The influence of religion on Portuguese and Brazilian teachers’ conceptions about the origin of life

Abstract

Teachers’ conceptions about human evolution have been a matter of intense research by Quessada and Clément (2010) in the context of the European BIOHEAD-CITIZEN project. Having in mind the socio-cultural links between Portugal and Brazil, in the present paper we extended the BIOHEAD-CITIZEN study to Brazilian teachers and compared with the equivalent Portuguese sample. The BIOHEAD-CITIZEN questionnaire was applied to 368 teachers and future teachers from Braga district (Portugal-Pt) and 300 from S. Paulo State (Brazil-Br). Results show a stronger influence of religous values in the Brasilien group as compared with the Portuguese one, though both groups are aware of the natural selection role in evolution theory. Furthermore, significantly (p<0.05) higher percentage of Brazilians (67.0%) refer God as being in the origin of mankind as compared with the Portuguese (45.5%). Similarly, 73.3% of the inquired Brazilians believe in God influence for the creation of life as compared to 49.2% of the Portuguese respondents. Although the Portuguese cultural influence in Brazil is strong (for about 500 years and having the common Portuguese language), these results show that the Brazilians, rather than the Portuguese, put in evidence their religious values, which comes along with the existence of more Agnostic/Atheist in Portuguese (9.4%) than in Brazilians (6.4%) samples.