Teleological pitfalls in reading evolutionary trees and ways to avoid them

Abstract

Despite evolution being the central idea in modern biology, considerable variation exists in its acceptance around the globe, and reports of anti-evolutionist and creationist movements are widespread. Educators need to re-evaluate the approaches used for teaching students about evolution in order to facilitate its understanding and acceptance. A major hurdle in understanding the concepts of evolution is that humans tend to view the world in a teleological way. Learners create obstacles to understanding the concepts of evolution by ascribing purpose or intent-driven actions to animals, processes, or inanimate objects. An indispensable learning tool in the field of evolution is the evolutionary tree, as it is a direct representation of evolutionary hypotheses. The ability to read and understand this form of representation is prerequisite to fully understanding the concepts of evolution. In this work, we present issues faced when attempting to teach students to read evolutionary trees as well as troublesome diagrammatic properties that may foster teleological thinking. Further, we present teaching practices and methods that may be used to avoid the above challenges (from diagrammatic and instructional perspectives). With this work, we aim to raise awareness among educators about the different potential teleological pitfalls in the field of teaching how to read evolutionary trees, and to present different approaches for minimizing teleological reasoning and thinking in evolution education.

Teleology and evolution education: introduction to the special issue

“…Future perspectives for evolution education and research also emerge from the three contributions in this special issue devoted to reading evolutionary trees, videobased analyses of classroom practices, and the teaching of evolution to young children. Focusing on the teleological pitfalls of reading evolutionary trees, Schramm and Schmiemann (2019) hypothesize that teleological mindsets, tree design, and fragmentary knowledge about evolution interact and argue that experimental research approaches are needed to investigate these interactions. This is a valuable research perspective for the interface between teleology and representational competence.…”

Modeling and Measuring Tree-Reading Skills in Undergraduate and Graduate Students

“…To develop items for the testing instrument, we analyzed existing tree-thinking diagnostic instruments regarding the compatibility of the item formats and item content, with the aim of focusing on different aspects of tree-reading based on the STREAM ( Schramm et al. , 2019 ).…”

“…We compiled all these published works on tree-reading skills and developed a synthetic tree-reading model that brings together all the published tree-reading systems, which we named the synthetic tree-reading model (STREAM; Schramm et al. , 2019 ).…”

Seeing the Woods for the Trees Again: Analyzing Evolutionary Diagrams in German and US University-Level Textbooks

“…Adding information can make it easier to interpret trees, and again, some kinds of information or characteristics can hinder the learning process. As in most fields of biology, teleological misconceptions [38] are prevalent in the context of evolutionary trees [39], but additionally, more general misconceptions about evolution can be supported by ambiguous diagrams [19].…”