A evolução humana nas mídias sociais: representações e contribuições para a educação em ciências

Abstract

Research shows that social media is responsible for the growth in the population's access to information about science and technology. Scientific dissemination can be a teaching tool and its content is present on social media, making it possible to find texts, images and videos on any subject in biology, including human evolution. The use of scientific dissemination texts on human evolution allows for countless discussions that permeate the scope of teaching evolution, as well as aspects that go beyond the discipline of biology. In the following research we seek to characterize the social representations of human evolution conveyed in the digital media that students access. Representation is a set of values, beliefs, information and attitudes crystallized in social media on the topic of human evolution. We used a questionnaire to identify the sources that students access and subsequently selected twelve texts from the most cited sources to be analyzed. The methodology used was content analysis. We used the model of the central core theory of social representations to characterize the structure of the representation of human evolution, which presented the Darwinian view of evolution as the central core, with natural selection, adaptation and evolution as the main concepts. On the periphery of representation we find distorted views of evolution, such as teleology and transformism, and peripheral concepts such as common descent. The contributions to science education permeate a reflection on the use of the analyzed texts in human evolution teaching activities. The texts do not present conceptual rigor, do not present references to the studies cited, and some texts are copies of content from other internet sites. Despite the low quality of content, the texts present questions to attract readers' attention, such as presenting ideas about future changes in human bodies and societies. Even so, we highlight the possibility of the articulation of fragments related to the concept of adaptation being explored in didactic sequences in the teaching approach using conceptual profiles. The adaptation must follow the criteria established within the teaching objectives that the teacher chooses. We concluded that the results of the work brought an interesting view of the level of information that students consume, however, we cannot say that students represent and share the views brought by the sources they access. We point out that teaching human evolution can go beyond the origin and dispersion of man, themes that are traditionally suggested by educational curricula. Finally, we conclude that the subject of human evolution goes beyond the limits of the discipline of biology and interdisciplinary articulation can contribute to its teaching.