Reviewing a high-school book in biology

This Book Is a Travesty

David L. Jameson

For the next 22 years [after he sailed aboard H.M.S. Beagle on a voyage of exploration], Darwin worked to find an explanation for how species change over time. He read, studied, collected specimens, and conducted experiments.

Finally, English economist Thomas Malthus proposed an idea that Darwin modified and used in his explanation. Malthus's idea was that the human population grows faster than Earth's [sic] food supply. . . . [page 402]

The truth is vastly different from the Glencoe writers' guesswork, and the writers could easily have learned the truth by reading Darwin's Autobiography. Darwin tells us that in July 1837, less than a year after he left the Beagle, he began to collect information that might be useful in explaining how species had acquired their adaptations. Then:

In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and . . . it at once struck me that [in the struggle for existence] favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work; . . . . [see note 1, below]

The Glencoe writers' notion that Darwin toiled for 22 years before he encountered Malthus's "idea" is nonsense, and so is their notion that Malthus came along and "proposed" a new construct that enabled Darwin to see the light. When Darwin was pondering the problem of adaptation, Malthus was no longer in any condition to propose anything. Malthus had died in 1834.

The 1995 version was a flashy, shallow book loaded with obsolete "information" and with illustrations, sidebars, and other extras that signified nothing. In my review, I said that the 1995 version was a menace to science education, and I gave this overall appraisal:

. . . [Dynamics of Life] tries to include far too many topics, conveys little understanding of any of them, and reflects little appreciation of biology as an integrative science. Moreover, the book gives the student little idea of what is really going on in biology today; if a teacher were to use Dynamics of Life while trying to give an up-to-date course, the teacher would have to devote an unreasonable amount of time to the preparation of supplementary materials.

In producing Dynamics of Life, Glencoe's writers and editors have repeatedly favored gee-whiz material while ignoring opportunities to present real science. [note 2]

The 1998 version wasn't much different and wasn't any better. Here is how I described it in The Textbook Letter:

The 1998 version of The Dynamics of Life is a reincarnation of the 1995 version, with some minor, poorly done changes. Some old material has been recast in new words, some sentences have been restructured, and a few illustrations have been altered or replaced, but The Dynamics of Life is still shallow, gee-whizzy, incoherent and pervasively obsolete. It still won't be acceptable to teachers who know their subject, because it still fails to show an appreciation of contemporary biology or a comprehension of the processes of science. [note 3]

I ended my review of the 1998 book with these remarks:

The minor revisions seen in the 1998 version of The Dynamics of Life haven't come close to rectifying the 1995 versions's deficiencies, and I think that Glencoe should stop fooling around with this book. Glencoe should dump the whole thing and start over, using some writers who know something about the biology practiced by real, working scientists.

I continue to think that those are good suggestions. The 2000 edition of The Dynamics of Life shows a lot of superficial changes, but these haven't made much difference. Glencoe still is using writers who know next to nothing about biology, and The Dynamics of Life is still what it was before -- a book laden with guesswork, with "facts" that too often are fictions, with "Lab" exercises that don't test any real or significant hypotheses, with "Thinking Critically" items that call for counting or describing or guessing (but little thinking), and with gee-whiz pictures that jam the pages but have no pedagogic value. As if to emphasize that the 2000 book has lots of gee-whizzery, Glencoe has put the name and logo of the National Geographic Society on the book's cover and has included "National Geographic Society" among the "Authors" listed on the title page [note 4].

Here are some things which appear in the 2000 version and which lead me to say that Glencoe still is using writers who know next to nothing about biology:

• The opening spread of Unit 9, "Vertebrates," has a colorful picture that's big and new, but the accompanying text is old and ignorant. The writers still are claiming that vertebrates are the only animals that can survive in "changing environments," that vertebrates are the only animals that engage in "complex behaviors," and that vertebrates are the only animals that migrate.

• The writers emphasize, over and over, that amphibians reproduce in water, that amphibians "complete part of their life cycle in water," that amphibians change from aquatic larvae into "semiterrestrial" adults, that the "amphibian life cycle" has "an aquatic tadpole stage and a terrestrial adult stage," and so on. But any eager youth who is interested in herpetology understands that most families of frogs, and various other families of amphibians as well, include species that exhibit direct development: The adults lay their eggs (or carry their eggs about) in terrestrial habitats; there are no tadpole stages; and the young amphibians that hatch from the eggs look like miniature adults.

• On page 898 we learn that "A dog that has picked a poisonous frog up in its mouth will never do so again." Hasn't any of these writers ever owned a dog?

• The writers give an old, wrong definition of ectotherm ("an animal in which the body temperature changes with the temperature of its surroundings"), and they erect an absolute division between ectotherms and endotherms. In doing this, they completely ignore the fact that large reptiles and some big fishes generate and retain internal heat. Later the writers declare that "Reptiles are ectotherms" -- but then they contradict their own definition of ectotherm by saying that reptiles "can use behavioral adaptations to compensate for changes in environmental temperatures." The writers don't grasp that fishes and amphibians use behavioral thermoregulation, just as reptiles do, or that endotherms employ behavioral thermoregulation too. Hasn't any of these writers ever sought shade on a hot summer day?

• On page 842 the writers erect another false absolute: "Reptiles reproduce by laying eggs on land." What about all those reptiles that produce live offspring and don't lay eggs at all? The simple-minded absolutes that occur throughout The Dynamics of Life can easily be made into simple-minded questions on quizzes, but they don't correspond to reality. Is Glencoe trying to comply with the notion -- currently popular in some political quarters -- that the purpose of public education is merely to ensure that students "learn the facts"? Perhaps, but the "facts" embodied in Glencoe's false absolutes and false dichotomies are foreign to the very nature of science.

• The full-page article titled "Inside Story: Flight" displays new graphics and new, colorful pictures, but the article's text is old and wrong. The writers still are promoting their foolish notion that birds don't have jaws or jawbones: "Birds," they say, "have beaks made out of a protein called keratin." Wrong. Keratin forms the outer sheath (i.e., the rhamphotheca) of a bird's bill, but the sheath is supported by bone. Hasn't any of these writers ever seen a bird's skeleton in a museum?

• The "MiniLab" on page 818, "Measuring Breathing Rate in Fishes," leaves me wondering what the writers might have been imagining when they contrived it. The writers begin by claiming that the rate at which a fish breathes is related to the availability of oxygen in the water ("More oxygen results in a slower breathing rate"), but then they direct students to observe the breathing rate of a goldfish as the fish is subjected to different temperatures. The students never measure the dissolved oxygen in the water that the fish is breathing, so the exercise is irrelevant to the writers' opening claim. It achieves nothing beyond the confounding of two variables.

  "Measuring Breathing Rate in Fishes" isn't an isolated case. Again and again The Dynamics of Life offers exercises in which students must "calculate" or "explain" something in a context that doesn't make sense. Not once do the writers inquire, "What is wrong with this exercise?" or "Does this exercise test any reasonable hypothesis?" or "Does this exercise test anything at all?"

• This book, dated in 2000, purports to describe the development of animals without ever mentioning the homeobox genes. Our knowledge of these homeotic genes provides a beautiful example of the reciprocity between traditional descriptive biology and modern molecular biology. Ignoring this is simply not fair to students.

• On page 467 the writers introduce, with great fanfare, the "fanlike diagram" for depicting "phylogenetic relationships among species [sic]," and they promote the view that a "fanlike diagram" is more descriptive than a cladogram and is the superior way to depict the historical record. I suppose that they really believe this, because they present a fan diagram of "Life's Six Kingdoms" on pages 468 and 469, and they reproduce the same diagram at the very end of the book. Unfortunately, the fan fails the test of good science -- and so does the concept of six kingdoms.

I could go on and on, but I don't think I have to. If you require more examples, you need only open the book. Almost every page of The Dynamics of Life offers something that is as confused or wrong-headed as the items that I have cited, and this leads to an inescapable conclusion: The Dynamics of Life is a travesty, and it mustn't be inflicted on students, on teachers or on taxpayers.

Notes

1. See The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, edited by Nora Barlow. It was issued in 1958 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. (New York City). [return to text]

2. Editor's note: Two reviews of the 1995 version ran in TTL for July-August 1996, under these headlines: "This Book Is a Menace" and "Turn It Off." [return to text]

3. Editor's note: See "The Return of the Menace" in TTL for May-June 1999. [return to text]

4. Editor's note: In the past few years Glencoe/McGraw-Hill has issued a number of schoolbooks that allegedly have some connection with the National Geographic Society, and Glencoe has even claimed that the NGS is the chief author of some of these books -- e.g., the 1997 version of Glencoe World Geography, the 1996 and 1998 versions of Geography: The World and Its People, and the 1999 version of World History: The Human Experience. We are unaware of any reason to believe these claims, and we infer that Glencoe has merely purchased permission to use the NGS's name and logo as sales-promotion devices. Readers of TTL will remember that the NGS's director of education products, David Beacom, refused to answer when he was asked whether the NGS had had anything to do with Glencoe World Geography or with Geography: The World and Its People. (See "Geographic Society Refuses to Tell Why Its Name Appears on a Trashy Text" in TTL, May-June 1998, and "Keeping an Eye on the Scams, Shams and Swindles" in TTL, January-February 1999.) [return to text]

David L. Jameson is a specialist in molecular biology and a senior research fellow of the Osher Laboratory of Molecular Systematics at the California Academy of Sciences (in San Francisco). His published works include books on evolutionary genetics and the genetics of speciation. He regularly reviews high-school biology textbooks for The Textbook Letter.

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