Conceptual change and evolutionary biology: A developmental analysis

Given the reputation of the United States as a world leader in science, it is ironic that its scien-tifi c establishment is experiencing a public backlash. The most acrimonious manifestation of this backlash has been the U.S. public’s reaction to the Darwinian theory of evolution. With only 40 % of the U.S. public accepting evolutionary explanations for human origins, the United States ranks second to last in acceptance rate among 34 industrialized nations. The rate in most of Europe, in contrast, ranges from 70 % to 80%, whereas Japan’s is 78 % (Miller, Scott, & Oka-moto, 2006). Explanations for this phenomenon abound, ranging from religious belief to poor scientifi c training to politicization. According to Mazur’s (2005) analysis of several national U.S. samples, Christian religiosity, especially fundamentalism, signifi cantly outweighs other contrib-uting factors, including educational level and political orientation. Further, after controlling for these factors, including religiosity, Mazur (2005) found that acceptance of evolution was not independently related to other measures of science knowledge, dogmatism (closed-mindedness), geographical locale, or ethnicity. In this chapter, these overt largely creationist rejections of evolutionary origins will be linked to a parallel phenomenon, well known to science teachers and science education research-ers, which is students ’ misunderstanding of natural selection (e.g., Bishop & Anderson, 1990). A developmental framework will be used to help explain the emergence of both sets of ideas in communities with different religious orientations and differing degrees of scientifi c exper-tise. By invoking a developmental perspective, cognitive scientists and science educators who are interested in the emergence of early scientifi c ideas can pinpoint the critical junctures at which commonsense, scientifi c, and religious reasoning meet, and trace the ensuing conceptua