1. From facts to data.

Facts are “things that exist, events that occurred, or contingencies that may occur” and data are defined as “given factual representations of reality” [35]. Without getting into a semantic discussion, as “facts are considered to be true while people are fallible”, but yet the “reading” of data depends on human mediation, “data” are be considered “human-developed factual subsets of primary information” [36].

In the case of this hominin skull lab, the set of physical, tangible skulls constituted the facts, and students drew on skulls as the source of primary data. One teacher remarked:

“One of the most invaluable things is having that complete set, not obviously entirely complete, but from a geological standpoint, [the lab] covered a really good piece of ground there, and being able to see that progression laid out in front of you in a spectrum is really powerful. It’s not three, it’s not seven, it’s like 13 [skull replicas] that really cover the diversity of hominid species that the students can look at. Being able to take their own data, and trust that someone else that they know collected similar datapoints on other skulls was probably part of that.”

The inherent quality of the material raw facts, in combination with the act of observation and measurement was an experience for each student that constituted a “primary informing.” While not all student measurements were accurate, and were at times corrected by the lab instructor, each student learned first-hand how to collect–and was made responsible for collecting–quality primary data. In order to obtain primary factual data, quality assurance–in this case in the form of lab instructor assisting and correcting the student measurements–is necessary [37]. One teacher explained:

“There used to be a theory that said that the ability to follow direction is the heart of the lab. To match your data with the expected data is the Holy Grail. The understanding now, which I agree with, is that the ability to find the data, see what it says, and then analyze its validity is probably what’s more important.” “People will,” he argued, “gravitate towards that personal experience” as it will “stick with people.” “If there is some way to demonstrate through action how this works, it typically is learned better.”

Praising the lab for giving students a taste of real science, one educator remarked:

“It takes a long time to go through the measurement phase. What a lot of teachers do, especially in settings where you are crunched for time, is you give them the data. But the actual measuring helped them appreciate how detail-oriented science can be, and maybe even how mundane sometimes it can be if you have to do this a thousand times, or replicate after replicate. It allowed them to appreciate a little bit what real science is, because they don’t always get that. They think science is memorizing processes and terms and vocabs, and not actually doing the process. They got to do the process this time.”

Even from the vantage point of one of the more well-funded schools, one teacher commented:

“It’s hard to find data that are going to support [evolution], that you can actually measure and look at, and you’re providing that–so that’s a really invaluable service, because it’s a topic around which people will have a difficult time running some sort of inquiry-based lesson.”

Furthermore, the measurement modules positively animated the students: “It was a really great lab. I remember they all had a lot of fun, they all got better at taking the measurements over time.” Similar impressions were relayed by another teacher: “It was a wonderful experience for them, and it’s an excellent way to motivate them.” Thus, in a subject that is taught abstractly if at all, collecting primary data on each hominin’s adaptations fully engages a student’s mind and reinforces the science behind evolutionary biology.

Lastly, interacting face-to-face with the set of skulls, students also recognized an inherent existential quality in the skulls. Students would realize, according to one teacher: “‘It must be real–I’m looking at these skulls!’”

2. From data to information.

The lab furthermore charged students to produce information from the data. Information is commonly understood “as data that are endowed with meaning and purpose" [38]. As this lab prompts students to themselves observe, measure, describe, calculate, discuss, and analyze, e.g. by comparing and contrasting data points, by answering the stated questions or generating new questions, or by explaining their answers, they were charged with generating information. Prompting their thought processes were the guiding questions put to each student and the plenary discussions throughout the lab. Highlighting these skills that the students hone, one teacher commented:

“I really liked that they are measuring in [the lab] and doing some analysis. It’s important to look at data and draw conclusions from it, and that’s a tough skill for a lot of students. So to give them one more opportunity to do that is always a good thing.”

Deriving information by making sense of the data and furnishing informed answers, was a real challenge for students as one teacher recalled:

“Interestingly enough, the students began to really believe that learning for real is hard. They had to put all this thought into it, graph it, and work. They were like: ‘Man, I thought this was supposed to be fun.’ ‘Well, you did have fun, I’m glad you had fun, and also this is a school. You learn things from the experience.’”

Combining the elements in order to tell a coherent story was the next cognitive process potentiated by the lab.

3. From information to knowledge.

Knowledge is commonly regarded as being a “fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, expert insight and grounded intuition that provides an environment and framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information.” Originating and applied in the mind, it requires the knower to organize information into a coherent framework or system. Knowledge, according to Blackler, must furthermore be situated and contested to determine whether it is factual [39]. Knowledge generation, in the context of this lab, involved engaging in a dialectical process with the lab instructor and ordering and synthesizing the information into sensible theses.

Teachers indeed reported that the lab had anchored many of the exposed students. Particular learning objectives met by the lab, according to the teachers, included basic concepts of evolution such as adaptive speciation, descent with modification, common ancestry, and survival of the fittest (see B. Teacher-reported learning outcomes section below). In sum, it allowed students to achieve, as one teacher put it, “a better, deeper understanding of the topic.”

i. Referencing the skulls and lab’s findings.

To gauge the extent to which the lab had been a formative experience for the students, teachers were asked whether in later discussions the students had referenced the skulls as tangible facts. All seven teachers attested their students had done so, albeit to varying degrees. “People were pretty impressed by the skulls, and definitely referenced some of the different morphological features of them and some similarities and differences when we talked about it later” commented one teacher. Another noted: “While it’s a very specific piece of evolution as a topic, it was something that we could refer back to after we had already done the lab. Just in terms of science in general, it was an experience they could remember.”

The degree of knowledge acquisition is also reflected in one teacher’s observation that in his class several students had invoked skull-specific examples in the context of other scientific subjects discussed in the class. Another teacher remarked that the lab “gave them empirical numbers that they could work with. I definitely noticed that some of my students were able to go back to one specific piece of data that for some reason resonated with them and could use that as evidence for evolution.” Just how vividly some students would recall learning objectives of the lab, and to what lab element she attributes this outcome, is illustrated by this teacher’s testimony:

“Originally they had an assignment where they had to summarize every lab and activity for the whole year. They had to tell us what the purpose was, what the procedure was, what our methods were, and what our final outcomes and conclusions were. They were not supposed to use their materials, it was just an in-class assignment. The student who had to summarize this lab was able to remember the three variables measured, facial prognathism, cranial capacity, and opisthion index. They were able to grasp what we did, three months after we did the activity without referencing the materials, which was a factor of the experience of it. It wasn’t just this is data, we are graphing it, it was physically manipulating the skulls.”

One teacher predicted that the lab-imparted knowledge would stick: “I’ve had kids from last semester this semester come up and ask: ‘Oh, are you gonna do the skull thing again?’ So in a semester, or in a year, or in 5 years, this will be something they will remember from biology class.”

ii. Differences in learning outcomes of current vs. prior biology classes.

There was unanimity among the teachers that the level of understanding on the subject of human evolution was more elevated in their current lab-exposed class vis-à-vis prior classes that did not benefit from the lab. For one, in the lab students generate substantiated findings as they are made responsible for observing, measuring and generating meaning from facts, which presents a radical departure from prior pedagogy that presented facts and theories as established and a smooth, non-controversial path to knowledge. The lab’s evidence-based approach was characterized by one teacher: “From a general nature of science perspective, [the lab] made clear that these explanations and hypotheses that we come up with are not just subjective people’s guesses. We do measurements, these are standardized, we do dating, and its different types of evidence all coming together.” Thus, mimicking the scientific process positively reinforced the confidence students had in the theory of evolution.

“Seeing the skulls and measuring them, hearing where they came from, and what we look at and measure to compare and date them to piece together this timeline, gave students one more example of evidence for evolution and that scientists are not just guessing, that we have empirical evidence that we use to support the claims that we make.”

The lab’s function as offering a cognitive foundation was emphasized by one teacher who explained: “I would say next to non-existent would be the degree to which my students in the past could have talked about human evolution. A lot of my current students would use this as a way of framing their thoughts around it.” Similarly, another teacher noted: “There is more understanding because they are actually able to communicate about human evolution, actually having concrete things to say.” This point was echoed by another teacher, who held that the students were now

“able to articulate the changes. [The lab] gave students a roadmap for discussing the process of evolution, particularly in humans, from Lucy to us, and from a Neanderthal to us. Whereas a past class said: ‘There was us and a caveman, and my mom says there was a monkey, and I don’t understand how the monkey got to us, and what the caveman had to do with it, isn’t the caveman us?’ This gave them a visual clue, something they could hold, to say: ‘Ok, I see how these are different. You’re telling me based on their age they were around at the same time, I get that they are different, I see how they are related.’ It was very helpful.”

Another teacher described the lab’s potential to be linked with other related themes in biology:

“I especially liked all of the connections to other anatomical features: the use of hands and language, the development of the nervous system that sets us apart from other organisms. That really came back into play, at least in my AP class, through most recent discussions of the human nervous system and the evolution of ganglia and all of these different forms of nervous tissue of different organisms. A lot of students saw how this hyper-specialization surrounding the use of tools, and development of language really set certain species apart from others.” One teacher summed up the lab’s effect on students: “There is definitely a deeper and longer-lasting understanding observable with this class. They now understand for life!”

4. From knowledge to acceptance.

The literature, as discussed in the paper’s background section (see C. Effects of human evolutionary biology instruction on students), has sought to understand the interplay between knowledge of human evolution and acceptance thereof. Where authors do concur is that knowledge of a theory does not automatically translate into acceptance. Factors of learning and acceptance highlighted by teachers included a student’s appreciation of the skulls as hard evidence, his/her immersing themselves in the experience and following the lab processes, his/her perceived veracity of methods and findings, his/her personalization, internalization and alignment of the new knowledge with his/her existing belief system, and his/her ability to overcome a negative bias.

Teachers associated student acceptance for human evolution with the quality of evidence furnished by the lab. The issue wasn’t as much student denial of human evolution, argued one teacher, as much as the failure of educators to supply hard evidence and a persuasive delivery. “A lot of [students] just don’t know”, explained another teacher, and are skeptical due to misconceptions such as humans having descended from modern apes. “They are on the fence or against it because they think there is no evidence for it. So once they are presented with some evidence, they are more likely to believe it.” Another teacher observed that “A couple of students did make this movement towards believing that there is a lot to be investigated here, that people have actually looked at, and it’s not a made-up theory, there’s hard evidence behind it.” Another teacher thought that those unconvinced might have needed more time to contemplate the meaning of the lab’s findings: “Due to deeply embedded cultural ideas, holding the evidence in their hands helped a lot of them. The hands-on experience with fossil casts convinced them, and even those still in disagreement may eventually come around.” Tangible evidence, therefore, plays a big role.

For other teachers it was engaging learners in the whole process, from data collection to synthesis, which persuaded learners: “There was a group of kids in the class who were like: ‘Evolution isn’t real because we weren’t monkeys,’ and then they went through this and they had a much better appreciation: ‘Oh, I see how it went!’” One educator credited the “data-driven method at arriving at the conclusions.”

Furthermore, students first need to agree with the lab’s methods and findings in order to accept that also humans indeed evolved. In other words, accepting the veracity of the process was a prerequisite to accepting the results. One instructor noted that in his class, “There was nobody who walked out and said: ‘This was all made up!’ Everybody was pretty convinced that that was real science. And that was very compelling, particularly in this population. It was very convincing.” More often than not students “agreed” with the conclusion that also Homo sapiens are products of evolutionary pressures one teacher noted, and “in most cases it was a fairly strong agreement.” “There were certainly more people who believed it after the experience than before,” reported another. This observation was echoed by another teacher who recounted: “As a result of this unit as a whole with this [lab] as a supporting agent, they were less towards the Adam and Eve camp and more towards the evolution camp.”

Students, also skeptics among them, now saw how evolution “was scientifically plausible.” One teacher pointed to the skeptical “fence-sitters” in the group: “A couple of students, 2 or 3, were very hesitant at first. But the day after we met they came up to me and said: ‘You know, I was on the fence there–but not anymore.’” For these students, the lab’s findings had sunk in.

One teacher, who presided over a class representing the full range of worldview profiles, characterized the lab as “convincing:”

“To what extent was the doubt factor reduced, mitigated, or else completely trounced? It certainly required more than just the skulls, although it was a big part. More labs, and a variety of evidence [would be needed]. [But the lab] was very compelling. At the very least, someone would say to you that they believe in evolution and given the skulls and given this and given that they certainly understand how. Student X would say: ‘A mouse is related to a whale, and I can see now how a fossil would show that.’ I think they could tell you an abundance of evidence that proves that it must be true.”

An additional prerequisite for accepting the reality of human evolution is that students would need to personalize, internalize and align the new knowledge with their existing belief system. If need be, the new information would need to be reconciled with the preceding world view. Here, as well, bias came into play. For example, according to one teacher, some students were not completely convinced to the point of saying: “Ok, it definitely happened!” One teacher noted that among students who remained doubtful: “there were a couple who were still holding on to a bias against those ideas.”

In summary, the teachers’ first-hand observations describe the nature of the students’ learning progression. Fig 1 below depicts the process students underwent to attain each epistemic level, and also points out limiting factors highlighted by the teachers as is discussed in the next section.

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Fig 1. Lab-induced epistemic processes and states.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0160054.g001

5. Enabling/impeding factors to acceptance of human evolution.

Teachers highlighted two principal enabling or impediments to learning about–and acceptance of–human evolution: academic ability/skill and a negative bias.

i. Academic ability and skill.

One teacher, who referred to Bloom’s taxonomy to explain the challenges he perceived as facing his class, cited the degree of cognitive skill as a notable learning limitation in his classroom:

“Students here at this school, specifically, struggle with anything above application. Analysis, we get there, but it’s a struggle, and synthesis, which is what, really, we’re asking them to do in an advanced Biology class, to synthesize all of these different data points and concepts into these very broad organizing principles, one of which is evolution, is a big struggle for them.”

This however was the only instance an interviewed teacher identified this particular limitation. For the other schools, all three learning domains and six hierarchical levels were exercised according to the interviewed teachers.

ii. Bias interference.

Bias, which may be defined as a preconception, predisposition or inclination to be for or against something, is often present, to varying degrees on a culturally controversial subject such as human origins. In some classrooms teachers noted little or no bias that would affect a student’s perception of the lab or stand in the way of the lab’s knowledge objectives. One teacher, for example, noted that in his class, “Most of those two classes were pretty open to it and were not coming at it with a whole lot of bias.” In other classrooms teachers observed a bias interference. The importance of cultural and academic background also came into play, as, explained by one educator, “A lot of students find it easier to rely on things they have been taught in their prior experience.”

Naturally, bias can cut either way. A teacher in a private school recounted: “This group of students especially has been very pro-evolution, so I never have had any push-back or any disagreement. They honestly saw it as an opportunity to get more evidence to go argue against people who didn’t understand evolution.” In one New Orleans’ Biology I class, “Nearly all of them agreed with the idea that species are transitioning, with only a few students in disagreement.” Also in a Catholic high school there was no implicit conflict reported between religion and science.ⁱ In an honors biology class for example, the teacher reported that her students were “pretty sure that evolution had occurred. Even a lot of them were religious, they said ‘I believe in God, I go to church, but this is where the evidence is.’ If anything it was a confirmation, a cool experience. ‘Now I have more evidence for these beliefs that a lot of people around me do not share.’”

Yet in other classes, students were reportedly “pretty split” on the subject of evolution.

“Kids on the first day of the evolution unit were like: ‘How do Adam and Eve relate to this?’, and I’m thinking it’s a fairy tale, it doesn’t relate to it really at all, it’s a cool story. I had some kids who were very against it, and they are very vocal, and I have kids who say evolution occurred, and they were very vocal.”

In one class exhibiting particularly diverse views, according to the teacher, a quarter of the class had accepted evolution due to prior knowledge, a cohort that he described as “the highest achieving and the best educated students that I received.” Their response to the lab was: “‘Been there, done that, it makes sense.’” The majority of students in that particular class were undecided, and there was reportedly a really small minority of students with preconceived notions opposed to accepting evolution: “I go to church every Sunday and they say [evolution] is baloney.” Just how “sticky” contextual bias can be, is revealed by student comments such as: “‘That can’t be true because my mom said it wasn’t true and that seems ridiculous!’” Yet this teacher found that even the skeptic’s mind could be changed: “They were malleable, much more so than I imagine if you were to go an hour outside of the city.” This teacher’s main strategy for circumventing bias is to shift student’s focus on knowledge objectives.

“The way I message is: ‘You can believe this or not believe this, but this is what you need to know to understand this scientific process that you will be tested on.’ And that actually, I found, it pushes the debate to the side, and we are just talking about the science. Given the urgency around testing, and the push for these students to really show high levels of mastery, they want to know that science, and they want to be able to demonstrate it at a really high level.”

Then,

“Everyone is focused on how do we memorize that, know it, explain it, and tell them the importance of it. So in that way, they are really focused on the science. Which means that for a lot of the kids, when I said: ‘Fossils show evolution,’ they said: ‘Oh yeah, all those skulls.’ ‘When he says proof of evolution, there were the fossils.’ So they are making that connection passively.”

Differing degrees of bias were reported by the educators. One teacher, who perceived her student’s views as rather entrenched, commented: “I think most of them thought the activity was interesting, but it didn’t necessarily change their mind about whether evolution occurred.” One teacher recounted that students in his class showed resistance to the lab’s very methods: “Actually, there were two or three students who were apprehensive about applying the same principles to humans.” In another class, the teacher noted that bias would not necessarily cause his students to ignore or deny facts: “They are not a crowd that vocally opposes evidence as it is given to them.”

In sum, the direction and degree of bias reportedly played a role in the student’s acceptance in the lab’s methods and findings, as illustrated in Fig 2 below.

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Fig 2. Bias direction and strength.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0160054.g002

1. Associating fossilized hominin crania with evolution.

The inherent empiricism of interacting with fossil hominin crania replicas was noted by each teacher, allowing students to appreciate that human evolution is evident in the fossil record. From the moment the students first enter the classroom on the day of the lab, the skulls at the front of the room stare back at them. “A lot of students are just jazzed to get something that appears as though it came right out of the ground,” remarked one teacher, “and some students take that in a distracted manner ‘Look at this skull I got here.’ That’s going to be common at least for a little while. But just about everyone buckled down.” After the fossils were introduced and first impressions were made, students were in a position to make the connection between fossilized hominin crania and evolution. “The lab itself was not an overarching lesson on evolutionary theory,” commented one teacher, “but instead a specific, yet quite personal, instance of evolution at work. For some students it was their first time seeing their own species’ skull, and the excitement was clear for every new group of students in this study.” Similarly, another teacher noted that the lab “gave them a physical, visual, kinesthetic way of connecting with evolution because it’s such an abstract idea at times. It’s hard to see in front of you like you can see a pH paper turning colors. [This lab] gave them a visual, physical, tactile-manipulation-of-the-skulls experience.”

2. Grasping “adaptive speciation”.

One principal theme of the lab is adaptive speciation, or evolutionary branching, a concept explored through anatomical analysis and comparison, i.e. measuring and interpreting three major anatomical adaptations expressed in different degrees across the eleven featured species. Although the skeletal analysis was limited to the skull, the cranial traits paint a clear picture of hominin evolution–from a small brained arboreal species to a large brained bipedal species, with robust Australopithecus variations emerging and eventually going extinct. One teacher commented: “They got to see the anatomy of it. So many of the skulls look much like ours, and seeing how it was different and why it was different helps their understanding.” In a similar vein, another teacher commented that “I really liked this discussion of anatomy as a feature that we can use to compare species. You can look at all kinds of forms, and get a pretty good understanding of where they fit in an evolutionary tree.” Indeed, within two classroom periods, this lab sufficiently enables the learners to induce the hominin’s temporal and relative order, yielding, according to one teacher, “a really good understanding of evolution as it actually occurred over time.” Another teacher referenced the lab’s phylogenetic tree exercise, in which, towards the end of the lab, students induce the position of each featured specie based on previously collected data and findings: “My favorite part was putting the skulls together in that phylogenetic tree” she stated.

Anatomical analysis and comparison furthermore clears up one major misconception of evolution: the linear version propagated by popular graphic of man slowly standing upright. “‘So we used to be a monkey or something like that?’” is a question students “always” reportedly asked one teacher. “No, we share ancestors” he then explains. “The lab does a good job showing the branching nature of evolution instead of this one thing becoming another”, he concluded. Another teacher described the same stumbling block, and how the lab helps students overcome this obstacle:

“They got to see real examples of anatomical changes. They have these misconceptions that it went from monkeys to humans, so [the lab] gave them ideas what came in between. That is a huge misconception that there were monkeys and one day one of them stood upright and suddenly we’re humans, and that is something they don’t understand is that things came in between and how they lived and what they looked like. So it really helps them see the anatomical changes and relate them to why the changes came about. What struggles were they facing that made it advantageous to have a larger brain, or a smaller brain, or to have a larger jaw or a smaller jaw?”

These observations were echoed by another teacher: “So instead of just thinking ‘Humans came from monkeys? That’s crazy!’–they were like: ‘Well no, there are these intermediate species, these other things happened, and it’s not really that simple of a story.’” Consequently, this teacher credited the lab with getting “a lot of them to start thinking about it, and thinking about it more critically.” In sum, students began to appreciate that evolution had elicited a far more multifaceted sequence of hominin taxa than hitherto commonly imagined or held.

3. Picturing “descent with modification” and “incremental change”.

Instead of first presenting the key theoretical aspects of evolution, and then investigating how this evolutionary theory is played out in this specific context (deductive approach), the inverse (inductive) method was applied. The facts–the skulls–came first. Theory, which revealed itself in the course of the lab, was thus an outgrowth. For example, to behold the great variety and similarities among the prime relics of hominin taxa is a cognitive aid towards accepting the principle of descent with modification. One teacher noted: “Most students certainly saw there were differences in the skulls, and that one skull looks like us. And the further back in time you go, the less the skulls look like us. And in between, there were some that kind of look like us, but kind of didn’t.” The notion sinks in that time renders malleable even bone. Another teacher remarked:

“it answered a key question for a lot of students which is: ‘Why does the monkey at the zoo never become a human?’ In other words, seeing how gradual this was, this took a really long time. And being able to hold something that was really old was helpful in them gaining an appreciation for that. That this is not a fast thing, and that is why a monkey at the zoo does not become a person.”

One teacher predicted that even after the summer holidays his students would have certainly retained that “the skulls were different, that some look like us, some didn’t, and that they certainly change over time.”

Another teacher described the realization that incremental change occurs over generations as a watershed moment among his students, also tying this insight to the bushy model of human evolution:

“The opportunity to first of all see and interact with the trajectory of human evolution was very powerful for many of the students who couldn’t conceptualize incremental change. Being able to see the plethora of skulls was very meaningful and really brought that to life. Secondly, and maybe the most impactful, was that the variety of skulls, in conjunction with the lesson, really made it clear that this was not a single trajectory, and that it was not a quick one at that. For them to see that there were lots of dead ends, that there were lots of simultaneous relatives, gave them a much deeper understanding of evolution.”

Thus, with empirical illustrations in hand, students peered back through the eons, the concept of descent with modification was made accessible, and a more nuanced, complex story came to light.

The lab served as a foundation from which the teacher could later extract further lessons. One teacher for example, who saw the lab as relevant to “our whole evolution unit”, used the lab as a springboard: “The subsequent discussions we had about what they saw, it was clear to them how and why changes came about, why there was modification, and why certain things were passed down and certain things were not.”

4. Comprehending “common ancestry”.

Once a student had accepted the possibility, even plausibility, that hominin lineages were not static but changed morphologically across time, the notion of common ancestry no longer required a leap of faith. One teacher thought the lab “did a good job of relating humans to our ancestors and to our closely related primates.” Furthermore, an array of skulls with some shared and some unique features begs the question of how they relate to each-other. Another teacher, who had positioned “common ancestry” as “a big buzzword for the year”, stated: “If you were then to ask them next August, after they have been on summer break, and they’ve really forgotten everything: ‘Did man come from monkey’, people would say ‘No.’ If you said: ‘Did we descend from a common ancestor’, most people would say ‘Yes.’”

The examples of nearly a dozen hominin species also offered a logical point of departure with which to comprehend common ancestry back through time. Admitting that it was beyond the expectations he had of his biology students, one teacher noted:

“Lately I had a couple [of] discussions with students where they were talking about finding it difficult to grasp the idea that life went from being molecules that were inanimate to being these animate molecules that are now spread through many different life forms. At least through [Ancient Ancestors] and through the work that you guys did, I think that most students were at least grasping this idea that human life shares these common ancestors that we interacted with, and there is evidence of that, and it’s not a logical jump to talk about how primates are more related to one another than flowers, and going backwards it creates this jumping off point for getting to this really difficult molecular question: ‘If that did happen, how did it happen, and how might we go about investigating it?’”

Thus, although the lab did not hammer home the idea that evolution is the central theme that ties together all living forms, the implication of a common ancestry far beyond hominins was a new realization for many students.

5. Understanding “survival of the fittest”.

The concept of the survival of the fittest, related to the idea of adaptive speciation and integral to a proper understanding of evolution, was furthermore demonstrated through the lab using our own genus. “It wasn’t just realizing how humans were a breed apart that sunk in,” explained one teacher, “the nature-species interplay also came to light with the realization that survival of the best adapted applied not only to distant ancestors but to humans, well even modern humans, opening up their minds to the fact that ‘Oh, humans have adaptations, too!’”

The lab also drove home the point that Homo sapiens are not excluded from the interaction between selective pressures and our adaptations. “It was mind-blowing to a lot of students that there were other hominids around at the same time, that they interacted with each-other, and there is evidence of these interactions”, recounted another teacher.

“And their imaginations ran wild with this idea of Neanderthals and humans shivering in the wintertime in caves. It was a really powerful, not just in social terms, but also in artistic and self-evaluative terms. With a lot of the extinction events that are happening now and the climate change that will happen in the future, there’s this circular going back to lots of species have died in the past, lots of species will die in the future, are we going to be one of the ones that die or survive? There’re lots of changes going on in earth’s climate now, there were a lot of changes to earth’s climate back then, how have those things affected the ways organisms have evolved?”

The lab thus effectively turned the index finger squarely at the inquirer: “There was a really cool social aspect to it as well” remarked the same educator. “We’re people studying people, and that falls underneath this branch of biology but it also falls in this branch of social science, and I think there were a lot of students who were really inspired by that mixture, which you don’t always get in your science class.” The implications begged further exploration.

The Darwinian understanding of fitness and survival was subsequently deepened by another teacher who, in consequent classes, pursued these themes: “There’s a misconception about natural selection and the strong people survive and everything else dies out when it’s not necessarily black and white like that. So that’s something I chose to focus on.” In sum, the lab also afforded the students a more nuanced understanding of “fitness”–one premised on adaptation.