Evolution Education in the German-Speaking Countries

This chapter discusses evolution education and the acceptance of evolution in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol, and Luxembourg. Ernst Haeckel first introduced Darwin’s concepts to a broad public in Germany. His interpretation of evolution was more teleological, hierarchical, and definitely more anti-religious than intended by Darwin. Later, pseudo-evolutionary arguments were adopted by the Nazis to pursue racism and mass murder. These historical developments still influence the perception of evolution in the German-speaking countries. Acceptance of evolution has been generally increasing since 1970, and correlates negatively with religious faith and positively with attitudes on science and the understanding of evolution, respectively. Students’ preconceptions are frequently faulty, anthropomorphic and teleological, e.g. they regard adaptation as an intentional process. Knowing these preconceptions helps to deal with them in order to help students properly understand evolution. Anti-evolution movements exist, but not in a comparable intensity to the United States. Occasional support of “Intelligent Design” (ID) by church dignitaries is usually mocked by the media, and ignored by a vast majority. Parts of the scientific community are alert to creationist initiatives like fake textbooks with ID contents. Creationism and ID are not intended to be taught at school or universities. In the curricula for primary school, evolution is not mentioned. Later, it usually appears once at lower and higher secondary school each. Students with general qualification for university entrance should at least know the basic evolutionary concepts and relationships. Teacher education has been heterogenous for the different countries, federal states, and school types, but is being standardized at university courses according to the Bologna process recently. Finally, we suggest improvements for evolution education. We agree with the German Academy of Science that a framework curriculum should be developed to offer evolutionary biology as a “red thread” through all biological phenomena, for all types of schools and for all grades.