The paper presents an experimental study that examines the conditions required for news about behavioral genetics to activate genetic essentialism beliefs. Nine hundred sixty-five adults living in the USA were randomly assigned to read either a control news article or one of the three versions of a news story about behavioral genetics. The…

Genetic essentialism of race is the belief that racial groups have different underlying genetic essences which cause them to differ physically, cognitively, or behaviorally. Apparently, no published studies have explored if belief in genetic essentialism of race among adolescents differs after many weeks of formal instruction about different…

The inclusion of Nature of Science (NOS) in the science curriculum has been advocated around the world for several decades. One way of defining NOS is related to the family resemblance approach (FRA). The family resemblance idea was originally described by Wittgenstein. Subsequently, philosophers and educators have applied Wittgenstein's idea to…

After the rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity in 1900, the biologists who began studying heredity, variation, and evolution using the new Mendelian methodology--performing controlled hybrid crosses and statistically analyzing progeny to note the factorial basis of characters--made great progress. By 1910, the validity of Mendelism was…

Textbook descriptions of the foundations of Genetics give the impression that besides Mendel's no other research on heredity took place during the nineteenth century. However, the publication of the "Origin of Species" in 1859, and the criticism that it received, placed the study of heredity at the centre of biological thought. Consequently,…

Although historical changes in scientific ideas sometimes display striking similarities with students' conceptual progressions, some scholars have cautioned that such similarities lack meaningful commonalities. In the history of evolution, while Darwin and his contemporaries often used natural selection to explain evolutionary trait gain or…

Life sciences became Biology, a formal scientific discipline, at the turn of the nineteenth century, when it adopted the methods of reductive physics and chemistry. Mendel's hypothesis of inheritance of discrete factors further introduced a quantitative reductionist dimension into biology. In 1910 Johannsen differentiated between the…

Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, had wide and varied interests. They ranged from exploration and travel writing to fingerprinting and the weather. After reading Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," Galton reached the conclusion that it should be possible to improve the human stock through selective breeding, as was the…

This paper aims at exploring (a) whether preschoolers recognize that offspring share physical traits with their parents due to birth and behavioural ones due to nurture, and (b) whether they seem ready to explain shared physical traits with a "pre-biological" causal model that includes the contribution of both parents and a rudimentary…

This historical narrative describes the foundation of education as established by J. A. Comenius (1592-1670). It explores the transfer of Comenius' tenets, utilized and modified through the years, up to their impact upon the ground-breaking experiments of G. Mendel (1822-1884), "the father of genetics". It explores the questions of…

Previous research showed that primary school children held several misconceptions about genetics of concern for their future lives. Included were beliefs that genes and DNA are separate substances, with genes causing family resemblance and DNA identifying suspects at crime scenes. Responses to this work "blamed" the mass media for these…

This study aimed to explore secondary students' explanations of evolutionary processes, and to determine how consistent these were, after a specific evolution instruction. In a previous study it was found that before instruction students provided different explanations for similar processes to tasks with different content. Hence, it seemed that…