However, placing students along a continuum of evolutionary reasoning competency was straightforward in most cases.
For students to achieve more expert-like competency in evolutionary reasoning, then, they must consider both adaptive and non-adaptive processes as possible contributors to evolutionary causation.
Most introductory biology courses are insufficient to establish competency in evolutionary biology.
In short, students' competency in evolutionary reasoning should be measured by their ability to consider both drift and selection as possible causal mechanisms in their explanations for trait change.
Rather, evolutionary reasoning is a core competency just as anatomy and communication skills are core competencies for most physicians.
Results and experiments are presented to characterize the training process and the acquisition of controller competency under different evolutionary conditions.
The American Association of Medical Colleges recently released a report establishing evolutionary biology as a premedical competency alongside other foundations such as chemistry and physics, and pointing to the value of evolutionary approaches within the medical curriculum itself (AAMC-HHMI Scientific Foundation for Future Physicians Committee 2009).
We should bear in mind that the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation, where our original competencies and dispositions were formed, was a very different place, one in which human beings lived in small groups of perhaps 10 30 individuals, comprised largely of kinfolk.
Although the dramatic increase of explicitly scientific ideas, and the decrease in the frequency of mixed models and explicitly naïve models provide support for the effectiveness of the PD program, several teachers failed to meet a minimum competency benchmark (i.e., being able to explain evolutionary change free of alternative conceptions).
However, for those interested in the evolutionary origins of human language, and specifically those characteristics and competencies that likely evolved following the split between chimpanzees and humans, it is critical to distinguish between these two theories.
