Natural History Education for Students Heading Into the Century of Biology (Inquiry & Investigation‪)‬

Natural History & Evolution as Common Themes in Biology A colleague teaching at a liberal arts college was recently dispirited by the following question from a senior biology major: "Is a spider a vertebrate or an invertebrate?" After examining our curriculum, we should be reluctant to lay blame on the student. This student learned the evolutionary processes that generated the spider, how to sequence its DNA, and measure its rate of respiration. Nowhere in the curriculum was she expected to learn what a spider is. Decades of emphatic promotion of experimental ecology, at the cost of natural history education, has robbed young biologists of exposure to organisms in their natural environment. E.O. Wilson (1985, 2000) has long argued that the unpopularity of natural history is leading to an educational and research crisis in our country.