'Animals Don't Just Grow Feathers When They Want To...'

The short view of inheritance is that it is about what every organism gets from its parents, one generation to the next. Young children appreciate that offspring have strong similarities with their parents. A longer perspective embraces the similarities and diversity in relatives' features; it includes the characteristics of predecessors within and beyond the extended family, to include members of a species going back thousands of generations. In this longer view, the slow but significant changes we call "evolution" make sense. Evolution connects ideas of inheritance from the pool of variation over "deep time" that give rise to evolutionary change as a response to shifting environmental circumstances. From this explanation emerges an elegant and complex way of understanding the world. This article is about the authors sharing some of their insight and research into teaching evolution and inheritance to younger students.