In 1988, Robert O'Hara coined the now ubiquitous phrase "tree thinking" to highlight the importance of cladistics for proper evolutionary reasoning. This accessible phrase has been taken up widely in the professional, popular, and educational literatures, and it has played an important role in helping spread phylogenetic thinking far…

Water is one of the most common molecules in the universe. Water is polarized, but it has many states besides the normal tetrahedron depicted in standard biology texts. Water is also the most ubiquitous molecule on Earth, the universal solvent. It is the internal and external habitat of cells. Ecologically, water is contiguous with life and the…

This essay offers a rationale for deploying ecofeminist science fiction stories as object-oriented thought experiments in science and environmental education, with particular reference to developments in genetics and evolutionary biology, and their implications for human (and more-than-human) reproduction and kinship in the period following the…

The Red Queen effect takes its name from a scene in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass," where Alice and the Red Queen are constantly running, yet remain in the same place relative to one another. In competitive ecosystems, this translates to the idea that, "in order to survive, a technology solution must evolve faster just…

Jenna Scaramanga and Michael Reiss, in their article, "Evolutionary Stasis: Creationism, Evolution and Climate Change in the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum," examine multiple editions of science materials produced by Accelerated Christian Education, ranging from the 1980s to the 2010s. They find that the materials offer a…

Evolution is the central concept of biology and key to a comprehensive understanding of any complex biological interaction. It has proven to be a particularly difficult subject for both teachers and students. Hybrid teaching environments have the potential to support students in learning about complex topics and simultaneously enable researchers…

When students think of evolution, they might imagine T. rex, or perhaps an abiotic scene of sizzling electrical storms and harsh reducing atmospheres, an Earth that looks like a lunar landscape. Natural selection automatically elicits responses that include "survival of the fittest," and "descent with modification," and with…

This Forum article extends themes and critical observations within Jenna Scaramanga and Michael Reiss's article "Evolutionary Stasis: Creationism, Evolution and Climate Change in the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum," published in "CSSE." The Accelerated Christian Education curriculum is a package of homeschool units…

This lesson used the correspondence of Charles Darwin as an exploration of nature of science (NOS) in a historical context. Specifically, we used his original correspondence about his "provisional hypothesis" of pangenesis as a novel way to explore a scientist's social community. Darwin's community of friends and colleagues in the…