Toulmin’s concept of “natural order” and its application to the teaching of biology.

Abstract

Science teaching has been consolidated as an autonomous discipline, although linked to the contents of science and its history. Within this discipline, we already notice the existence of subdisciplines whose differences lie in the particular science they deal with: such is the case of the didactics of Biology. This article studies the possibility of applying the idea of “natural order”, devised by Toulmin, to a particular case of biology teaching: the teaching of theories of evolution. It allows us to distinguish, in a much more adequate way than is explained in many manuals, between Lamarckism and Darwinism. Likewise, we see that there is no change in the “natural order” when moving from classical Darwinism to the synthetic theory of evolution, whose “natural order” is concentrated in the Hardy-Weinberg law. It also allows us to see that the synthetic theory of evolution and punctuated equilibrium share the same “natural order” but not the explanation for its alteration, which makes them alternative theories. Finally, we can explore the concept of “natural order” in the context of evo-devo theory after defining the concept of “morphogenetic space”. We see that this theory and the synthetic theory of evolution do not share the same “natural order”, which makes them complementary and not alternatives.