Lessons on Diversity, Extinction, and Evolution

The National Science Education Standards suggests middle school students obtain an understanding of diversity of species, evolution, and extinction — all functions of natural selection: Species diverge, evolve and go extinct via natural selection. Thus, comprehension of natural selection is the first order of business in this section, and so we provide three activities. Following these is an activity that illustrates one way evolution can be measured and a radio broadcast concerning ancient extinctions.

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Natural Selection http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/lessons/ns.cum.l.html

A common criticism of natural selection is: How can it produce novel, complex and useful structures by pure random chance? Darwin argued that selection is cumulative, not a random process. This lesson provides a way for students to actually compare the cumulative nonrandom selection of Darwin with the noncumulative version so often erroneously implied. Students attempt to produce a full sequence of 13 cards of one suit (ace to king). This must be done by shuffling the suit of cards for each round, then checking the cards. Half the teams must look for the full sequence each time, and repeat the process until this is accomplished. The other teams start to build their sequence by pulling the ace when it first appears as the top card, then adding to the stack whenever the next card for the sequence is shuffled to the top. Discussion reveals how the second method mimics Darwinian natural selection, while the first does not. MSP full record

An Origin of Species http://www.teachersdomain.org/9-12/sci/life/evo/anorigin/index.html

In a segment from the PBS Evolution project, viewers can observe natural selection and adaptive radiation in action as a new species evolves. This site includes a background essay and discussion questions. MSP full record

Evolution: Online Lessons for Students: Lesson 4 - Flashy Fish http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/educators/lessons/lesson4/act2.html

John Endler traveled to Trinidad in the 1970s to study wild guppies. The guppies live in small streams that flow down the mountains from pool to pool. In this activity, students take part in an online simulation of Endler's work. They collect data, formulate a hypothesis, run a series of experiments, and find out about the interplay between natural selection and sexual selection in this population of guppies. MSP full record

Molecular Clocks: Proteins That Evolve at Different Rates http://www.teachersdomain.org/resources/tdc02/sci/life/evo/molecclocks/index.html

Four different proteins from humans and horses are compared in this graphic and article from The Human Evolution Coloring Book by Adrienne Zihlman. The reasons why each protein evolves at its own characteristic rate are discussed. Each protein is useful for measuring evolutionary change over a different time scale. MSP full record

Time-Lapse Extinctions http://ewradio.org/program.aspx?ProgramID=3911

The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago, and was followed by a mass extinction of large mammals. This radio broadcast reports on research into how human activity and climate change may have wiped out the big animals. The clip from 2005 is two minutes in length. MSP full record

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Copyright August 2007 — The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0424671. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.