Students as predarwinian teleologists: a proposal for addressing the problem of teleology in Biology education

Abstract

In this paper we present the theoretical foundations of a proposal for a didactic treatment of students' teleological conceptions in the teaching of Biology. The proposal in question involves resorting to the way Darwin dealt with the dominant teleological conceptions of his contemporaries, in order to propose a general strategy through which students' teleological intuitions could be influenced, so as to facilitate the learning of the theory of natural selection. We will also suggest that this proposal implies an original way of appealing to the analogy between theoretical change in the history of science and science learning.