Talk about an interesting day in the age of electronic information! This afternoon in a listserv I belong to, I read about a report by the National Academy of Sciences on the teaching of evolution in the classroom. There were two news articles, but I wanted to read the primary source. On the opening page of the National Academy of Sciences website, I found the news release from the Academy. It is in conjunction with the new book Science, Evolution, and Creationism. I followed that link and found out that I could download a PDF version of the book – for free! There was also a podcast. Guess what I’ll be reading/listening to over the weekend, and it all was available within a few minutes.
When I was teaching middle school science, evolution was in the district curriculum (and it is now in my state’s standards in biological sciences), and I can’t imagine teaching life science or biology without using evolution as an underlying principle. But as an undergraduate chemistry major, I never had the opportunity to formally study the theory of evolution. So my knowledge of evolution has accumulated from a variety of sources over the years.
Staying up-to-date on topics such as evolution is a lot easier with the Internet, but sometimes there is too much of a good thing. If you Google “evolution” for example, you get over 170,000,000 hits! Or — you could log into NSTA’s SciLinks, search on the word “evolution” and get a list of websites related to topics such as “biological evolution” or “evolution and adaptation.” Here are a few of my favorites.
Understanding Evolution is a comprehensive site from the University of California Museum of Paleontology. This could be the basis for a complete course, study group, or self-study. The teacher link in the right margin is a tremendous resource with a link to a searchable database of lesson ideas and a link called “conceptual framework” which is actually a set of essential questions around which to organize a unit! Many individual components of this site are noted separately in the SciLinks database, but if you go to the main site, you can see just how comprehensive it is. I would start with click on the Evolution 101 link for a tutorial on evolution. This would also be appropriate for students.
Another good source is Evolution from PBS. Even if you don’t have access to the video, the web-based resources are very good and visually stunning.
NSTA has a set of Evolution Resources,with links to the above websites as well as to position papers and other resources and articles.
I wonder how many people have actually read any of Darwin’s writing? Darwin’s The Origin of Species is not an easy read, but it is the primary source! The page has links to his other works, too.
A colleague of mine recently visited the Galapagos Islands and said it was a life-altering experience. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there, but Galapagos on the NSTA site is a great collection of background information, classroom investigations, and resources for teaching evolution.
If anyone else is reading the National Academy book, perhaps we could use this site to begin a discussion?