This paper presents the results of a study which examined children's ideas about speciation.
Two groups of elementary school students, 9-year-olds and 12-year-olds, were interviewed
using a semi-structured questionnaire. The results indicate that several children explain the
phenomena of speciation in terms of consistent explanatory frameworks that strongly
resemble either early Greek or renaissance variants of Essentialist theories in biology. The
core beliefs of such frameworks constrain the types of solutions that are generated for a …