God or Darwin? The development of beliefs about the origin of species.

Abstract

In two studies I address the question of how an understanding of the origins of species is achieved. Study One is an investigation of when and how children come to adopt natural-evolutionary explanations for biological origins, as opposed to psychological-creationist explanations. Forty-nine elementary school children (6- to 12-years old) were asked about their natural history knowledge and about the origins of biological entities. A coherent pattern was demonstrated, with systematic age-related shifts from a primitive natural explanation, spontaneous generationism, to an intentional explanation, creationism, and from there, for some, to a more sophisticated natural explanation, evolutionism. The presence of evolutionism was positively related to subjects' natural history knowledge, independently of age. In Study Two, both creationist and evolutionist beliefs were investigated in more detail. Subjects were 175 children and their parents, from fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist elementary schools. In the non-fundamentalist community, a replication of the pattern of results found in Study One, was achieved. For the fundamentalist community, creationist explanations dominated at all ages, and all natural explanations, including knowledge of natural-history, were suppressed. Additional measures across the two communities revealed comparable parent educational levels, and comparable child interests in neutral areas, such as outdoor activities and reading, but divergent interests and knowledge in religious activities, fossils and adaptation. It was not until early adolescence (10- to 12-years) that the children's pattern of responses converged on the pattern found in the adults of their respective communities. It is argued that the divergent developmental pattern across the two communities can be optimally explained with a model of constructive interactionism: Children generate both natural and intentional beliefs about origins, while the communities privilege certain beliefs and suppress or fail to facilitate others, thus engendering a particular belief system. Additionally, these studies of children's understanding of ultimate cause shed light not only on this topic, but also on the nature of children's naive theories of biology and psychology. The application of these results to a developmental model in which both mind and society play interactive roles in the development of belief systems, is described.