Considering adaptation and the ‘function’ of traits in the classroom, using wiki tools

The conceptual understanding of the process of adaptation (whereby a population becomes better suited to its environment over evolutionary time) is acknowledged to be a difficult one. Many studies have shown that there is an inherent misunderstanding of the term, which is often related to the learner adopting the common rather than biological usage of the term in the learner’s language. However, understanding adaptation is essential to understanding evolution, and learners need to be encouraged to understand how to relate hypotheses of the ‘function’ of a trait shown by an individual with the environment in which the individual lives. Here, I describe a practical which encourages a class of learners to create their own organisms, through a series of steps by which they create functional explanations of morphology and behaviour. Using a branching process whereby groups of students are split into smaller and smaller subgroups, an artificial phylogeny is created. A wiki system is then used to emphasise how individual species and groups of species are related. The relationship of this practical to problems of tree-thinking is discussed.