The Importance of Clarifying Evolutionary Terminology Across Disciplines and in the Classroom: A Reply to Kampourakis

Kampourakis’s commentary rightly argues for the importance of interdisciplinary discussion among experts in conceptual development, science education, and the history and philosophy of science. Indeed, we viewed our paper (Ware & Gelman, 2014) as providing a valuable intersection between conceptual development and science education research, and hope that this exchange will encourage further such cross-discipline conversations. Kampourakis takes issue with our usage of three terms: “Darwinian,” “Lamarckian,” and “teleological.” We address each of these concerns in turn. First, Kampourakis points out that we incorrectly implied that Darwin attributed evolution to “gene recombination and chance mutations.” In fact, although individual variation was a critical element in Darwin’s model, he did not accurately postulate the source of this variation or the mechanisms of inheritance. This knowledge did not emerge until later, with advances in fields such as molecular biology and genomics. Our definition of “Darwinian” was more consistent with the so-called modern synthesis of evolution (sometimes also referred to as “neo-Darwinism”), which is grounded in Darwin’s core ideas about variation and natural selection, but updated with knowledge from subsequent discoveries, such as Mendelian genetics (Huxley, 1942; Mayr, 1982). We acknowledge this oversight on our part and appreciate the clarification. We are also aware that even this model of evolution is now considered outdated (Gould, 2002); however, more recently discovered mechanisms (e.g., genetic drift) were beyond the scope of our focus on purpose-based inheritance reasoning at the individual-organism level. Second, Kampourakis points out that our use of “Lamarckian” to refer to so-called soft inheritance (Mayr, 1980) is too restrictive because other biologists, including Darwin