Sunday, March 13, 2016

An ADI activity for exploring evolution

The objective of this activity is to get students to think about and understand how to develop models of evolution (TN State Standards being met: 5.5, 5.6).  Students will do this activity in groups of 3.

Introduction: We have been learning about how evolution can lead to a wide diversity of organisms.  We have also discussed how scientists represent these evolutionary relationships through phylogenetic trees.  However, the ways in which species are related are not always easy to find.  Scientists must evaluate a number of traits when constructing a phylogenetic tree including, but not limited to, physical traits, sequenced genes and proteins (when available), behavior, and the ecological niche each species occupies.

Problem: In 2012, researchers in the Democratic Republic of Congo described a new species of monkey that they named Cercopithecus lomamiensis (described in DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0044271).  Construct a model describing your group's hypothesis of the evolutionary relationships between this new species and the following 10 monkey species: XXX (here I would list 10 monkey species, at least 8 of which live in sub-Saharan Africa.  Each species ought to have a Wikipedia page, nothing too obscure.).

Student groups will be allowed (and expected) to use the Internet in class for this project.  They ought to construct phylogenetic trees based on the traits they select.

2 comments:

  1. Phillip,

    I found your ADI topic interesting because I agree that evolution lends itself well to modeling and argumentation. I'm curious as to whether you would have already discussed the affordances and constraints of classifying by specific traits (i.e. classifying by appearance has certain downfalls that classifying by genes may not experience) before this activity. If you had, how could you present information in such a way as to prevent students from all creating the same phylogenetic tree? Just a question that I was wondering if you had any thoughts on

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    1. I think I would want to do this activity before discussing the strengths and weaknesses of classifying by each type of trait in order to get students to think about it on their own first. If I had discussed this first, I would probably throw in one or two extinct species that we have only fossil records of in order to push students towards understanding that we want to use certain types of traits over others, but these traits are not always available for us to use.

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