In this article, the educative value of scientific biographies will be explored, especially for non-science major college students. During the "Scientist's life and thought" course, 66 college students read nine scientific biographies including five biologists, covering the canonical scientific achievements in Western scientific history.…

This paper reports evidence that learners commonly develop a notion of chemical stability that, whilst drawing upon ideas taught in the curriculum, is nevertheless inconsistent with basic scientific principles. A series of related small-scale studies show that many college-level students consider a chemical species with an octet structure, or a…

Philosophers of biology have long argued that Darwin's theory of evolution was qualitatively different from all earlier theories of evolution. Whereas Darwin's predecessors and contemporaries explained adaptation as the transformation of a species' ''essence,'' Darwin explained adaptation as the selective propagation of randomly occurring…