as they apply to teaching evolution in a seminar setting.

The Relation of High School Biology Courses & Students' Religious Beliefs to College Students' Knowledge of Evolution

We examined how college students' knowledge of evolution is associated with their self-described religious beliefs and the evolution-related content of their high school biology courses. On average, students entering college know little about evolution. Religious beliefs, the absence of evolution-related instruction in high school, and the presence of creationism-related instruction in high school were all associated with significantly lower scores on an evolution exam. We present an ordered logistic model that helps to explain (1) students' diverse views and knowledge of evolution, and (2) why college-level instruction about evolution often fails to significantly affect students' views about evolution.