Seeing the Forest Through the Trees: Helping Students Appreciate Life's Diversity by Building the Tree of Life

Staub, Nancy L.; Pauw, Peter G.; Pauw, Daniel

doi:10.1662/0002-7685(2006)68[149:stfttt]2.0.co;2

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 9 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The data presented here are a first step in understanding how to better incorporate macroevolution into biology education, thus facilitating the tree-thinking habit of mind called for by biologists and education researchers (O'Hara 1988, Gilbert 2003, Goldsmith 2003, Baum et al 2005, Catley et al 2005, Catley 2006, Staub et al 2006, Sandvik 2008). Scientifically literate students should be as familiar with the patterns and processes of macroevolution as they are with the mechanisms of change in gene frequencies in populations (Catley 2006).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…More important, do they reinforce or reduce common misconceptions of evolutionary processes? Such information is vital to understanding how best to Education incorporate macroevolution into biology education and to facilitate the "tree thinking" called for by a number of researchers (O'Hara 1988, Gilbert 2003, Goldsmith 2003, Baum et al 2005, Catley et al 2005, Catley 2006, Staub et al 2006, Sandvik 2008. Tree thinking is a habit of mind that uses the history of life on Earth as its first line of evidence while providing students with a hierarchical view of the natural world.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Seeing the Wood for the Trees: An Analysis of Evolutionary Diagrams in Biology Textbooks

Catley¹,

Novick²

2008

BioScience

149

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Education Graphical representations of evolutionary relationships among taxa have a long history in biology. The pervasive effect of two particularly influential representations, the "Chain of Being," rooted in the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, and the "Tree of Life," epitomized by Haeckel's trees of the late 1800s, can still be seen in contemporary representations. The Chain of Being encompasses the physical and metaphysical world in an unbroken chain that stretches from nonliving matter all the way to "supernatural" beings. It is possible to trace a connection from the Great Chain of Being depicted in Didacus Valades's 1579 Rhetorica Christiana (Lovejoy 1936), through Bonnet's (1745) scala naturae (scale of being) and Lamarck's (1809) extension of the "chain" in Philosophie Zoologique, to Haeckel's trees of the late 1800s. The Chain of Being and Tree of Life are founded on the concept of a linear evolutionary progression from simple to complex, with a distinctively teleological perspective. Although many other forms-both hierarchical and otherwise-have also appeared in the scientific press over the past 300 or so years, many current representations of evolution mirror the great chain as a process of orderly progression (Nee 2005).This study documents the type, frequency, and distribution of evolutionary diagrams in 31 contemporary textbooks aimed at a wide array of readers from middle school to the undergraduate level. Today, practicing biologists use phylogenetic trees in the form of cladograms and phylograms to hypothesize and study phylogenies. Some would argue that phylograms are a subset of cladograms, but they are based on quite different methodologies and underlying philosophies. The topologies, however, can be identical, except for nonequal branch lengths. These attempt to convey the inferred degree of relatedness based on, for example, the number of nucleotide substitutions between taxa.We found that cladograms (sensu stricto) were well represented (n = 505) in textbooks. Phylograms, in contrast, were very rare (n = 6). We also found a large number of other types of diagrams (n = 192) that at best are open to multiple interpretations and, at worst, are ambiguous or based on long discredited evolutionary mechanisms. Because there were so few phylograms (four examples in two introductory biology textbooks for majors and two examples in two botany textbooks), we excluded those diagrams from our analyses.Although cladograms began to appear in high-school textbooks in the early 1990s, there has been virtually no research examining the functionality of these or other types of evolutionary diagrams in life science pedagogy. How well do evolutionary diagrams in textbooks reflect current thinking in evolutionary biology? More important, do they reinforce or reduce common misconceptions of evolutionary processes? Such information is vital to understanding how best to Kefyn M. Catley (e-mail: kcatley@wcu.edu

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeing the Wood for the Trees: An Analysis of Evolutionary Diagrams in Biology Textbooks

Catley¹,

Novick²

2008

BioScience

149

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…(http:// www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/explorations/tours/Trex). Also recommended are ways of teaching about evolution consistent with modern practice in systematics: using "ancestral" and "derived" instead of "primitive" and "advanced" when referring to organisms and characters, which promotes thinking about evolution as a tree rather than a ladder (and also follows the good example of Darwin, who admonished himself, "Never use the words higher or lower"); including exercises that define clades by synapomorphies and map such characters onto phylogenies (see Staub et al 2006 and ENSI: Making Cladograms); and clarifying that a cladogram or phylogenetic tree is a hypothesis, given the data, and that a node on a cladogram is a hypothetical ancestor, not an actual ancestor for which we should expect to find a fossil representative. To attain scientific literacy, students need to learn that evolution is a branching process, that paleontologists are not searching for missing links but for transitional features, and that evolutionary research is conducted in a way that enables scientists to use independent lines of evidence to converge on robust conclusions about the history of life.…”

Section: Figure On Adaptive Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Transforming Our Thinking about Transitional Forms

Mead¹

2009

Evo Edu Outreach

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A common misconception of evolutionary biology is that it involves a search for "missing links" in the history of life. Relying on this misconception, antievolutionists present the supposed absence of transitional forms from the fossil record as evidence against evolution. Students of biology need to understand that evolution is a branching process, paleontologists do not expect to find "missing links," and evolutionary research uses independent lines of evidence to test hypotheses and make conclusions about the history of life. Teachers can facilitate such learning by incorporating cladistics and tree-thinking into the curriculum and by using evograms to focus on important evolutionary transitions.

show abstract

“…For this reason, Baum et al (2005) recommend that evolution education include clear and explicit instruction on building trees as well as on reading relationships and traits depicted in phylogenetic trees. Although a wide range of research has identified students' difficulties with interpreting these trees (O'Hara 1997, Lopez et al 1997, Meir et al 2007, Novick and Catley 2007, Perry et al 2008, Sandvik 2008, only a few have explored students' abilities to construct them (Staub et al 2006, Halverson 2011. Our research has focused on students' abilities to construct phylogenetic trees from a set of familiar organisms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teaching undergraduate students to draw phylogenetic trees: performance measures and partial successes

2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Background: An in-depth understanding of the process and products of evolution is an essential part of a complete biology education. Phylogenetic trees are a very important tool for understanding evolution and presenting evolutionary data. Previous work by others has shown that undergraduate students have difficulty reading and interpreting phylogenetic trees. However, little is known about students' ability to construct phylogenetic trees. Methods: This study explores the ability of 160 introductory-level biology undergraduates to draw a correct phylogenetic tree of 20 familiar organisms before, during and after a General Biology course that included several lectures and laboratory activities addressing evolution, phylogeny and 'tree thinking'. Students' diagrams were assessed for the presence or absence of important structural features of a phylogenetic tree: connection of all organisms, extant taxa at branch termini, a single common ancestor, branching form, and hierarchical structure. Diagrams were also scored for how accurately they represented the evolutionary relationships of the organisms involved; this included separating major animal groups and particular classification misconceptions.

show abstract

Seeing the Forest Through the Trees: Helping Students Appreciate Life's Diversity by Building the Tree of Life

Cited by 10 publications

References 9 publications

Seeing the Wood for the Trees: An Analysis of Evolutionary Diagrams in Biology Textbooks

Seeing the Wood for the Trees: An Analysis of Evolutionary Diagrams in Biology Textbooks

Transforming Our Thinking about Transitional Forms

Teaching undergraduate students to draw phylogenetic trees: performance measures and partial successes

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About