The Yellow Brick Road leads nowhere...

[Ron Kaneen]

Where I recently finished my undergrad degree, evolution is a manditory
course and is designed to be taken in the final year of the program as its
intent is to tie everything together.

While the course does focus to a degree on natural selection (Darwin,
Malthus, etc.), things such as speciation and species concepts (including
the phylogenetic species concept), mass extinctions, inter- and
intraspecific interactions and co-evolution are also discussed.  The
instructor also invites experts from other departments in to explain thigs
such as human evolution and the evolution of the universe (we can't be an
expert in everything).

Do you think that this is a better way to handle the topic of evolution?
It is not discussed as fact, theory or fiction and we are not asked to
believe it if we don't want to, but it allows for some light to be shed on
the subject.


Colin Kaneen



At 11:58 99/08/13 -0400, you wrote:
>I want to concur with John Grehan that there is a big problem with how we
>at the University level teach evolution and that as a result high school
>teachers are poorly equiped to educate their students.  I have been working
>with high school biology teachers lately and I have found that, while they
>generally have the gist of the Darwinian natural selection, they have no
>knowledge of the phylogenetic relationships of living organisms, for how we
>study those relationships, or for how knowledge of phylogeny helps us study
>the origin and maintenance of organismic traits.  This may sound like too
>much to expect of high-school teachers and students, but I believe that
>even a shallow grasp of phylogenetic thinking provides a valuable
>conceptual structure on which students can hang other knowledge.