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Permission to use copyrighted College Board materials may be requested online at: www.com/inquiry/cbpermit. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. AP Central is the official online home for the AP Program and Pre-AP: apcentral. ii AP Biology: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Table of Contents Special Focus: Evolution and Change Introduction Carolyn Schofield Bronston.
3 Joining the Scientific Community Kenneth R. 4 The Darwin I Wish Everyone Knew Robert Dennison. 7 What Have the Courts Said About the Teaching of Evolution and Creationism? Randy Moore. 15 The Making of Darwin’s Endless Forms Sean B.
22 Resources for the Teaching of Evolution in AP Biology Sharon A. 33 Multiple Choice and Free-Response Questions on Evolution with Scoring Guidelines Compiled by Carolyn Schofield Bronston. 88 Important Note: The following set of materials is organized around a particular theme, or “special focus,” that reflects important topics in the AP Biology course. The materials are intended to provide teachers with resources and classroom ideas relating to that focus.
The special focus, as well as the specific content of the materials, cannot and should not be taken as an indication that a particular topic will appear on the AP Exam. AP Biology: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Special Focus: Evolution and Change Introduction Carolyn Schofield Bronston Robert E. Lee High School Tyler, Texas Evolution. Just the word evokes high blood pressure and profanity in some, steely-eyed tenacity and “evangelical” zeal in others.
How strange that the driving force behind the huge spectrum of life as we know it remains so controversial and so divisive. Originally, the title of this collection was to be “It’s not just a theory. ,” but in the end, that seemed too flippant. The fact is evolution is occurring today as it has in the past.
All students need to know of its importance and its consequences. Teachers need to feel confident in their grasp of this subject so that they can convey the elegant simplicity and incontrovertible truth of natural selection. Religion and science are not at odds—even the pope has pronounced it so. So hopefully we can all move away from that argument and move toward an understanding of how life around us changes and what we can learn from the past to help us in the future.
The articles included in these materials run the gamut from historical perspectives of Darwin the man and the legal battles over his ideas, to cutting-edge developmental studies that provide “missing” evolutionary links, to a compendium of resources that will inform and enlighten both teachers and their students. With a straightforward, scientific approach, you can enable your students to see for themselves the logic and elegance of evolution. For it is much more than just a theory: it is the foundation of life itself. AP Biology: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Special Focus: Evolution and Change Joining the Scientific Community Kenneth R.
Miller Brown University Providence, Rhode Island Scientific community—what do those words mean to you? To many in the public, they conjure up an image of laboratory workers in white coats, divorced from the reality of daily life, practicing an arcane craft that ordinary folks needn’t understand or care about. And that’s the problem, a problem that you’re about to help solve in your AP course this year. The notion that science is so specialized that it cannot explain itself is clearly one of the reasons why it’s fashionable for bright, intelligent adults to joke about how little they know of science and still consider themselves well educated. The sense that science doesn’t affect our daily lives allows our society to place a low priority on scientific research.
The belief that the scientific community simply exists on its own and does its work without constant attention and renewal is simply false and could easily lead to an abdication of American scientific leadership in the world. The problem begins with a false understanding of the true nature of the scientific community. As biologists, we know that among the characteristics of life are growth and development, and these traits apply to the scientific community, too. You see the scientific community every day when you enter your classroom.
You nurture it every time you work with a student or lead a class through a laboratory exercise, and you have been part of it ever since you took up the great vocation of teacher, the highest calling a society like ours can have. In reality, as an AP Biology teacher you are the single most important part of the scientific community, because you are creating the scientific community of tomorrow. Indeed, the greatest gift you can give to your students is that sense of belonging, of being part of the great project of scientific investigation and understanding that has drawn us out of ages of darkness into the light of knowledge. And what a light that is.
I am tempted to tell my own students that I view them with a sense of envy that they have been born at just the right time to become biologists. For the very first time, we have the capability to ask, in detailed biological terms, what it truly means to be human. Today’s ongoing flood of DNA sequence information enables anyone, with a few taps on the computer keyboard, to explore the human genome, chromosome by chromosome, to compare it with those of our closest relatives and to explore the ways in which life has evolved and developed in all of its majesty and glory. AP Biology: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Special Focus: Evolution and Change Today’s students take biotechnology—from genetically modified foods to DNA fingerprinting—for granted, and well they should.
For your students, these are simply part of the age into which they have been born, the context in which they entered your classroom and laboratory. The best part of all of this is that you have the chance to open these worlds to your students, to help them develop an understanding of these technologies and their effects on their lives. Technology is everywhere in modern life, but whether an individual will be its master or be led by it is determined by the extent to which he or she understands the technology of the day. In the coming century, the technology to be mastered, without a doubt, will emerge from the science of life.
Your opportunity, your challenge, is to open the minds of your students to that science and to help them see themselves as part of the scientific community. In many ways, the tools at your disposal have never been more suited to the task of science education. The Internet gives your students direct access to the latest genomic data, as well as contact with research laboratories everywhere in the world. Genetic manipulations and studies that were cutting edge only a few years ago can now be carried out easily and inexpensively in high school teaching labs.
Creative and well-planned lab exercises will give your students not only hands-on experience with these technologies but also an even more important gift—the sense of belonging to the scientific community and of participating in the exploration and study of life. Breaking down the illusory barriers that separate your students from “real” scientists should be one of your highest priorities, and if you can do it successfully, it will change many lives. Albert Einstein once wrote that “the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious—it is the source of all true art and science.” As you look over the curriculum you are planning for your AP students, I hope you will take some time to reflect on the profound and timeless truth of Einstein’s observation. All great teachers, in one sense or another, are storytellers, and as biologists, what stories we have to tell! Evolution has opened up the mysteries of the past in a way that yesterday’s scientists could never have imagined.
Cell biology has revealed an inner world of intricate beauty and balance inside every living thing. Developmental biology has begun to reveal the patterns and processes that build the bodies of plants and animals. Molecular medicine now approaches human disease in a way that the physicians of the past could not have imagined. What we have learned is impressive, but even more enticing are the mysteries that still remain, the vast unexplored territory that lies before us and before your students.
So don’t pull any punches on your students. Tell it like it is. Let them know that they really have come along at just the right time, and challenge them not just to learn biology but AP Biology: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Special Focus: Evolution and Change to do biology. We should never have to remind ourselves that science is a process, not a body of knowledge.
The curriculum of AP Biology is not a set of facts to be memorized so much as it is a landscape to explore, a landscape in which the boundaries continue to expand and in which the most exciting territory is still uncharted. From the moment they set foot in your classroom, remind them that they are part of the scientific community, and that the unexplored territory of biology will forever belong to them. Good luck and best wishes in helping to create the scientific community of tomorrow. AP Biology: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Special Focus: Evolution and Change The Darwin I Wish Everyone Knew Robert Dennison Jersey Village High School Houston Charles Darwin has been and continues to be vilified by those opposed to his views.
Perhaps no scientist has been so misrepresented and misunderstood.