Table of Contents
UNDERSTANDING NATURAL SELECTION - FLIPPED CLASSROOM:
IT IS IMPORTANT THAT STUDENTS & TEACHERS FIRST COMPLETE THE ON-LINE QUIZ BEFORE VIEWING THE STUDENT WIKI (THIS PAGE), THE FLIP CONTENT OR THE TEACHER WIKI CONTENT.
Links To Answers & Supplementary Learning Materials:
- When the QUIZ has been completed, students are sent results by email.
- In the email, there is a link for more information, activities and experiments to help the student understand more about each question and the answer.
- Students are encouraged to investigate, ask questions and design their own experiments.
How Have Camels Become Adapted To Life In The Desert:
TRUE OR FALSE: Camels are a good example of an animal that evolved and adapted to life in the desert.
Look for any evidence on-line that would show that the above statement is false.
Video 1. How Camels May Have Evolved & Adapted:
- IF UNABLE TO ACCESS YOUTUBE VIDEO TRY:How Camels May Have Evolved & Adapted:
Even today there are a number of families of camels (including Alpacas and Llamas) that have evolved and adapted differently in different environments.
HINT: Most confusion about natural selection is confusion of cause and effect.
Background Information
Eco-systems:
An ecosystem and its components (plants, animals, their interactions, and their surroundings) are all topics prone to misconceptions.
Students may anthropomorphize plants and animals. They may struggle with ideas like 'predation', believe that only certain animals get eaten, or think that all organisms within an ecosystem 'get along'.
They may assume certain characteristics about groups of organisms such as carnivores based on a few examples, or may over-simplify the complex set of relationships represented by a food web.
Finally, students may not understand that ecosystems are dynamic and change as a result of natural and human-influenced processes.
Adaptation:
Another topic prone to misconception is adaptation.
Students (and adults) often misinterpret or misuse this word to indicate that individual organisms intentionally or 'need' to change in response to changes in their environment.
Many children’s books and websites present some variation of this misleading notion in an attempt to simplify the concept or the reading level of material.
As a result, adaptation is an extremely misunderstood scientific concept.
- Richard Dawkins on misconceptions about evolution.