Evolution: Evidence and Acceptance

Educational Professionals’ Knowledge and Acceptance of Evolution

This study sought to determine if we could identify a cadre of educational professionals with sufficient knowledge and acceptance of biological evolution to objectively evaluate the merits of the emerging discipline of evolutionary educational psychology. Members of APA and AERA were recruited to complete surveys measuring demographic characteristics, evolution knowledge (specifically natural s...

Mechanisms of Graft Acceptance: Evidence

Network Effects in Technology Acceptance: Laboratory Evidence

This research analyzes network effects in technology acceptance, on the hypothesis that the larger is user network, the more likely is technology acceptance. Still today, empirical measurement of network effects is challenging and there is a lack of experimental evidence, particularly in technology acceptance research. To overcome this limitation we reproduce a particular class of technology ac...

Evidence and Evolution 2

As Elliott Sober acknowledges in the preface, the title of his latest book Evidence and Evolution is potentially confusing. For his discussion does not present various known empirical facts that support the theory of common ancestry, such as fossil data and genetic and anatomical features of extant species. Rather, it is an epistemological study of scientific inference and the confirmation of h...

Cognitive Constraints on the Understanding and Acceptance of Evolution

In September 2008, Electronic Arts released a computer game called “Spore,” in which players control the evolution of a novel organism from microscopic cell to interstellar explorer. Billed as a potential teaching tool, the game has been sharply criticized by evolutionary biologists for its lack of scientifi c accuracy (Bohannon, 2008). In Spore, “evolution” proceeds by swapping “DNA points,” e...