Introduction
Having been born in 1991, Jurassic Park captured my imagination not only as a film, but also as a complex novel by Michael Crichton that touched on evolution, genetics, and chaos theory. While I can’t say that my 8th graders are poring over the novel, the legacy of Jurassic Park lives on, inspiring an interest in paleontology and fossils to this day with incarnations like the recent summer blockbuster Jurassic World. Dinosaurs easily fascinate middle school students, but the mechanics of evolution is another story. Evolution mainly involves the deceptively simple concept proffered by Charles Darwin: evolution by the process of natural selection. This process explains how organisms gradually change over time to become better adapted to their environments by passing along beneficial traits to their progeny.
In the United States today we see an inherent contradiction between the role of the country as a leader in the global economy with regard to science and technology, contrasted against the acceptance and understanding of science in the popular consciousness. One key area of flagging public awareness in the United States is biological evolution. Evolution orders the natural world. In order to create a generation of informed citizens, educators must convey the importance of evolution.
Despite the evidence and universal acceptance of the theory of evolution by the scientific community, only 32% of the American public hold the opinion that human evolution is “due to natural processes such as natural selection.”1 There is a great need to correct the record and put students in a position to benefit from a firm grasp of evolutionary science.
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