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Full-Text Articles in Education
Evolution And The Second Law Of Thermodynamics: Effectively Communicating To Non-Technicians, Alexander Schreiber, Steven Gimbel
Evolution And The Second Law Of Thermodynamics: Effectively Communicating To Non-Technicians, Alexander Schreiber, Steven Gimbel
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Given the degree of disbelief in the theory of evolution by the wider public, scientists need to develop a collection of clear explanations and metaphors that demonstrate the working of the theory and the flaws in antievolutionist arguments. This paper presents tools of this sort for countering the anti-evolutionist claim that evolutionary mechanisms are inconsistent with the second law of thermodynamics. Images are provided to replace the traditional misunderstanding of the law, i.e., “everything always gets more disordered over time,” with a more clear sense of the way in which entropy tends to increase allowing a thermally isolated system access …
The Future Of Natural Selection Knowledge Measurement: A Reply To Anderson Et Al. (2010), Ross Nehm, Irvin Sam Schonfeld
The Future Of Natural Selection Knowledge Measurement: A Reply To Anderson Et Al. (2010), Ross Nehm, Irvin Sam Schonfeld
Publications and Research
The development of rich, reliable, and robust measures of the composition, structure, and stability of student thinking about core scientific ideas (such as natural selection) remains a complex challenge facing science educators. In their recent article (Nehm & Schonfeld 2008), the authors explored the strengths, weaknesses, and insights provided by a detailed exploration of three commonly used measures of student thinking about natural selection in a large sample of underrepresented minority students. One of their core findings was that all of the tools they studied--including the CINS--have strengths and weaknesses that must be carefully taken into consideration by those …