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  • How to bring evolution into the classroom

How to bring evolution into the classroom

By: Amanda Gibson

Friday, May 26, 2017

Tenniel's drawing of Alice with the Red Queen.  From Lewis Carroll's book, Through the Looking Glass.
Alice with the Red Queen. From Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. Sir John Tenniel

Students learn science best by doing. That’s what the data say—students perform better in science courses when professors replace lecture with more active forms of learning, like discussion, group work, and case studies. Active learning techniques can even reduce the achievement gap between students from disadvantaged vs. nondisadvantaged backgrounds (as shown by former IU postdoc David Haak and colleagues, Science 2011).

As an evolutionary biologist, I want to know: how can students engage directly with evolutionary concepts in the classroom? Teaching evolution is notoriously challenging. There are of course the pervasive misconceptions and controversy surrounding evolution. On top of that, its temporal nature means students don’t typically get to “see” the evolutionary process unfolding. Yet evolution is the most fundamental of the biological sciences—a failure in the evolution classroom reverberates throughout the rest of a student’s biology training.

Games offer one solution to this challenge. Like computer simulations, students can use games to rapidly play out evolutionary scenarios. Playing cards are particularly useful: they’re cheap, and their familiarity automatically eases students into the exercise. IU Professor Curt Lively, former IU postdoc Devin Drown, and I developed the Red Queen game to teach host-parasite coevolution using playing cards. In our game, students collaborate to generate data and test predictions of the Red Queen hypothesis, a core hypothesis in evolutionary biology. It proposes that host-parasite coevolution maintains genetic variation in populations.

Red Queen hypothesis
Sir John Tenniel's drawing of the Red Queen running, pulling Alice along with her.  From Lewis Carroll's book, Through the Looking Glass.
Red Queen hypothesis, a major idea in evolutionary biology, took its name from the Red Queen character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass who said, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Likewise, organisms must continually evolve to combat their natural enemies. Illustration by Sir John Tenniel, Through the Looking Glass

Students play against one another as host and parasite, and the card suits function as different genotypes. The students record their own success or failure to generate data on changes in host and parasite genotype frequencies through time. They personally experience rapid oscillations in genotype frequencies, with rare genotypes increasing and common ones declining. Genetic variation is clearly maintained, supporting the Red Queen’s prediction. Another advantage of playing cards is their flexibility: we encourage students to modify the rules of the game, or even build a new game, to test other evolutionary hypotheses. The game has spread since we first played it in IU’s Honors Evolution course: students in high schools and colleges across the country, even in England, have chased the Red Queen. You can learn more about our game in the 2015 open-access article in Evolution: Education and Outreach.

Read the article

Students can also experience evolution in action using organisms that breed quickly. When Levi Morran [BS in Biology '04] moved from his postdoc at IU to a professor position at Emory University, he collaborated with lecturer Megan Cole to do experimental evolution with students in Emory’s Intro Bio labs. The students can do this because Dr. Morran’s organism of choice, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, has a generation time of 3 to 4 days. Students select for disease resistance by feeding nematodes the pathogenic bacteria, Serratia marcescens, over multiple generations. Only the resistant nematodes contribute offspring to the next generation. Does this experience, of seeing evolution happen over the course of the semester, improve student learning of evolutionary concepts? We’re currently working with Dr. Cole to figure this out.

With inquiry-based classroom activities like these, we may be able to enrich students’ understanding of evolution. In doing so, we can promote scientific literacy and improve biology training as a whole.

Mandy Gibson holding two decks of playing cards.
Gibson presented the Red Queen game to the National Association of Biology Teachers in November 2016 in Denver. Courtesy photo
About Dr. Gibson

IU Biology alum Amanda "Mandy" Gibson graduated in July 2016 with her PhD in Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior. She is now a postdoc in Levi Morran's lab at Emory University and has accepted an assistant professorship in the Department of Biology at the University of Virginia, starting in January 2019.

Her IU mentor, Distinguished Professor of Biology Curt Lively, was pleased to announce earlier this year that Gibson had received the John Maynard Smith Prize from the European Society of Evolutionary Biology, a major award for recent PhDs in evolutionary biology. Her prize will be celebrated at the upcoming ESEB congress in The Netherlands, where Gibson will present the 2017 John Maynard Smith Prize Lecture.

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