Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents the results of a study which examined children's ideas about the origin and differentiation of species. The focus of this paper is on the epistemic constructs associated with children's explanatory frameworks. Two groups of elementary school students, 9- year-olds and 12-year-olds, were interviewed using a semistructured questionnaire. The results indicate that most children explain the phenomena of speciation in terms of a conceptual framework that strongly resembles either early Greek or later renaissance variants of Essentialist theories in biology. Children also demonstrate a spontaneous understanding of important epistemic constructs associated with theoretical frameworks. For example, most children show an explicit awareness of the boundaries of their theoretical frameworks and have some idea of the phenomena that such a framework can and should explain. Many children treat questions about the origins of the first animal and plant species as "first questions," or questions which are in principle unanswerable. The children appear to distinguish between facts that they as individuals lack but that are probably known by experts, domain problems that are unsolved but could in principle be answered by biological theories, and problems that are beyond the explanatory scope of biological theories.