Students’ views of biological evolution: looking at the literature

There is little doubt that biological evolution, or ‘evolution’ for brevity, has fascinated humans since the development of our ideas about science. Testament to this is the large number of studies that investigate the gulf between the scientific understanding and the general public’s views about evolution (e.g. see Glaze & Goldston, 2015). In 1973, Dobzhansky famously argued that the process of biological evolution is fundamental to a complete understanding of biology. He argued that it provides a framework to understand past and future events in the living world and unifies the study of life on Earth. Teaching evolution in schools Evolution has, for over 100 years, been assigned the status of a scientific theory, that is, an idea with a convincing body of evidence, accumulated over time, which gives it support (Palmquist & Finley, 1997). That is not to say that the processes of evolution are fully understood, but there is no doubt within the scientific community that