Illustrated Story Teaches Young Kids Natural Selection
Seven- and eight-year-olds successfully learned basic evolution concepts via a story illustrating differential reproduction rates of fictional animals due to selection pressures. Karen Hopkin reports
By Karen Hopkin
SUBSCRIBE TO Science Quickly
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
Once upon a time, there was an animal called a pilosa that caught insects with its trunk. Some pilosas had wide trunks. Others had skinny trunks. When habitat changes caused their dinners to tunnel underground, pilosas with wide trunks began to starve and die. The pilosas with thin trunks could still reach the bugs. So they stayed healthy and had babies that also had thin trunks. Eventually, all pilosas had skinny trunks and they lived happily ever after. Or they might have, if they were real.
Pilosas were made up by researchers who were exploring whether kids could grasp the concept of natural selection. They found that parables like the plight of the pilosa enabled even kindergartners to get evolution. The study is in the journal Psychological Science. [Deborah Kelemen et al, Young Children Can Be Taught Basic Natural Selection Using a Picture-Storybook Intervention]
Children enjoy explanations, so much so they often invent their own—like, giraffes must grow long necks so they can reach high branches. But after reading about the pilosa, all of the seven- and eight-year olds in the study could correctly explain that the species changed over time because the better-adapted creatures outreproduced those that were less fit.
Maybe early exposure to such complex concepts could help science literacy evolve.
—Karen Hopkin
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
Subscribe to Support Independent Journalism
Great science journalism requires human expertise, time, effort and creativity. And it costs money. That’s why I and the journalists here at Scientific American hope you’ll join our community.
When you subscribe, you are supporting staff and freelance journalists who are passionate about telling science stories that are true, important and compelling. Our editors and reporters are often experts in their fields, which means they understand the nuances of big discoveries and can untangle the breakthroughs from the hype. With a subscription, you are also supporting rigorous fact-checking to ensure the words we publish are precise and accurate. And you’re supporting original illustrations, graphics and photos that bring you closer to an advanced laboratory, an ice sheet in Antarctica or a space mission in orbit. You’re helping us craft other types of high-quality journalism as well: Our newsletters are carefully written, edited and curated by staffers you have or will come to know and love. Our Science Quickly podcast is based on original reporting, collaboration with editors and scientists and exacting production.
Subscriptions keep this engine running so we can continue to deliver thoughtful, rigorous and independent science journalism to you. In an era of viral misinformation, this work is crucial. If you value what we do, I hope you’ll consider joining us as a subscriber
