GSA 2020 Connects Online

Paper No. 168-8
Presentation Time: 6:55 PM

SIGNIFICANCE OF SYSTEMATIC AND EVOLUTIONASRY THEORY IN THE ADVANCING EDUCATION OF BIOLOGISTS, PALEONTOLOGISTS AND GEOLOGISTS


MIKHALEVICH, V.I., Russian Academy of Sciences, Zoological Institute, Universitetskaya nab., 1, St. Petersburg, 199134, Russian Federation

In the 21st century the exponentially growing volume of new knowledge and trend to interdisciplinarity needs advancing of educational process.

The concrete expression of Geoscience education should be the biological base. For this base, a general systems and evolutionary approaches are required as the most promising and effective, providing an understanding of the hierarchy of the objects under study, their interconnection and their developmental trends.

To this end, for the advancing development of these approaches, institutionally, it is necessary to have appropriate departments in the structure of educational institutions: at geological faculties - departments of biology (with a subdivision of systematics and the theory of evolution), in biological faculties - separate departments of systematics and theory of evolution. In the systematic studies a special attention ought to be done to the systematic of the unicellular eukaryots as the groups still less investigated and having a special significance in paleontology and stratigraphy. To provide the continuity of education, it is necessary to base school courses on the same systemic and evolutionary approach, as well as in the process of postgraduate studies and postdoc education it is also necessary to provide for the advanced training of geologists in the same evolutionary and systematic terms. Teaching of scientific knowledge based on taxonomy and evolution is necessary in all ecological, paleoecological, stratigraphic and molecular genetic disciplines.

The same systemic and evolutionary approach is required at the individual level, helping to assimilate an ever-growing amount of knowledge and to develop professional intuition.

In conclusion, the specific results of these approaches in the study of the taxonomy of protists by the scientists of the Russian school of micropaleontology will be exemplified.