“Biology remains platonic in many ways”. What about Biology Instruction? Effects on Teaching Variational Evolution

The contemporary evolutionary theory (TE) was founded on the “population thinking, one of the most important concepts in modern biology ” (Mayr, 2001) introduced to science by C. Darwin. According to this, in contrast to platonic views: “What we find among living organisms are not constant classes (types) but variable popula-tions. Every species is composed of numerous local populations. Within a population, in contrast to a class, every individual is uniquely different from every other individual” (Mayr, 2001). According to Lewontin (2002) this scientific reorientation which was imposed even before the variational mechanism for evolution was defined, is the true revolution of Darwin. It was a change of the object of study from the qualities of the groups in the variation among their in-dividuals. But, as Lewontin believes “biology still remains platonic in many ways”. As it is known, many researches are concerned with pupils ’ difficulties in understanding natu-ral selection. Among the reasons discussed, is the assertion that pupils and students have typo