Daniel Nettle: Newcastle University Centre for Behaviour and Evolution

Even in the most developed countries, many people do not accept the theory of evolution as true. Whilst there are cultural and ideological reasons for this, part of the issue is that evolutionary ideas appear to violate certain intuitive beliefs. Even more interestingly, recent research has shown that students who do accept evolution quite systematically misunderstand how it works, tending to endorse species selectionism, the idea that species are born and die abruptly, and models of heredity in which useful characteristics are acquired by all members of the species, not just the progeny of the individuals in which they arise. I will argue that all of these errors arise because in our intuitive cognition about animals, there is little distinction between the species and the individual. Indeed, species are seen as a kind of individual, and individual animals are seen as appearances of the underlying species. This leads people into what Ernst Mayr called typological, rather than population, thinking. I report results of a recent study of conceptualisation of evolutionary change amongst undergraduate students, and argue that a good way of conveying evolutionary ideas is by using human examples, since our intuitive cognition about humans primarily works at the level of individuals, their family relationships, and the ways they are different from other members of their species.