Pitfalls and strengths of adaptation in biology education: how can philosophy of science help

The concept of adaptation in evolutionary biology is a clear example of how philosophy of biology and general philosophy of science can contribute to science education. Philosophy of biology may provide, e.g., critical conceptual taxonomies of complex and polysemic notions, like adaptation, which are peculiar to the discipline. But philosophy of science can do more for education than guard from conceptual pitfalls: it can help transforming terminological clarifications into access points to how science works. Philosophy of science encompasses the reasons of the semantic diversification of adaptation, revealing the role concepts play in scientific research. This, in turn, can contribute in structuring didactic laboratories that make students experience the nature of science and the foundations of its authority. From the standpoint of teaching evolutionary biology, adaptation is a “false friend”: the familiarity of the term may inspire confidence as a common ground on which to build studentsʼ understanding of evolution, but the everyday use of adaptation - as several analyses show - is manifestly non-technical. Moreover, even within evolutionary biology the word adaptation is used with several different technical meanings. In a case like this, a kind of philosophical analysis, namely conceptual taxonomy, can give important insights and guidelines for science education. A conceptual taxonomy by our group recognized and defined seven different meanings of adaptation in biology. We also pointed out some common cross-meanings issues, e.g. (a) the long-standing state/process dichotomy: adaptation can mean both a process and its product, and such ambiguity can lead to some theoretical problems; (b) therelationship between structure and function: the relative importance of the two terms can be conceptually balanced in different ways; (c) the necessity - and non-triviality - of boundaries extablished between adapting entities and an environment. We also noticed that the polysemy of adaptation is related to a series of levels of description, e.g. trait, individual, population, macro. The overall conceptual map of adaptation resulting from our philosophical analysis is, we think, important for teaching effectively. But philosophy have far greater potentialities. A deep philosophical analysis goes into the reasons why adaptation underwent semantic diversification, thus giving access to the dynamics of biology as a scientific enterprise, where new approaches and fields of research re-decline adaptation without ruling out its previous meanings. Philosophy of science may inspire didactic laboratories for students (see Pievani & Serrelli 2008) that simulate scientific work: in our case, adaptation - with its various meanings - has to be taken not as a matter of fact, but rather as a to-be-built concept capable to guide the studentsʼ construction of real problems, puzzles and questions, and the search of the best arguments and answers. Laboratories of this sort put teachers and students into the interdependence between theoretical context, scientific practice, and discoveries, and seem the best way to help them not only navigate through concepts, but also understand and discuss the “nature of science” (McComas 1998), as well as the foundations of its authority