lpetrich

It may be difficult to produce large-scale macroevolution in a classroom, but there may still be some sorts of classroom exercises that are good for illustrating evolution and related principles. Even some hands-on ones for little kids.

One good one would be some exercises in comparative anatomy and classification. These would start with a lot of pet animals and garden plants and other familiar species.

Thus, schoolkids would take dogs and cats and mice and rats and cows and horses and birds and turtles and snakes and frogs and fish and make lists of features of them. And see how they themselves compare to these creatures.

Teachers would assign features to list, and as students get more proficient, they can come up with their own features to use. Examples:

What is the body covered by?
What's on the end of the fingers/toes?
What kind of teeth?
How many limbs?
Tail?
Wet-skin nose?
Whiskers?

Taking X-rays would be useful here, because these would reveal additional features: the bones.

The class would get into such questions as to whether human arms and bird wings are comparable to the front legs of four-legged animals. And whether this front-leg modification happened more than once.

The teacher would also point out that what's important for classification are features that are shared and distinctive -- having eyes, a nose, and a mouth are examples of shared but undistinctive features in these examples. However, only some of the examples have hair or feathers, making hair and feathers useful for classification.

This classification exercise can be extended as more species are covered, such as arthropods. I recommend calling spiders and scorpions and other arachnids "broad-sense insects" as opposed to the six-legged "strict-sense insects"; a class exercise would be to count their limbs and eyes and otherwise compare them.

Fossils would also be handled with this perspective; teachers ought to be prepared for comparisons of trilobites to pillbugs and brachiopods to clams and scallops.

Some species would be difficult to classify; it may be hard to get very far in classifying flowering plants beyond some of the more obvious groupings.

A successful student should get some idea of classification methods and comparative anatomy; this can serve as a basis for discussions of evolution, and how a classification can be interpreted as a family tree, with different descendants acquiring different features.

I'm not the world's best pedagogue, however; I wonder how such a curriculum might work out in practice.

[ March 31, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

BLoggins02

Fundies would have a field day with this.

"You're indoctrinating our children into the Devil!!"

Automaton

"DON'T INDOCTRINATE OUR KIDS!!! That's what you get for not having Faith that the Bible is the Absolute Truth and Word of God."

Straight Hate

"But they both have bones..."

"SACRELIGIOUS BLASPHEMY - we'll pray for your soul!"

In all seriousness, I like what you've described.

tgamble

On the contrary, cretinists would love it. they'd go.

"see? see? All that desing. you think that all that happened by blind random chance? you think monkeys turned into humans and life came from rocks?"

copernicus

Richard Dawkins took an interesting pedagogical approach to evolutionary theory in his book, The Blind Watchmaker. He created a simple computer program that manipulated 9 "genes" to produce different evolutions of 'biomorphs'--graphical depictions of body shapes. Users of the program generated different evolutionary developments by altering the genes to favor certain visual characteristics. Dawkins' visual parameters mimicked the way in which environment tends to select certain genes for survival. I thought that his approach was extremely useful in conveying an intuitive appreciation of how evolution works independently of "intelligent design".