Analogies and Teaching of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology

Abstract

This paper distinguishes three ways of taking analogies into account when teaching natural sciences and discusses some didactic implications of the perspective, rarely mentioned in the field of didactics, according to which some metaphors and analogies are a non-removable part of scientific theories. These general analyses are then brought into play in a discussion of possible contributions to the teaching of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology based on the work on the informatics analogy, in the first case, to contribute to a learning process that throw into questions genetic determinism, as well as on the analogy of design, in the second case, to contribute to the metacognitive regulation of teleological thinking.