The State’s New Standards for Survival in Science Class

Though a National Academy of Sciences report laments that many public school students have little or no exposure to the theory of evolution, the draft version of California’s new standards for science instruction--released last week--does not avoid the issue. Examples:

Grades 6-8

* Students know that genetic differences within a population often result in individual variations in form and function. Students analyze how selective pressure (natural and artificial) results in a change in characteristics of a population over time.

* Students know the reasoning used by Darwin in his conclusion that natural selection is an important mechanism of evolution.

* Students know how independent lines of evidence, including geology, comparative anatomy and behavior, provide a basis for the theory of evolution.

* Students analyze examples of how movements of the Earth’s continental and oceanic plates through time, with the associated changes in climate and geographical connections, have determined the past and present distribution of organisms.

Grades 9-12

* Students analyze how morphological changes in a lineage through time reflect genetic changes mediated by natural selection, genetic drift and other processes, including environmental influences.

* Students analyze evidence that evolution is primarily a selective process, based on the differential survival of groups of organisms having characteristics that make them fit to exploit their environments. Students recognize that natural selection acts on the phenotype, rather than the genotype, of an organism.

* Students analyze the fossil evidence in terms of increasing diversity, episodic speciation and mass extinction.

* Students analyze how reproductive or geographical isolation typically separate sexually reproducing species, and know that examples also exist of species that interbreed to form a continuum.