Children's Thoughts on the Origin of Species: A Study of Explanatory Coherence

This paper presents the results of a study which examined children's ideas about speciation. Two groups of elementary school students, 9-year-olds and 12-year-olds, were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire. The results indicate that several children explain the phenomena of speciation in terms of consistent explanatory frameworks that strongly resemble either early Greek or renaissance variants of Essentialist theories in biology. The core beliefs of such frameworks constrain the types of solutions that are generated for a variety of biological problems.