Teleological pitfalls in reading evolutionary trees and ways to avoid them

Schramm and Schmiemann Evo Edu Outreach (2019) 12:20 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12052-019-0112-3 Evolution: Education and Outreach CURRICULUM AND EDUCATION Open Access Teleological pitfalls in reading evolutionary trees and ways to avoid them Thilo Schramm* and Philipp Schmiemann 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. Keywords: Evolutionary theory, Teleology, Phylogenetic tree, Learning process Background In modern biology, evolution and evolutionary analyses play an increasingly important role (Futuyma 2013; Taylor et al. 2018), further corroborating Dobzhansky’s claim that evolution is biology’s unifying principle (Dobzhansky 1973; Futuyma 2013; Kelemen 2012). However, students at all educational levels struggle to grasp the central concepts of evolutionary biology, which hinders their understanding of biology in general (Abrams and Southerland 2001; Ariew 2003; Cunningham and Wescott 2009; Gregory and Ellis 2009; Kattmann 2008; Werth 2012). As evolutionary trees are the most direct representation of macro-evolutionary processes and are used as hypotheses concerning the relative relatedness of species, they are an indispensable tool in the learning and communication about evolution (Baum et al. 2005; Meisel 2010; Nehm and Kampourakis 2014). The concepts *Correspondence: Thilo.Schramm@uni‑due.de Biology Education, University of Duisburg-Essen, Universitätsstraße 5, 45141 Essen, Germany of reading and interpreting evolutionary trees are poorly understood by students of biology, similar to how they find it difficult to understand evolution (Baum et al. 2005; Gregory 2008; Kummer et al. 2016; Omland et al. 2008). The theory of evolution is known to spark controversies globally, regardless of country or culture. The acceptance of the theory of evolution in a population varies between different countries, with some countries showing a high percentage of acceptance (80% in France, 75% in New Zealand) to some countries showing lower percentages of acceptance (54% in Missouri, US; 17% in Malaysia) (Campbell 2018; Friedrichsen et al. 2018; Lay et al. 2018; Quessada and Clément 2018). In addition, the share of the population holding creationist beliefs also varies between the states and regions. It has been reported that the acceptance of creationism and intelligent design is on the rise in different countries (Reiss 2018). The level of acceptance of the theory of evolution and its wide range is attributed to different factors, including religious views, cultural traditions, geographical diversity, and individual proficiency (Borgerding and © The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/ publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Schramm and Schmiemann Evo Edu Outreach (2019) 12:20 Deniz 2018; Deniz and Borgerding 2018). Accepting evolution and understanding its concepts are closely linked. However, the tendency to think teleologically hinders student understanding of the theory of evolution (Barnes et al. 2017; González Galli and Meinardi 2011). In this work, we aim to present theoretical considerations about the teleological pitfalls in teaching how to read evolutionary trees, based on data from earlier studies. These pitfalls will be structured into three parts: two major cognitive hurdles—the great chain-of-being and the complexity idea—and troublesome diagrammatic properties of evolutionary trees. In addition, we present different approaches to overcome these pitfalls. Teleology The concepts and processes of evolutionary biology seem to be poorly understood by high-school students, members of the public, and even post-secondary students and graduates of biology (Gregory 2009; Nehm and Schonfeld 2007, 2008). One of the fundamental difficulties in learning evolutionary biology is that human beings tend to see the world from a purpose-driven and goal-oriented perspective (Gregory 2009; Kelemen and Rosset 2009). This might be because we expect other living beings, processes, and inanimate objects to behave as humans would, with planned and purposeful actions (Mead and Scott 2010a, b). Thus, it is not surprising that not only novice learners but also other humans tend to see evolution as a purposeful and directed process (Catley et al. 2010; Kampourakis 2014; Kelemen 2012). Teleological thinking is a way of thinking wherein objects or processes behave with the underlying intention to fulfill their specific goal (Kelemen 1999a; Rosenberg and McShea 2008). This notion is specifically strong in children; however, it persists through their high school and university years (Gregory 2009; Kelemen and Rosset 2009; Southerland et al. 2001; Trommler et al. 2018). Furthermore, in teleological explanations, inanimate objects or parts of living beings (such as organs) are often falsely attributed with consciousness and goal-directed actions (Tamir and Zohar 1991). The teleological bias occurs in students during their preschool years when trying to understand many aspects of the natural world. Children at this age typically view (...truncated)