COMPREENDENDO A POLISSEMIA DO CONCEITO DARWINISTA DE ADAPTAÇÃO EM LIVROS DIDÁTICOS DE BIOLOGIA DO ENSINO MÉDIO.

The present paper aims at analyzing the polysemy of the Darwinian concept of adaptation in High School Biology textbooks approved in the 2015 Brazilian National Textbook Program. As a theoretical-methodological tool, we used a semantic matrix containing systematized ontological and epistemological dimensions that provided the bases for the proposition of zones in a Conceptual Profile model of the adaptation concept. The analyses showed that the frequent use of the concept of adaptation in addressing contents from Zoology, Botany, Paleontology, and Physiology reinforced the integrative and central role of Evolution in school discourse. A utilitarian notion of adaptation as a state of being or to refer to characteristics of living beings prevailed among the recording units, in which functionality showed up as a sufficient condition to define them as adaptations, independently of their origin by natural selection. This way of presenting adaptations can lead the students to relegate the role of natural selection in their explanation to a second plane, or even to neglect it entirely, or to an understanding of it as a natural process that necessarily acts to produce characteristics appropriate to the current conditions of the environment. Several approaches involving the concept of adaptation emphasized the notions of goal and purpose, from a teleological perspective. The recurrent use of such teleological explanations may be associated with the fact that this way of thinking is rather common in cognitive activities, such that its use might be justified by the expectation that a language based on it might have heuristic value in the students' conceptual evolution. Nevertheless, there is a necessity of grounding these explanations properly, from an evolutionary and/or organizational approach to living systems, such that modes of thinking incompatible with scientific understanding in contemporary biology are not promoted. This brings about difficulties that are potentially hard to confront in high school, especially if we consider the general absence in teacher education of an appropriate grounding of valid teleological explanations under the light of contemporary biological thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]