Epistemology of biology and future teachers and biologists conceptualization of living

The results presented in this article result from a doctoral study that was interested in the history of biology and significant philosophic conceptions that, until now, fueled the building of knowledge in biology (Simard, 2015 [1]). In this regard, a set of life conceptions was selected and circumscribed to develop a new evaluation tool considering the occurrence of one or other of conceptions among future teachers and biologists. For some of these historic conceptions, that are now considered as obsolete, the issue is that they see themselves very alive in scientific thought, even today. The characterization of the conception of living and the identification of obstacle-conceptions is a necessary step to subsequently study the learning processes and the development of teaching sequences considering them for the benefit of a current understanding of living. Finally, this study presents the positive influence of scientific training in biology on the conceptualization of the living by a decrease of the obstacle-conceptions.