Adapting teacher training to new evolution research approaches

70 Evolution teaching is difficult “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution (Dobzhansky, 1973) it is, however, a tricky topic for teaching as most learners come to it with previous knowledge and it is fraught with misconceptions (Bishop & Anderson, 1990). And of course evolution teaching is a contentious issue (Skoog, 2005). Evolution is the chapter by which biology –up to then mainly ontological and descriptive became explanatory. The questions that were “what is this species, this structure?” –moved towards conceptual questions “How did this species appear? Why did this species acquire this particularity? What are the forces that cause species to evolve in certain ways?” (Wooley and Lin, 2005). The main questions in molecular biology research nowadays are of the type “what are the underlying mechanisms?”