Teaching evolutionary theory in France: going beyond wishful thinking
At 1.5km, Rue Lamarck is among the longest in the 18ᵉ arrondissement; neighboring Rue Darwin is just... 86m long. This gap symbolizes France's special link to evolution.
Marc-André SELOSSE, Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (MNHN) - Sorbonne Universities and Bernard GODELLE, University of Montpellier
An early adherent to the theories of the evolutionist Lamarck (inventor of the concept of transformism, which establishes that the biological world has changed), our country reluctantly, then slowly, assimilated the mechanisms behind this biological change: natural selection, proposed by Darwin. Other evolutionary mechanisms will be discovered later.
At the end of the XIXᵉ century, the weight of a Pasteur blurs Darwin's impact: taken to the extreme, Darwinian theory suggests that life originated from an "initial" spontaneous generation. This appearance without a creator upset many churches. The conservative and clerical Pasteur, for his part, asserted that there was no such thing as spontaneous generation: he had little sympathy for Darwinism, and never mentioned Darwin in his writings. Pasteur accepted a created world, since life could not appear spontaneously. Thus began a French biology without Darwinism.
Wellcome Images/Wikimedia, CC BY
During the XXᵉ century, biology teaching therefore "told" stories of evolution (such as that of man, or that of the emergence of fish from the water in the primary era), supported by paleontological examples, but the mechanisms at work were absent, or even misrepresented. Between 1950 and 1980, the university was dominated by "general biology", epitomized by academician Pierre-Paul Grassé: this approach to life reveals admirable relationships between structures and the functions they perform within organisms. But it ignores the mechanisms of evolution and reduces living organisms to a series of organisms linked by a chain of innovations forming a progress. Darwinism is neglected as a clumsy, reductive explanation.
So, have we moved on from the days when 80% of French people believed in evolution (in 2005), but had no idea how it works? The answer is yes... a little.
French-style evolutionary biology
The 1980s saw the emergence of a French school of evolutionary biology, based in particular on agronomy schools and the Ecole Normale Supérieure. University training courses were set up; accessible popularization works were published; and gradually, this school gained worldwide recognition. However, the school's ideas were slow to penetrate secondary education, where change did not begin until the late 1990s. Evolution specialists, including ourselves, took part in the reform of the competitive examinations for teacher recruitment (agrégation and CAPES); others wrote pedagogical works; some were invited to help draw up school curricula. The latest development is the introduction, in 2013, of evolution teaching in the curricula of agronomic and veterinary preparatory classes.
However, the teaching of evolution still encounters difficulties, first and foremost linked to this training of teachers in "general biology", which they still duplicate too much with their students. In reality, the programs are a kind of wishful thinking, with no ongoing training to change attitudes. During the reform of the preparatory class syllabus, a teacher asked on a discussion forum "What use is evolution to future agronomists? An excellent question! It's a bit like a physics teacher asking why he should teach gravitation to astronomers.
Genetic drift
Can such a teacher be expected to pass on the evolution and power of its applications without ad hoc training? Some of the new features in the programs are problematic: the introduction of the concept of genetic drift posed difficulties for teachers, who were ill-prepared to find simple examples and approaches. Drift is the fact that traits (genetic variants) can appear or disappear by chance, whatever their value for natural selection, especially when a population becomes small. This explains many observations, such as the frequency of certain diseases in human populations founded by small groups, in Finland for example. Despite the commendable efforts of inspectors, there are too few resources and too few opportunities to bring teachers together to train them in evolution, as in other new aspects of the curriculum.
Today, we're worried about initial training: it changed in duration and nature at the start of the current five-year term. Ten years ago, a student took the CAPES with a master's degree (level 1) followed by a year's training. Today, it's the master's year that serves as training, with a one-month field placement and courses in pedagogy and didactics. While this last aspect is an interesting innovation, the reduction in the total duration of disciplinary training (by one year and 30% during the M1) is clearly detrimental to the level. What's more, the takeover of this training by the Ecoles Supérieures de Professeurat et d'Education (ESPE) has been accompanied in some centers by the exclusion of science faculties, which poses a problem in terms of the ability to provide training everywhere in a biology nourished by recent advances, particularly in evolution.
Marc-André SELOSSEProfessor at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Visiting Professor at the Universities of Gdansk (Poland) & Viçosa (Brazil), Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (MNHN) - Sorbonne Universities and Bernard GODELLEProfessor of Human Evolutionary Biology , University of Montpellier
Visit original version of this article was published on The Conversation.