Publications & Media

Academic Publications and Media

We actively publish our scientific outputs in peer reviewed journals in evolution education, science education, and the interdisciplinary human sciences.

We are also committed to advancing open science practices in educational design research, and feature our most current preprints as well as general audience science communications media below.

Featured Peer-Reviewed Articles

Are humans a cooperative species? Challenges and opportunities for teaching the evolution of human prosociality.

Hanisch, S. & Eirdosh, D. (2021). Are humans a cooperative species? Challenges and opportunities for teaching the evolution of human prosociality. The American Biology Teacher, 83 (6). https://doi.org/10.1525/abt.2021.83.6.356

Evolutionary anthropologists commonly describe humans as a highly cooperative species, based on our evolved socio-cognitive capacities. However, students and the general public may not necessarily share this view about our species. At the same time, fostering our ability to cooperate is considered a key foundation for achieving sustainable development, and students’ understanding of the conditions that enable or hinder cooperation is therefore an important learning goal in sustainability education. In this article, we describe a small classroom activity that explored students’ and preservice biology teachers’ preconceptions about the human capacity to cooperate around shared resources in comparison to the capacity of our closest relative, the chimpanzee. Results indicate that students and teachers had limited knowledge about the evolved human capacity for cooperation around shared resources in small groups, most often viewing chimpanzees as more capable of cooperation and sustainable resource use. Based on the results of this classroom intervention, we highlight important learning opportunities for educators in biology on teaching human evolution and human behavior, particularly as related to current challenges of sustainable development.

Cooperation as a causal factor in human evolution: a scientific clarification and analysis of German high school biology textbooks

Hanisch, S., & Eirdosh, D. (2022). Cooperation as a causal factor in human evolution: a scientific clarification and analysis of German high school biology textbooks textbooks. Journal of Biological Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/00219266.2021.2020875

Many evolutionary anthropologists view cooperation as core to the evolutionary success of our species. Concurrently, many sustainability scientists view cooperation as core to the future sustainable development of our species. When it comes to biology education, however, it is unclear how or if students are being engaged in these scientific perspectives. This article offers an overview of scientific perspectives regarding cooperation as a central causal factor in shaping human behaviour, cognition, and culture during human evolution. Against this background, we analysed 23 German high school biology textbooks with the aim to understand if and how cooperation is presented as a causal factor in human evolution and behaviour. Overall, the role of cooperation, especially the emotional and motivational aspects of cooperative behaviour, and the role of a cooperative social and cultural environment in shaping human traits, appears to be significantly deemphasized compared to the role of individual brain size and ‘intelligence’ in the evolution of our species. Furthermore, in sections on behavioural ecology, humans are hardly ever presented as an example of a highly cooperative species. Overall, textbooks show a diversity of strengths and weaknesses, from which we identify several learning opportunities in the appropriate integration of cooperation science within biology education.

Educational potential of teaching evolution as an interdisciplinary science

Hanisch, S. & Eirdosh, D. (2020). Educational potential of teaching evolution as an interdisciplinary science. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 13 (25). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12052-020-00138-4

Evolution education continues to struggle with a range of persistent challenges spanning aspects of conceptual understanding, acceptance, and perceived relevance of evolutionary theory by students in general education. This article argues that a gene-centered conceptualization of evolution may inherently limit the degree to which these challenges can be effectively addressed, and may even precisely contribute to and exacerbate these challenges. Against that background, we also argue that a trait-centered, generalized, and interdisciplinary conceptualization of evolution may hold significant learning potential for advancing progress in addressing some of these persistent challenges facing evolution education. We outline a number of testable hypotheses about the educational value of teaching evolutionary theory from this more generalized and interdisciplinary conception.

Causal mapping as a teaching tool for reflecting on causation in human evolution

Hanisch, S. & Eirdosh, D. (2020). Causal mapping as a teaching tool for reflecting on causation in human evolution. Science & Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-020-00157-z

Teleological reasoning is viewed as a major hurdle to evolution education, and yet, eliciting, interpreting, and reflecting upon teleological language presents an arguably greater challenge to the evolution educator and researcher. This article argues that making explicit the role of behavior as a causal factor in the evolution of particular traits may prove productive in helping students to link their everyday experience of behavior to evolutionary changes in populations in ways congruent with scientific perspectives. We present a teaching tool, used widely in other parts of science and science education, yet perhaps underutilized in human evolution education—the causal map—as a novel direction for driving conceptual change in the classroom about the role of organism behavior and other factors in evolutionary change. We describe the scientific and conceptual basis for using such causal maps in human evolution education, as well as theoretical considerations for implementing the causal mapping tool in human evolution classrooms. Finally, we offer considerations for future research and educational design.

Featured Preprints

Understanding Evolution As If By Design? The challenges and opportunities of reasoning about agency in evolutionary biology and society

Eirdosh, D. & Hanisch, S. (2022, preprint) Understanding Evolution As If By Design? The challenges and opportunities of reasoning about agency in evolutionary biology and society. OpenEvo Book Review and Commentary. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.26643.14884/2

Darwin’s theory of evolution provided a scientific explanation for the apparent design of adaptations in the natural world. In teaching students about evolution, educators sometimes rely on a contrast between ‘Darwinian evolution’ as a process of adaptation without purpose or goals, as opposed to adaptive design in the human realm, framed as a process driven by intentions. In his 2021, Cambridge University Press book, As if By Design: How Creative Behaviors Really Evolve, psychologist Edward Wasserman complexifies this simple dichotomy by exploring a selectionist account of human innovation through a collection of vignettes documenting stories of invention. Through these simple stories, Wasserman demonstrates that the “3 C’s”; the concepts of context, consequence, and coincidence, are helpful ingredients in the creation of scientifically adequate accounts of behavioral or cultural novelties. In this review, we briefly summarize the core argument from Wasserman, and reflect on the implications for students and teachers of evolution science.

Teaching for the interdisciplinary understanding of evolutionary concepts

Hanisch, S. & Eirdosh, D. (in review). Teaching for the interdisciplinary understanding of evolutionary concepts.Chapter in du Crest et al. (forthcoming). Evolutionary Thinking Across Disciplines.Problems and Perspectives in Generalized Darwinism.

Evolutionary concepts are used, with varying and arguable degrees of scientific utility, across a wide range of disciplines. Evolution education, however, remains overwhelmingly within the confines of biology education, when it is taught at all within general education. The reasons for this disciplinary myopism are complex, and normative guidance for curriculum designers is scarce. This contribution explores how understanding the structures of knowledge, or the organization of facts and generalizations in science, cognition, and education, may help illuminate the educational potential and evidence-informed pedagogical practices appropriate for teaching about the interdisciplinary application of evolutionary concepts.

A community science model for interdisciplinary evolution education and school improvement

Eirdosh, D. & Hanisch, S. (in press). A community science model for interdisciplinary evolution education and school improvement. Chapter in du Crest et al. (forthcoming). Evolutionary Thinking Across Disciplines. Problems and Perspectives in Generalized Darwinism

A generalized conceptualization of evolutionary processes allows for a view of the cognitive, behavioral, and cultural variation in our everyday lives as elements of diverse evolving systems. Such a view invites questions about how cultural evolutionary processes may favor or hinder the expression of variant thoughts and behaviors, any of which may be more or less valued by any given community. From an educational perspective, this implies an untapped potential for engaging students in understanding the cultural evolutionary dynamics of their everyday lives, schools, and broader communities. As a strategy to engage this potential, the Community Science Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology is developing a unique model of Community-Based Cultural Evolution (CBCE) for inter-institutional collaboration at the intersection of evolution education and applied school improvement efforts. Using advances in teaching for conceptual understanding and transfer of learning, the CBCE model aims to empower students to clarify, investigate, and collaboratively influence the cultural evolutionary dynamics of their own school and surrounding communities. The relationship between students’ evolving intuitive theories of school improvement, and the evolving scientific theories of school improvement scientists, provides a framework for understanding the development of student conceptions of cultural (and, perhaps, biological) change more generally. This chapter provides a conceptual foundation for exploring the claim that engaging students in reflecting on the cognitive, behavioral, and cultural evolutionary processes in their everyday lives provides new opportunities for school improvement and interdisciplinary evolution education initiatives. The practical and systemic challenges of this approach are clarified and future directions are outlined.

Additional publications

A Teacher's Guide to Evolution, Behavior, and Sustainability Science

Hanisch, S. & Eirdosh, D. (2020). A Teacher's Guide to Evolution, Behavior, and Sustainability Science. 2nd Edition. GlobalESD. http://guide.GlobalESD.org

This guide is intended for educators, students, and others, from all subjects and grade levels, interested in advancing Education for Sustainable Development through the lens of Evolutionary Anthropology. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a UNESCO-led global program. The aim is to promote skills and understandings in students in relation to the challenges of global sustainability, enhancing the capacity of communities to take action towards shared values and goals. Many approaches, frameworks, and teaching materials already exist worldwide to support these aims. Our approach to ESD is informed by the human sciences that offer a valuable lens for understanding the challenges and solutions to sustainability from local to planetary scales of social organization. The purpose of this guide is to offer an introduction to the big ideas and core understandings from across the evolutionary, behavioral, and sustainability sciences. A set of practical tools for teachers can help you to adapt and design lessons for classrooms anywhere in the world.

Evolving cooperation and sustainability for common pool resources

Hanisch, S., Eirdosh, D., & Morgan, T. (2023). Evolving cooperation and sustainability for common pool resources. In X. Sá-Pinto, A. Beniermann, T. Børsen, M. Georgiou, A. Jeffries, P. Pessoa, et al. (Eds.), Learning evolution through socioscientific issues (pp. 127-147). Aveiro: UA Editora. doi:10.17617/2.3486776.

Sustainable resource management is often a matter of managing common-pool resources (CPRs), which include the social and material resources shared by groups of individuals. CPRs can be prone to overuse through competition between resource users who are motivated to maximise their resource use (or contribute little to the maintenance of the resource) for individual gain and at the expense of group-level sustainability—an outcome known as the Tragedy of the Commons. CPR dilemmas are pervasive in human contexts, ranging from mitigating climate change to sharing public spaces, fighting a pandemic or tackling antimicrobial resistance. Since CPR dilemmas are also found across the non-human living world, sustainability scientists, economists and evolutionary biologists are interested in the dynamics of competition and cooperation around resources. In this chapter, we argue that students’ conceptual understanding of CPR dilemmas through exploration and critical reflections on human and non-human examples is central to developing a basic understanding of sustainability issues more broadly, as well as of evolutionary dynamics that can help explain the evolution of cooperative social behaviours and conflict resolution mechanisms. We provide an overview of the science of CPR dilemmas in the evolution of living systems and human natural resource contexts. Moreover, we present a flexible set of resources that educators in secondary school biology or environmental science can employ to help students engage in cross-cutting concepts, scientific ideas of the life sciences and a range of scientific practices to develop understandings and socioscientific reasoning skills surrounding real-world issues of sustainable resource use.

Eirdosh, D., & Hanisch, S. (2021). Evolving Schools in a Post-pandemic Context. In COVID-19: Paving the Way for a More Sustainable World (pp. 465-480). Springer, Cham.

Eirdosh, D., & Hanisch, S. (2019). The Role of Evolutionary Studies in Education for Sustainable Development. In: Geher, G., Wilson, D. S., Head, H., & Gallup, A. (Eds.) (2019). Darwin’s Roadmap to the Curriculum: Evolutionary Studies in Higher Education. Oxford University Press.

Eirdosh, D., & Hanisch, S. (2020). Can the science of Prosocial be a part of evolution education. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 13 (5). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12052-020-00119-7

Other Media and Science Communications

TEDxLeipzigInternationalSchool

Why human behavior is at the center of education and learning

Watch OpenEvo co-founder, Dustin Eirdosh deliver a TEDx talk on teaching human behavior as an interdisciplinary theme.

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Frontiers for Young Minds

Our lab has produced one Frontiers for Young Minds article, as well as facilitated the Youth Review of another.

Do Monkeys Care What Is Fair?

Cronin KA and Hopper LM (2020) Do Monkeys Care What Is Fair? Front. Young Minds 8:550299. doi: 10.3389/frym.2020.550299

Scientists study fairness in humans, apes, and monkeys to understand the evolutionary origins of our own behavior and to better understand the behavior of other primates. Scientists studying monkeys have found that, sometimes, monkeys will share food equally with others, but their choices often depend on their species and the specific circumstances. Monkeys are more likely to help friends, but even then, monkeys rarely go out of their way to act fairly. Furthermore, while monkeys appear to recognize unfair outcomes, they only seem concerned by inequity when they receive less than others, not when they receive more.

What Is “Fair” Is Not the Same Everywhere

Hanisch, S., Eirdosh, D., Schäfer, M., and Haun, D. (2021). What Is “Fair” Is Not the Same Everywhere. Frontiers for Young Minds. 9:580435

When people must share things, what does it mean to share fairly? Do all people around the world have the same idea of what is fair or unfair? Are humans born with a feeling about what is fair and unfair, or is it something we learn as we grow up? Scientists study how people from different cultures choose to share things in various situations, and whether people think different ways of sharing are fair or unfair. This article describes an experiment in which scientists studied whether children from different cultures have different ideas about what is fair. These studies are important for understanding how humans are similar and different from each other and from other animals, and they also help us understand how we can work to create a world that is considered fair by everyone.

Our blog posts and articles

We have written a range of articles for general audiences interested in issues of evolution, behavior, and sustainability science education.

Education is an Evolutionary Science. Why Don’t We Teach It That Way?

Educational sciences have long be informed by discussions in the evolutionary sciences, so why don’t teacher education programs (or whole school communities) explore these fascinating big questions on the nature of humans, learning, and schooling?

Finding Purpose in Evolution Education

How should evolution educators help students reconcil the human sense of purpose with the complex processes of evolutionary change?

It’s Time to Fix Evolution’s Public Relations Problem

Evolution has a public relations problem. Not the well-known problem of evolution acceptance on religious grounds, but rather one which also includes secular and scientific communities. This is the problem of accepting the relevance of evolutionary theory for understanding the human condition.

Elinor’s Classroom: Developing a Connected Concept of the Commons for 21st Century Civic Education

There is an important link between Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom’s scientific work on collective action, and emerging perspectives in the evolutionary human sciences, such that this work may also have significant import for how we teach evolution science itself.

Transfer of Learning in Evolution Understanding: A Challenge Not Just For Students

One of the “holy grails” of education is to develop in students the ability to transfer their prior learning to new contexts and, most importantly, to the world and their lives outside of the classroom. How educators and scientists think about evolution may relate to how we achieve (or not) this elusive goal of learning that transfers.

Evolving Minds: Learning as Evolution, Evolution as Learning

This article explores the relationship between the scientific and vernacular use of the evolution concept as it relates to individual and social learning processes. We argue that the systematic exploration of learning as an evolutionary process, and evolution as a learning process holds untapped educational potential, a potential that is hampered by systemic conceptual biases among mainstream evolution educators.