Cobern, W. W. (1994).  Cultural Constructivist Approach to the
Teaching of Evolution.  SLCSP Working Paper #112.

(This manuscript served as the basis for Cobern, W. W. Point: Belief, 
understanding, and the teaching of evolution. Journal of Research in Science 
Teaching, 31(5): 583-590.)


Abstract
	Educators typically think that one teaches evolution to develop students' 
conceptual understanding of evolution.  It is assumed that if students understand 
evolution they will believe it.  From a constructivist perspective it can be argued 
that understanding and belief, though related, are distinct concepts each of which is 
a potential goal for instruction.  Though there are good reasons why belief should 
not be an instructional goal, achieving conceptual understanding requires that 
issues of belief be addressed.  The point is that students are not likely to gain much 
understanding of something that they dismiss outright as unbelievable.  What 
counts as believable for an individual rests on that person's world view.  This 
article argues that instruction on evolution can profitably begin with a dialogue on 
what counts as believable.  Such a dialogue would be based on a study of the 
cultural history of Darwinism which would allow students to see how people in 
Darwin's day wrestled with the same fundamental questions at issue today.  The 
purpose of this strategy is to create a shared meaning in the classroom that certain 
fundamental questions are worth discussing and that the biological principles of 
evolution can contribute to that discussion.  Thus, rather than trying to present 
evolution as a purely scientific issue, this article suggests the rather unorthodox 
strategy of explicitly addressing the social and cultural issues related to the topic of 
origins.



	Evolution is a truly interesting subject.  It holds a central position in 
modern biology.  Theodosius Dobzhansky (1973, p. 125) went so far as to say, 
"nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."  Evolution is also 
interesting because of its high public profile.  No other topic in science has 
generated as much public comment and debate as has evolution.  From the 
Huxley/Wilburforce debates of Darwin's time, to the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 
1925, to the balanced treatment legislative initiatives of the 1970s and 1980s, 
evolution has been the science community's lightening rod for public interest.  In 
broad terms, the science community is committed to evolution as both an 
appropriate and essential aspect of the school science curriculum as one sees in the 
quote from Dobzhansky.  They face, however, a largely unresponsive public as one 
sees in various surveys of public attitudes and knowledge concerning science and 
evolution.  Clearly a problem exists.  The solution for some in the science 
community is to overcome obdurate religious resistance.  For others the solution is 
to increase the evolutionary content in curricula and to improve instructional 
approaches.  Many science educators see it as a matter of both with the second 
solution being key to the first.  One can find these approaches in many of the 
recent policy statements on science education (e.g., AAAS, 1989; California, 
1990; NAS, 1984).  In my view, these approaches simply will not suffice for the 
task at hand.

	There is a question at the heart of the troubles one faces when teaching 
about evolution, what is the goal of this instruction?  Many science educators will 
likely consider the answer to this question patently obvious.  The goal is for 
students to acquire a knowledge about evolution.  However, this answer is obvious 
only within a positivist view of science; and, in my opinion, the answer is both 
simplistic and unrealistic.  In contrast, I offer a cultural constructivist approach to 
evolution education centered on six points.  1) A constructivist perspective implies 
that all teaching and learning takes place in context.  2) Metaphysics and world 
view are key cognitive aspects of any context - thus, the modifier "cultural".  3) 
Evolution as a topic of curriculum and instruction is placed in a context defined by 
teachers and curriculum writers.  4) To the consternation of all, the context of 
evolution education is frequently in conflict with the metaphysical and world view 
contexts brought to the classroom by students.  5) The theory of evolution and the 
role of evolution in science today does not necessitate this contextual conflict.  6) 
Lastly, there are instructional approaches that promote the sound teaching of 
evolution, but from within a different and culturally sensitive context.

A Criticism Worth Heeding
	At the onset of this discussion it is crucial for one to recognize that 
nowhere in science is the overlap between scientific ideas and other ideas in society 
more clear than with the theory of evolution and origins.  Given this situation the 
science educator's focus is easily drawn to well advertised controversies only to 
miss the crux of this science and culture interaction.  The nature of the 
science/culture interaction that often takes place in education has been criticized by 
Ogawa (1989) and Young (1974) among others.  That criticism comes from both 
the political left and the political right is a measure of the significance of this 
criticism.  The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1966) decried the 
dehumanization of society brought about by the reductionism of the physical 
sciences that he viewed as endemic in American schools.  On the opposite end of 
the political spectrum, Phillip Johnson (1991) decried the anti-religious bias of a 
science education unnecessarily wedded to philosophical materialism.  From both 
sides comes the same criticism: there is more in science teaching than that to which 
teachers of science and the professors of science admit.  This "more" that critics 
speak of is a particular metaphysical framework that is seldomly stated outright, 
but is implicit in most of science teaching.  If there is a criticism of science 
education that is shared by the left and right wings of our society, then, it seems to 
me, this is a criticism to which science educators ought to pay attention.  It is true 
that some object to this criticism claiming that the problem is not that something 
more than science is being taught along with evolution, but that evolution is not 
being taught at all (e.g., Stone, 1992).  Even if this claim were granted at the high 
school level, and this is by no means a given, the objection could hardly be 
sustained at the college level.  Yet, even at the college level one sees the rejection 
of Darwinism.

Not One, but Two Goals
	In 1959 three thousand scholars gathered at the University of Chicago for a 
week to celebrate the centennial of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.  
The celebration mantra was "one hundred years without Darwin [is] enough" (Tax, 
1983, p. 37).  One might have thought that the Scopes trial of 1925 marked the 
end of anti-Darwinism, and in the eyes of the media and of many scholars it did.  In 
fact, the topic of evolution remained in the shadows of science teaching until the 
centennial celebration 34 years later (Grabiner & Miller, 1974).  The momentum 
gained at the conference for bringing evolution into the mainstream of secondary 
school science led to significant changes in curriculum and textbooks.  BSCS was 
at the forefront (Hurd, 1961; Mayer, 1986).

	Unfortunately, the science education community misread American culture 
and was taken by surprise when anti-evolutionists fiercely counterattacked BSCS-
led curricula innovations with a spate of successful legislative initiatives.  
Moreover, ruled by a philosophy of "when in doubt, throw it out," textbook 
companies quietly dumped Darwin effectively neutralizing the post-centennial 
gains.  Evolutionists and anti-evolutionist had been struggling for years but the 
new wrinkle in the 1970s was the legislative action to bring about a balanced 
treatment of evolution and what was touted as scientific creationism (Numbers, 
1982).  In the seesaw of attacks and counterattacks, the balanced treatment acts 
succumbed to court challenges and by the late 1980s evolution education was on 
the rise again (see  Skoog, 1979; Pauly, 1991).

	Riding the crest of renewed support for the teaching of evolution, science 
educators turned their attention to the question of how best to teach evolution.  In 
the years after the centennial, constructivist oriented research such as 
misconception, alternative conception, and conceptual change research flourished 
providing for educators new insights on learning.  Research results showed that 
students have a variety of notions about various aspects of evolution, for example 
adaptation or natural selection (see Helm & Novak, 1983; Novak, 1987; 
Wandersee & Mintzes, 1987).  Learning is thus more accurately viewed as the 
change and development of concepts rather than a simple acquisition of concepts.  
Much research is now focused on how best to bring about conceptual change and 
development rather than on finding better ways to tell about evolution (Good, 
Wandersee, Anderson, Fisher, & Lawson, 1993).

	The research is welcome but it would be a mistake to once again misread 
American culture.  According to a recent Gallup Poll, only nine percent of all 
Americans believe the orthodox scientific view of evolution (reported by Sheler & 
Schrof, 1991).  Educators are tempted to say that people reject evolution because 
they do not understand it or are simply uniformed.  However, it stretches credulity 
to argue that only nine percent of Americans understand evolutionary theory.  
Moreover, similar findings are reported about college biology majors and teachers 
(e.g., Johnson & Peeples, 1987; Van Koevering & Stiehl, 1989).  Is it possible that 
all of the curriculum innovations of the past 30 years have had so little effect?  I 
believe it is more reasonable to conclude that even among those who have a basic 
understanding of evolutionary theory there are many who reject textbook 
Darwinism.  Therefore, if the science education community expects that better 
techniques alone will substantially change this nine percent statistic, I fear we are 
in for a major disappointment - once again.

	I applaud and support efforts to improve the teaching of evolution, but a 
more fundamental question must be addressed, what is the goal in regard to the 
teaching of evolution?  To be specific, are we expecting instruction to improve 
understanding or to change belief?  In the past this question would have held little 
meaning for many educators.  Imbued by the spirit of positivism, educators 
observed a strict separation between knowledge and belief.  In constructivist 
thought this separation largely evaporates and in the process a significant change 
of goal occurs.  There are two possible goals, not one.

Positivism and Constructivism
	Logical positivism represents a distinguished formal school of philosophical 
thought which spawned a widely held colloquial view of science.  Colloquial 
positivism roughly represents a classical view of realism, philosophical materialism, 
strict objectivity, and hypothetico-deductive method.  Though recognizing the 
tentative nature of all scientific knowledge, colloquial positivism imbues scientific 
knowledge with a Laplacian certainty denied all other disciplines, thus giving 
science an a priori status in the intellectual world.  Colloquial positivism is what 
Smolicz & Nunan (1975) called the myth of school science.

	In a sense, the certainty of colloquial positivism can make life easy for the 
science teacher.  Colloquial positivism allows the teacher to say to students that 
this is the way things are, for science provides the one reliable source of objective 
knowledge.  No matter how tentative the current understanding of a phenomenon 
might be, one always knows that science is at least taking us in the right direction. 
 Colloquial positivism's elevated view of science nicely serves what Eger (1989, p. 
81) called the interests of science.  The science community as it exists today is 
concerned with establishing a Kuhnian pipeline beginning at grade school, 
concluding at the university, and thus delivering future scientists.  The secondary 
interest of the science community is the insurance of public appreciation for 
science adequate for acquiescence to continued funding for scientific research.  
The perspective is that of the scientist holding center stage and looking out at the 
world about.

	Within a framework determined by the interests of science and a positivist 
view of knowledge, it is nonsensical for the teacher to ask about believing 
evolutionary theory.  Only a fool would refuse to believe what is known to be true. 
 In a positivist framework, belief is never objective and can have no measure of 
meaningful certainty.  Thus, belief is irrelevant to the issue of knowledge.  Rather, 
the significant question is whether one understands evolutionary theory.  It follows 
then that the fact that large numbers of people reject standard accounts of 
evolution can only have two interpretations.  The most widely  reported 
interpretation is that educators have simply failed to both teach enough evolution 
and to teach it effectively (Rosen, 1989).  The only other interpretation is that 
those who reject evolution have not attained the level of hypothetico-deductive 
reasoning necessary for understanding evolution (Lawson & Weser, 1990).  To put 
it bluntly, they are too irrational to understand evolution.

	Positivists can point the finger of guilt but they appear impotent in the face 
of what Hawkins (1978, pp. 5-7) called critical barriers to learning:

reasonably patient explanation is no cure... we are up against 
something rather deep in the relation between science and common 
sense; we are up against a barrier to teaching in the didactic mode 
which has hardly been recognized, or if recognized has been seen 
mainly as a challenge to ingenuity in teaching rather than as a 
challenge to a deeper understanding of human learning...

Moreover, poll results indicate that the problem in evolution education is not solely 
one of understanding but also one of belief.  Many students do not believe 
evolutionary accounts of origins.  Because positivist educators consider unbelief to 
be a nonsensical conclusion, they are not inclined to address the issues of belief.  
The consequence is twofold.  The beliefs of many students remain unchanged, but 
more significantly, students also resist conceptual change and hence their 
understanding of evolution remains inadequate.

Understanding versus Knowing
	Constructivist epistemology, whether in its radical or moderate forms (e.g., 
Glasersfeld, 1989; Good & Schlagel, 1992; respectively), hinges on three 
assertions quite alien to colloquial positivism.  1) Knowledge is a way of making 
sense of experience.  2) Knowledge is always an interpretation and therefore 
always fallible and inherently uncertain.  3) All interpretations are based on prior 
knowledge.  Colloquial positivists declare that knowledge of evolution is a direct 
representation of reality and therefore not open to belief or unbelief, only to 
understanding.  In contrast, constructivists say that knowledge of evolution is 
science's best reckoning of reality - it is the way science believes things to be.  It is 
what scientists currently view as the most valid interpretation of phenomena.  Of 
critical importance, constructed knowledge admits to doubt and does not carry 
with it the force of truth.  This is a very different view of knowledge, one which 
makes perfect sense of the question do we teach for understanding, belief, or both?

	Moreover, sense making is influenced by social and cultural factors in a 
student's life (e.g., Atwater, 1991; Cobern, in press b; Gallard, 1992; Lassiter, 
1992; Pomeroy, 1992).  Elsewhere, I have argued the importance of fundamental 
beliefs with respect to learning science and the development of scientific attitudes 
(Cobern, 1991).  The argument is both intuitively and rationally strong that 
fundamental beliefs about the world exert a powerful influence on how sense is 
made of events in the world.  The nature of that influence has to do with a 
distinction between understanding and knowing, i.e., believing (Cobern, 1993; 
Arendt, 1978).  At heart is the question why one explanation makes sense to one 
person but not to another person.  Under the influence of colloquial positivism, 
science educators long assumed that the case for the importance and validity of 
scientific knowledge was prima facie.  However, some years ago Arendt (1978) 
noted that an argument can be rationally flawless, the interpretation of data can be 
epistemologically perfect, and yet, some people will reject the conclusions.  The 
reason, she argued, is the fundamental difference between understanding and 
knowing.  Understanding is necessary for knowledge, but never sufficient.  
Understanding is the epistemological or thinking process by which one comes to 
conceptual comprehension.  Knowing is the metaphysical process or process of 
apprehension (determined by one's world view) by which one comes to accept as 
true or valid that concept one has comprehended.  In other words, knowing is 
believing that such and such is so.  Coming from a somewhat different 
constructivist perspective, Gunstone (1988, p. 90) made a similar observation 
about teaching, "rather than the traditional 'How can I explain it better?', the 
teacher is led to 'How can I make this interpretation/model/generalization, etc. 
appear believable to students?'"

	Because colloquial positivism views science as providing truth, there is no 
openness to other truth claims.  This means that until a scientific explanation 
concerning a phenomenon is provided, for the positivist nothing is really explained. 
 Once a scientific explanation has been provided, one need not defend it against 
other truth claims.  After all, it is science that provides true knowledge.  There are 
many examples to be found that demonstrate this phenomenon.  The traditional 
account of Jericho's destruction is a lesson, so to speak, taught by the Bible.  The 
January 1992 issue of National Geographic (Geographica section) teaches a 
different lesson about Jericho.  To start with, the Biblical account is called a "tale," 
and then Geographic opines that the city was likely destroyed by an earthquake 
given the quake history of the region.  The article clearly implies that one did not 
know what really happened to Jericho until now.  The Biblical account does not 
qualify as knowledge for the author, nor is there even a sense that a complex of 
complementary explanations might be appropriate as MacKay (1974) or Reich 
(1990) would suggest.  The article does not even argue that the new explanation is 
better.  It simply presents the new explanation with the full expectation that 
readers will believe it.  This only makes sense if one views science as offering the 
truth while all else is opinion.

	Then there is the curious debate about El Greco's painting style.  Art critics 
traditionally attributed El Greco's elongated and exaggerated figures to his 
personal philosophy, but some scientists having taken an interest in El Greco 
paintings argue that El Greco's style is symptomatic of unilateral astigmatism 
(Ahlstrom, 1955; Dornhorst, 1987).  In other words, El Greco painted strange 
figures because that is how he literally saw them.  As above, those who support 
this scientific view do not argue that it is better than other types of explanation.  
When one is offering an explanation based on a system that provides the truth (i.e., 
positivistic science), one need not deal with opinion.  My point is that in neither of 
these examples is there conclusive proof for one explanation or the other.  At issue 
is what counts as believable - and for the positivist the answer is simple.

	Some science educators may want to jump in and say that these examples 
involve a questionable use of science.  They may wish to argue that science used 
properly does not involve the question of what counts as believable.  Sol Tax, to 
the contrary, provides a personal example of how this issue does apply to science 
within what is undeniably a proper scientific setting - learning about evolution.  
Tax (1983) wrote about a college course he took on biological evolution.  It was 
no problem to him that the course emphasized evidences that could only be 
explained by evolution.  As a personal challenge, however, he tried to imagine a 
non-naturalistic theory that accounted for the evidences and thus not refutable by 
the evidence presented in the course.  Then he wrote quite candidly,

But this universe of my imagination established for me the absurdity of a 
supernatural alternative to naturalistic evolution.  Needless to say, that was 
easy because I had never entertained a contrary belief. (p. 36, emphases 
added)

Upon reflection Tax realized that he had not come to his position on evolution 
through any rational process or argument.  Evolution was consistent with what he 
already believed the world to be like.  In this respect, Tax provides a very different 
perspective than the one in the first two examples.  His lack of positivistic myopia 
is refreshing.

Cultural Constructivism
	For Sol Tax, and of course for many others, there is simply no believable 
alternative to Darwin.  The mistake in science education has been to go one step 
further and act as if belief were not an issue.  I say that this is a mistake because it 
seems quite clear that many students do not share Tax's sense of what is believable 
(e.g., see Cobern, in press a).  Bear in mind that one scientist talking with a co-
worker, or even a scientist from another field, is not the same as talking with those 
outside the scientific community.  Nor is teaching evolution at the secondary level, 
for example, anything like a biology professor and graduate students discussing the 
fine points of evolutionary theory.  The question of what counts as believable is 
important in science education precisely because teaching takes place across 
groups, e.g., scientist to non-scientist.  As noted earlier, a key point in 
constructivist thought is that meaning is an interpretation based on prior learning.  
Prior learning includes various scientific concepts, but it also includes culturally 
dependent presuppositions or assumptions about what the world is ultimately like 
and what constitutes first causes (Cobern, 1991).  This is a definition for world 
view, and the claim of cultural constructivism is that learning is influenced by 
world view.  Sol Tax found evolutionary concepts believable because they fit his 
world view.  These concepts fit the world views of most scientists and nearly all 
science curriculum writers, but they do not fit the world views of many students.  
Therein lies the problem.

	The teacher of evolution faces a situation very much like Darwin presenting 
the Origin of Species to a public who historically held a very different view of 
origins.  In Darwin's day the question of believability was still on the table.  Today, 
the tendency is to present a lean factual account of evolution (perhaps most of 
science) devoid of nonscientific entanglements.  However, this positivistic 
approach is not unencumbered.  It implies a philosophically materialistic and 
reductionistic view of what is believable.  If science education has as its primary 
goal the interests of science as currently construed then perhaps little instructional 
change is needed.  The university science major, for example, works to understand 
concepts that are already within the domain of what that student considers 
believable.  It seems though that the science education community is very much 
concerned about interest in science, as Eger (1989) would say.  In other words, we 
are very much interested in the knowledge of science and attitudes toward science 
among the majority of students.  These students are looking in at science and the 
first question that a constructivist educator needs to ask is, what counts as 
believable for these students?  If concepts of evolution are not deemed believable, 
the student interpretations of what is taught will be decidedly different from 
intended instructional outcomes.  Thus, the concept of cultural constructivism 
helps clarify why persistent science teaching, even when of high quality, is not 
always effective.

	To answer now an earlier question, belief is not a proper science education 
goal.  If for no other reason, it is not proper because it is simply not practical.  
Certainly schooling influences what students come to view as believable, but of 
equal certainty are the myriad of non-school influences.  Sol Tax is not atypical.  
People come to evolution as believers, not the other way around.  Moreover, even 
if it were practical to teach for belief in something like evolution, to do so would 
be tantamount to proselytization.  The proper goal for teaching evolutionary 
concepts is a worthy one but much simpler.  It is the understanding of evolutionary 
concepts.  However, as I argued above, belief cannot be ignored.  Though belief is 
itself an improper goal, belief is the place where instruction should begin.

	One addresses the issues of origins not by teaching a doctrine in positivistic 
fashion (evolution or other), but by looking back historically to the cultural and 
intellectual milieu of Darwin's day and the great questions over which people 
struggled.  Though evolutionary theory is not resisted in the 1990s the way it was 
in the 1860s, students are still interested in the same fundamental questions.  For 
example:  1) What is the essence of Nature?  2) How do we account for the fact of 
life rather than no life at all?  3) What does it mean to be a human being?  4) In 
what sense, and to what extent, are human beings different from other living 
things?  5) What is society?  What counts as believable is embedded in the answers 
one accepts for these questions.  By beginning instruction with these questions, the 
teacher is attempting to capture student interest by first raising metaphysical 
questions that are usually of very broad interest among people.  Moreover, I do 
not believe that an accurate conceptual understanding of evolution can be attained 
among the majority of students by ignoring these world view questions.  This is 
not a suggestion for a philosophical or religious bull session.  I have in mind what 
physicist David Bohm (1992, p. 16) called a dialogue, "The image this derivation 
[of dialogue] suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among us... a flow of 
meaning in the whole group, out of which will emerge some new understanding... 
When everybody is sensitive to all the nuances going around, and not merely to 
what is happening in one's own mind, there forms a meaning which is shared."  The 
recent Glasson & Lalik (1992) work on a social constructivism approach to the 
learning cycle empirically supports this idea.

	The balance of this article briefly examines the cultural history that I 
propose science teachers use as a framework for a dialogue on fundamental 
questions for the purpose of developing a shared meaning in the classroom.

Evolution as a Foreign Affair
	The Thirty-Year War ended in October 1648 with the signing of the Peace 
Treaty of Westphalia.  "The supremacy of Christian theology in European life was 
over.  The age of Faith, the Middle Ages, had run its course" (Jaki, 1983, p. 11).  
For centuries, the fundamental questions of life had been answered by a Christian 
world view, which presented a unified view of knowledge and belief grounded in a 
theology of creation.  The cosmology of the Christian world view was based on 
the doctrine of the plenary inspiration of Scripture which taught that Nature was 
the purposeful creation of God.  Moreover, people drew from this the inference 
that Nature was essentially static.  The Christian world view had a linear sense of 
time that had both beginning and end.  The Biblically based sense of linear time, 
however, did not necessarily involve the view that the state of human existence 
was ever progressing (Greene, 1981).  The notion of progress though based on a 
linear concept of time was to come much later, and indeed was a notion critical in 
the development of evolutionary theory.

	For the purposes of this paper, even a brief account of the intellectual and 
cultural history of the Renaissance and Reformation is not really needed.  Suffice it 
to say, the religious wars that followed the Reformation dealt a crippling blow to 
the certainty that the Church and Christian world view held for people throughout 
the Middle Ages.  The Westphalia Treaty ended the religious warring, and it also 
marked the end of the decline into epistemological uncertainty.  The advances of 
the 17th century natural philosophers coupled with a seriously weakened Christian 
world view, racked by skepticism and uncertainty, provided an opportunity for 
positivistic naturalism.  In this view, certainty of knowledge could be attained with 
an empiricism restricted to measurable characteristics and secondary (or natural) 
causes.  In the words of E. A. Burtt:

The world that people thought themselves living in - a world rich with 
colour and sound, redolent with fragrance, filled with gladness, love and 
beauty, speaking everywhere of purposive harmony and creative ideals - 
was crowded now into minute corners of the brains of scattered organic 
beings.  The really important world was a world hard, cold, colourless, 
silent, and dead; a world of quantity, a world of mathematically computable 
motions in mechanical regularity (1967, pp. 238-239).

For those who chose it, positivistic naturalism re-established certainty of 
knowledge, but one had to accept a diminished view of both religious and 
humanistic concepts.  With the philosophy of Descartes, one sees the beginning of 
a mortal epistemological struggle between creationism and positivistic naturalism.  
Early positivists like Descartes were clearly still thinking within a Christian 
framework.  Even Darwin himself as late as 1860, showed the influence of 
Christian thinking:

	I had no intention to write atheistically.  But I own that I cannot see as 
plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and 
beneficence on all sides of us.  There seems to me too much misery in the 
world... On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this 
wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that 
everything is the result of brute force.  I am inclined to look at everything 
as resulting from designed laws, with details, whether good or bad, left to 
the working out of what we may call chance (quoted in F. Darwin, 1888, 
vol 2, pp. 311-312).

With the Descent of Man, all had changed.

	Since Kuhn (1970), philosophers of science have been saying that theories 
of science are always underdetermined.  So it was with evolution.  It was not 
enough for Darwin to make the observations he did.  For example, there had long 
been explanations for fossils within the creationist perspective.  Without 
compromising the genius of Darwin, one has to recognize the influence of the 
cultural state of affairs during his lifetime.  The West was still dominated by 
Christian thought.  Positivists shared important elements of creationist 
epistemology such as the requirements of evidence and experimentation, the 
canons of proof.  The West, however, was no longer dominated by a Christian 
world view.  Darwin was born into an age of transition where long held ideas had 
been weakened.  Of particular significance to Darwin were presuppositions 
concerning Nature.  Newton argued that a static Nature was composed of 
particulate matter in motion.  For many, this described a changeable Nature, not a 
static one.  Herschel demonstrated that the stars were not fixed after all, but 
moved.  The accepted assumption of a static Nature was becoming less tenable.

	By the 1800s, the West had witnessed remarkable scientific progress in 
providing a mechanistic understanding of natural phenomena.  Moreover, Darwin's 
day was a time of unprecedented economic expansion, a time when laissez fair 
capitalism was the rule of the day.  Competition was the ethic of the capitalistic 
marketplace that provided all the change and progress.  In 1850, Joseph Paxton 
built the Crystal Palace in London to showcase the scientific and technological 
achievements of modern Europe.  This was indeed an age of change and progress, 
and this was the backdrop for Darwin's accomplishment.  One can imagine Darwin 
mulling over the ideas of mechanicism, competition, change, progress, origins.  
One can almost hear his thoughts, 'If only there were a mechanism...'

	I am not saying that these were the literal thoughts that led Darwin to the 
concept of natural selection or that he even had such thoughts.  However, he was 
not a hermit.  This was the environment in which he thought and reasoned.  
Though what I have written is the barest of descriptions for this rich piece of 
intellectual and cultural history, it is sufficient to make the point that one can 
describe Darwin's theories as science, but not his embrace of positivistic 
naturalism.  Yet the first makes no sense without the second.  To come again to 
the classroom, understanding evolution requires no less now than it did for 
Darwin.  To understand evolution one must be able to see the world as it is seen by 
positivistic naturalists - the world view of evolutionary biologists and of many 
scientists in general.  That is not, however, the world view of many students.  
Thus, my position is that the teaching of evolution needs to begin with the very 
metaphysical questions that were so troublesome in Darwin's day.  These questions 
are not amenable to simple, didactic teaching; but these questions and the history 
behind them can serve as the basis for a dialogue among students and teacher that 
creates a shared meaning in the classroom.  That shared meaning is the sense that 
these are important questions which people answer in a variety of ways for a 
variety of reasons.  Constructivist theory implies that having gained this shared 
meaning in the classroom, students will be more attentive to the conceptual issues 
of evolution.  This is what I think Hills had in mind when he wrote about teaching 
science as a matter of "foreign relations" (Hills, 1989, p. 183).  Surely, Sol Tax 
would also approve of this approach to evolution since he himself wrote, "on 
reviewing what I had so far written, I say that for an avowed secularist I appeared 
to be associating a great deal with religious ideas.  But then it occurred to me that 
to deal with students emotionally committed to religious premises might well 
require rather more than less acceptance of them, as in a Socratic dialogue" (1983, 
p. 39).

Conclusion
	As long as evolution is approached from the perspective of colloquial 
positivism, there will continue to be large numbers of students with misconceptions 
about evolution or who reject it outright.  The positivist view that science can be 
taught as a distillate or pure essence is untenable.  All science and science teaching 
is encumbered (admittedly to varying degrees) by non-scientific ideas (Thelen, 
1983; Fourez, 1988; Linder, 1992).  Moreover, the subject of origins simply 
touches on too many other disciplines for it to be approached as a science-only 
topic even if it were possible.  Students are influenced by too many non-school 
factors for a teacher to think that a science course, let along a unit, will 
significantly influence student belief even if it were agreed that such an objective is 
appropriate.  To the contrary, constructivist thought suggests that understanding 
and belief are separate though related issues, and that the proper goal of 
instruction is understanding.  The relation of understanding to belief does not allow 
one to ignore belief, therefore, constructivism suggests that belief be allowed a 
legitimate role in the science classroom.  My specific suggestion is that teachers 
preface the conceptual study of evolution with a classroom dialogue, as Bohm 
(1992) defined this term, informed with material on the cultural history of 
Darwinism.  There is ample scholarship that supports the assertion that social and 
cultural factors influence science, so this suggestion for instruction does no 
damage to science - unless one believes that science education is a matter of 
indoctrination.  Will a cultural constructivist approach improve science learning?  
Since the science education research community is in the process of rethinking it's 
research agenda with regard to evolution, it would seem quite appropriate that this 
new agenda include hypotheses from cultural constructivism.

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