Meeting Abstract

S4-2.1  Friday, Jan. 4  How to get coverage of major evolutionary adaptive changes into textbooks and curricula PADIAN, K; University of California, Berkeley kpadian@berkeley.edu

An important lesson from the 2005 Dover �Intelligent Design� trial is that anti-evolutionists can easily distort and misrepresent the evidence and methods of comparative biology to the public, because public understanding of evolution is so poor. Creationists desperately need to perpetuate the myth that macroevolution � major change through time — is a myth. Particularly misunderstood are the concepts of exaptation, of the origins of major new adaptations and taxa, and how scientists use many independent lines of evidence to illuminate these questions. Unfortunately, a survey of leading college textbooks in introductory biology and upper division courses in evolution, vertebrate paleontology, and comparative vertebrate anatomy discovers virtually no effective coverage of our knowledge and methods. Integrative biologists are in a very good position to improve this situation because a plurality of the authors of these texts are members of SICB. I show how illustrations that incorporate phylogeny, homology, paleontology, and adaptive change can communicate both knowledge and methods of approaching macroevolutionary questions. I explain how we can change textbooks easily and rapidly to accomplish this goal, and how we can use the Worldwide Web to deliver our knowledge to a public that desperately needs to understand it.