Reviewing a high-school book in biology

Biology: Living Systems
1998. 966 pages. ISBN of the student's edition: 0-02-826347-2.
Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 936 Eastwind Drive, Westerville, Ohio 43081.
(Glencoe/McGraw-Hill is a unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies.)

More Biobabble from Glencoe

William J. Bennetta

Like these sandhill cranes, most living things are unique and complex living systems.

"Most"? What is that word "most" meant to imply? Are there some other living things that aren't "unique" or aren't "complex"? Are there some living things that aren't "systems"? Are there some living things that aren't "living"? How can that be?

Though Glencoe's utterance about "most living things" is just empty biobabble, it has a perverse virtue: It functions as a reliable introduction to the material that a reader will find inside the book. In the 1998 version of Living Systems, as in the 1994 version, biobabble is everywhere.

When I reviewed the 1994 version [see note 1, below], I emphasized these three observations:

• Living Systems looked like a mess of bits and pieces that had been pasted together by drones who knew almost nothing of biology and who had been concerned chiefly with creating a glitzy product that would look good at first glance. The "biology" in Living Systems was often wrong, laughably obsolete or utterly idiotic, but the book's pages were loaded with faddish sidebars and other trendy gimmicks. A lot of these were irrelevant to the chapters in which they appeared, and some lacked any detectable relevance to biology.

• If Living Systems had any themes, they were anthropocentricity and natural theology -- neither of which has any role in biology. Anthropocentricity is the ancient idea that man is the most important thing in the universe and that all of nature revolves around human life and human desires. Natural theology is a body of religious doctrine, dating from the early 1800s, whose devotees hold that nature is purposeful, rational and benign. Some of the 1994 book's most ridiculous passages came where Glencoe's writers, in trying to make natural theology look scientific, had spatchcocked terms like "genes" or "adapted" into religious tales [note 2].

• The seven units that constituted the 1994 book were titled "The Nature of Biology," "Energy and the Cell," "The Continuation of Life," "Evolutionary Relationships," "Life Functions of Organisms," "Controlling Living Systems" and "Interactions in the Environment," but those seven titles failed to reflect the book's content. At bottom, Living Systems was a book about humans. I speculated that Glencoe had produced Living Systems in an effort to get some extra mileage out of a mass of old material dealing with human anatomy and physiology, and I made this comment: "I doubt that anyone who actually reads Living Systems will mistake it for a general-biology text. Its preoccupation with humans is far too conspicuous, and so is its contemptuous, distorted treatment of the rest of the living world."

The 1998 version is much the same as the 1994. Glencoe has made some changes in Living Systems, but with very little effect. Living Systems still is a glitzy parody of biology, still is pervaded by superstition, and still cannot be mistaken for a general- biology text.

In its structure and its pagination, the 1998 Living Systems matches the 1994 version exactly -- 873 pages in the body of the book, then 92 pages devoted to appendices and some lists.

To search for differences between the two versions, I have examined them in two ways. First: I have taken a random sample of 96 pages from the body of the 1998 book, and I have compared these pages with the like-numbered pages in the 1994. (In 70 cases, the page in the 1998 version has turned out to be identical with the corresponding page in the 1994. In 7 cases, the page in the 1998 book shows a change that is merely cosmetic -- i.e. some type has been reset, with no change in wording, or a color scheme has been altered. And in 19 cases, the page in the 1998 shows a change in content, though the change isn't necessarily an improvement. In some instances, Glencoe's writers have simply replaced old nonsense with new nonsense.) Second: After finishing my random survey, I have checked to see whether the writers have revised defective items that appeared in the 1994 version and were explicitly described in my review of the 1994. (During this checking, I have seen changes in a dozen items -- but again, not all of the changes are improvements.) Here are some of my specific findings:

• Page 106: The caption under the diagram of active transport has been changed. It no longer mentions ATP.

• Page 130: In the passage titled "Nucleus," several sentences have been altered. The revised passage isn't satisfactory, but Glencoe's writers no longer say that nucleoli are RNA molecules.

• Page 146: As in the 1994 version, this page has a photo of a bear. The accompanying caption has been replaced, and the new caption is pure biobabble. It declares that "All organisms" metabolize fats "to release heat and energy for body functions as this bear hibernates in winter." Huh?

• Page 170: Glencoe has reprinted, word for word, the 1994 book's passage about Francesco Redi and his efforts to learn why maggots appeared on decaying meat. The passage is a fake. It's a fantasy, not an account of what Redi really did and really observed.

• Page 198: A picture-caption now says that a cat inherits "genes," rather than "chromosomes," from its parents.

• Page 262: In the 1994 book, the caption for a diagram illustrating a point mutation said: "If three nucleotides are inserted or deleted, the protein will probably be functional." In the 1998, the caption says that the protein "may" be functional.

• Page 278: The passage about symptoms of cystic fibrosis has been overhauled and improved.

• Page 280: Where the 1994 version offered an obsolete section labeled "Finding the Huntington's Gene," the 1998 has a better passage called "Analyzing the Huntington's Gene."

• Page 296: The text on this page, introducing the term gene therapy and linking gene therapy to cystic fibrosis, has been rewritten.

• Page 317: When I reviewed the 1994 Living Systems, I pointed to several absurdities in the writers' passage about Darwin's visit to the Galápagos Islands. In the 1998 book, the specific absurdities that I cited have been eliminated, but the passage is otherwise unchanged. Glencoe's writers still haven't read Darwin, and it is obvious that they are merely retailing hearsay and stale legends that they have copied from other schoolbooks [note 3].

• Page 333: In the 1998 book, as in the 1994, the material on page 333 includes this "Investigation" item: "Amber is a hardened, resinlike material that sometimes may hold trapped insects. Describe a simple way of making an amber-trapped fossil without using amber." The guy who wrote that item deserves some sort of prize.

• Page 348: In my analysis of the 1994 version I noted that the Glencoe writers, in a section about convergent evolution, had muddled convergence with homology and had produced the nonsensical claim that the "body structures" of dolphins were "homologous with those of other mammals, not with fishes." In the 1998 version, the section about convergent evolution has been rewritten for the better. The rewrite says nothing about dolphins, fishes or homology, and the "body structures" claim has been replaced by some legitimate information: Students read that the single-lens eyes of vertebrates and the single-lens eyes of squids evolved independently.

• Page 458: In the 1998 Living Systems, as in the 1994, the entire exposition of the phylum Mollusca is confined to page 458. The material that appeared in the 1994 book has been reprinted without change: It comprises three paragraphs of fluffy text and four decorative pictures, with no analysis whatever of the mollusks' morphological diversity, their evolution, their many ecological roles, or their amazingly diverse modes of reproduction. The amount of space that is given to the mollusks in Living Systems is less than the amount that is devoted to liquid weight-loss products or to the evils of asbestos insulation. Some biology book!

• Page 473: In the 1994 Living Systems, Glencoe's writers repeatedly preached anthropocentricity by promoting the old, mystical notion of "nature's ladder" -- the notion that living things could be arranged in a continuous series that started with lowly and defective creatures, progressed through "higher" forms that were increasingly more "complex" and admirable, culminated in the mammals, and attained its climax in man (the most admirable creature of all). In my review of the 1994 book, I derided an 11-line passage, on page 473, in which the writers -- performing one of their feats of ladder-peddling -- glorified the mammals by making absurd claims about the mammals' "success." In the 1998 book, page 473 carries a new 11-line passage that avoids overt absurdity but is lame, at best, and contains items that are misleading or meaningless. (For example: The writers say flatly that the young of mammals other than monotremes "develop within the mother's uterus." But in marsupials such as kangaroos, new individuals spend only a short time in the uterus, and they complete only a small part of their early development there. They undergo most their development outside of the uterus, as pouch young.)

• Page 474: In the 1994 book, the table titled "Summary of Characteristics of Vertebrates" was larded with false, categorical claims that promoted the doctrine of the ladder. The table taught, for example, that all fishes and all amphibians rely on external fertilization. The bogus table has now been reprinted, without any revision, in the 1998 book.

• Page 486: The 1994 book had a section titled "Reproduction by Fragmenting," in which Glencoe's writers falsely equated the regeneration of damaged structures (in animals or plants) with reproduction. The entire section was a splurge of biobabble. In the 1998 book, the "Reproduction by Fragmenting" section displays a new photograph and a new caption, but the section's text has not been changed at all. It is still a splurge of biobabble [note 4].

• Pages 498 and 499: In the 1994 book, Glencoe's writers made a comical attempt to boost the doctrine of the ladder by presenting, in a passage titled "External Fertilization," claims that were patently bogus -- and when I reviewed the 1994 book, I pointed this out. Looking at the 1998, I see that the writers have tried to patch the passage up, but they have merely made it worse. See the article "Sexual Fantasies, Sexual Facts" that accompanies this review.

• Pages 532 and 533: In the 1994 Living Systems, pages 532 and 533 displayed a boxed article about one Helen Cordero, a "Pueblo artist" who made figurines, called storytellers, from clay. The article has now been reprinted, unchanged, in the 1998 book. Glencoe's writers don't even pretend to relate Cordero's merchandise to the study of living things, and the writers openly mock their readers by telling them to perform this exercise: "Writing About Biology: Find out more about the art forms of the Pueblo Indians in northern New Mexico. Are there other popular art forms, in addition to storytellers? Write a short report on your findings." As I remarked in my review of the 1994 Living Systems, I doubt that even the dimmest student will mistake that exercise for "writing about biology."

• Page 592: In the 1994 book, page 592 carried another mystical tale about nature's ladder. To affirm that organisms progress from crude, inept forms to refined, laudable forms which more closely resemble man, Glencoe's writers said that the vertebrates had undergone evolution toward "greater body complexity" and that this phenomenon was illustrated by the presence of two-chambered hearts in fishes, three-chambered hearts in amphibians, and four-chambered hearts in birds, mammals and some reptiles. Predictably, the writers refused to describe any of the instances in which vertebrate organs or systems have evolved to possess fewer, not more, components. In the 1998 version, the material on page 592 has been slightly revised but it is still distorted and misleading -- another attempt at ladder- peddling.

• Page 737: An extraneous label has been cut from figure 26-9, an anatomical diagram of a human knee.

• Page 743: The 1994 book had a superbly stupid "Investigation" called "Bone and Muscle Density," and the same "Investigation" now appears in the 1998 book. After measuring the density of some bones, students must answer this question: "What advantage to animals is having an exoskeleton density that is different than that of animals having an endoskeleton?" Even if the question were stated in real English, it would be entirely absurd. The students haven't examined any exoskeleton or any exoskeletal substance during the "Investigation," and the writers are wrong when they imply that the densities of exoskeletal materials must always be different from the densities of endoskeletal materials.

• Page 768: In the 1994 Living Systems, page 768 bore a section -- titled "Predation is Beneficial" -- in which Glencoe's writers promoted the notion that predation is "healthy" for a prey population. That notion, I explained in my review of the 1994 book, came directly from natural theology and had no basis in science. The healthy-predation fantasy is absent from the 1998 book, and the section in question is now titled "Effects of Predation." Good.

• Page 772: When I reviewed the 1994 version, I called attention to the writers' claim that intraspecific competition was "more severe" than interspecific competition, and I explained why that claim was ridiculous: Intraspecific competition is measured by its effects on individuals, interspecific competition is measured by its effects on populations, and the two sets of effects can't be compared. In the 1998 version, Glencoe's writers have replaced the "more severe" claim with some filler -- but the rest of the stuff on page 772 remains unchanged, including the inane theological statement that "Some degree of competition is desirable [to whom?] . . . because, through natural selection, the best adapted individuals survive to reproduce." That statement is analogous to, and makes no more sense than, the claim that predation is "healthy."

• Page 775: When I reviewed the 1994 book, I scorned the fluffy biobabble that I found in the two-paragraph section titled "Territoriality." Glencoe's writers have now fashioned two new paragraphs of biobabble to replace the old ones. Everything in the section has been rewritten except the first sentence -- and that sentence tells us again that the writers are faking and that they have no comprehension of territoriality. Here's the sentence: "Intraspecific competition among some animals may be held in check as animals occupy and defend specific territories." No! The notion that intraspecific competition is "held in check" by territorial behavior is absurd. Territorial behavior is a manifestation of, not a check upon, intraspecific competition -- and indeed, battles for territories (and for the reproductive opportunities that territories confer) constitute some of the most conspicuous and dramatic manifestations of intraspecific competition to be seen in all of nature. Can anyone watch a territorial battle between two bands of chimpanzees and interpret the battle to mean that competition between the two bands is being "held in check"? Can anyone watch two birds fighting for a territory and infer that competition between those birds is being repressed? Can anyone watch a territorial struggle between two fish and fail to recognize that the two fish are engaging in competition?

• Page 864: On page 864 of the 1994 book I found this passage:

  Genetic Engineering      Using selective breeding, geneticists have produced new
  strains of plants, such as rice and wheat, that produce more grain per plant than
  other varieties. The new strains also respond well to chemical fertilizers. An acre of
  land planted with these new strains can produce food for more people than the same
  acre planted with other varieties.

  Geneticists have also begun developing a strain of corn that is richer in protein
  than other types of corn. This protein-rich strain is not yet ready for use because it
  has several undesirable traits that must be bred out of it, including soft kernels and
  lack of resistance to pests.

  In my review, I noted that Glencoe's writers obviously didn't understand the term genetic engineering, for they had taken it to mean selective breeding. In the 1998 book, they have made a quick fix. They still haven't learned anything about genetic engineering, but they have replaced the term genetic engineering with a different two-word phrase. The rest of their passage remains unchanged:

      Improved Plants      Using selective breeding, geneticists have produced new
  strains of plants, such as rice and wheat, that produce more grain per plant than
  other varieties. The new strains also respond well to chemical fertilizers. An acre of
  land planted with these new strains can produce food for more people than the same
  acre planted with other varieties.

  Geneticists have also begun developing a strain of corn that is richer in protein
  than other types of corn. This protein-rich strain is not yet ready for use because it
  has several undesirable traits that must be bred out of it, including soft kernels and
  lack of resistance to pests.

  Apparently those nameless geneticists who had just begun to work on high-protein corn in 1994 have just begun to work on it again. What fakery! If Glencoe's writers had wanted to offer information, instead of just covering up their ignorance, they could have cited many new crop-plants that have been developed by genetic engineering. How about the tomato cultivars whose man-made genomes, fortified with DNA from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, enable them to resist various lepidopteran pests? How about the corn cultivars, equipped with bacterial DNA, that resist the European corn-borer? How about the soybean plants that, because their genes have been manipulated, yield beans which are uncommonly rich in oleic acid? Glencoe's writers could have found such examples easily, if they had tried.

In the 1998 version of Living Systems, as in the 1994, pages 368 and 369 display a boxed article about John James Audubon. In that article, the student reads that Audubon "described watching migrating passenger pigeons in 1813" and that Audubon wrote: "The air was literally filled with pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse." Then, at the end of the article, the student finds this problem:

Mathematics Connection: Audubon made a rough calculation of how many passenger pigeons there were in a flock. He figured that the birds flew 60 miles per hour in a column about one mile wide. If a flock took three hours to pass overhead, and two birds occupied one square yard of space, how many birds would that flock contain?

Glencoe's writers pose their question ("If a flock took three hours . . . ?") as if it were their own creation. In fact, however, it is a restatement of some foolish stuff written by Audubon himself -- stuff which Audubon concocted from material that he had stolen.

The history of this matter reaches back to the early 1800s and to American Ornithology, Alexander Wilson's renowned treatise on American birds [note 5]. In his narrative about the passenger pigeon, Wilson told of a flock that he had seen near Frankfort, Kentucky:

They were flying with great steadiness and rapidity, at a height beyond gunshot, in several strata deep, and so close together, that, could shot have reached them, one discharge could not have failed of bringing down several individuals. From right to left, far as the eye could reach, the breadth of this vast procession extended, seeming every where equally crowded.

Later, Wilson speculated about how much mast [note 6] would have been consumed by that flock in a day:

If we suppose this column to have been one mile in breadth, (and I believe it to have been much more,) and that it moved at the rate of one mile in a minute, four hours, the time it continued passing, would make its whole length two hundred and forty miles. Again, supposing that each square yard of this moving body comprehended three Pigeons, the square yards in the whole space, multiplied by three, would give two thousand two hundred and thirty millions, two hundred and seventy-two thousand Pigeons! -- an almost inconceivable multitude, and yet probably far below the actual amount. Computing each of these to consume half a pint of mast daily, the whole quantity at this rate would equal seventeen millions, four hundred and twenty-four thousand bushels per day!

More than twenty years after Wilson composed those lines for American Ornithology, John James Audubon addressed the passenger pigeon in his own great treatise, his Ornithological Biography [note 7]. As Wilson had done, Audubon assigned to the pigeon a speed of a mile a minute -- but Audubon, unlike Wilson, was unwilling to present this speed as a mere supposition. Audubon depicted it as a scientific inference:

Pigeons have been killed in the neighbourhood of New York, with their crops full of rice, which they must have collected in the fields of Georgia and Carolina, . . . . As their power of digestion is so great that they will decompose food entirely in twelve hours, they must in this case have travelled between three hundred and four hundred miles in six hours, which shews their speed to be at an average about one mile in a minute.

He did not tell why he thought that passenger pigeons could always digest their food within twelve hours, nor did he explain why the rice found in those pigeons "killed in the neighbourhood of New York" must have been residing in their crops for no more (or less) than six hours. In truth, Audubon's mathematical exercise was a bogus elaboration of something that he had lifted from Wilson. In American Ornithology, Wilson had mentioned en passant that "rice has been frequently found in individuals killed many hundred miles to the northward of the nearest rice plantation." Audubon took that remark and decorated it with some numbers which he had rigged to yield the deduction that passenger pigeons could fly at a mile a minute for long periods of time.

Later in his exposition, Audubon described a huge flock of passenger pigeons he had seen near Hardensburgh, Kentucky. He wrote that "The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting snow; . . . ." -- and he offered another calculation:

Let us take a column of one mile in breadth, which is far below the average size, and suppose it passing over us without interruption for three hours, at the rate mentioned above of one mile in a minute. This will give us a parallelogram of 180 miles by 1, covering 180 square miles. Allowing two pigeons to the square yard, we have One billion, one hundred and fifteen millions, one hundred and thirty-six thousand pigeons in one flock. As every pigeon daily consumes fully half a pint of food, the quantity necessary for supplying this vast multitude must be eight millions seven hundred and twelve thousand bushels per day.

It is easy to see how Audubon fashioned that passage. He took some more material from Wilson's account of the Frankfort flock, he omitted Wilson's observation that passenger pigeons flew "in several strata deep," and he altered some of Wilson's figures so that the number of pigeons and the daily consumption of mast would be reduced by 50%. This feat, a combination of plagiarism and arbitrary fudging, has been frugally described by Robert Plate in his biography of Wilson: "Audubon's vivid account of the passenger pigeon," Plate says, "owed much to Wilson. In 'estimating' the numbers and mast consumption of a flight he witnessed, for instance, Audubon's odd method was to take Wilson's figures, cut them exactly in half -- and present them as his own." [note 8]

Now look at the Glencoe "Mathematics Connection" problem again. To "solve" that problem with the information given, the student must assume that the birds formed a thin lamina, a mile wide and only one bird deep -- but this contradicts Wilson's report that the pigeons in a flock deployed themselves in "several strata." To solve the problem for a real flock, the student would have to know the flock's depth as well as its width, and he would have to know the number of pigeons in a cubic yard.

There is another approach, but it is available only to a student who understands the concept of projected area: Such a student can interpret Glencoe's question to mean that the flock was a mile wide and that, within the flock's projected area on a plane, each square yard contained the projected silhouettes of two birds. But this interpretation leads to the conclusion that the flock couldn't have had much effect on "the light of noon-day." Let's do the math:

An adult passenger pigeon's wingspan was 24 inches or so, and the bird's overall length was some 16 inches, roughly half of which represented its long, tapered tail. Hence the silhouette of one bird, with wings fully extended, would have fit into a rectangle measuring 24 by 16 inches and having, therefore, an area of 384 square inches. If we adopt the rather generous assumption that the area of the silhouette itself would have been equal to one-third of the area of the rectangle, we find that the silhouette of one bird would have covered of 128 square inches, and the silhouettes of two birds would have covered 256 square inches -- about 20% of a square yard. At two birds per square yard, then, the projected silhouettes of the all the birds in the flock would have covered only 20% of the projected area of the flock. Such a flock's effect on "the light of noon-day" would have been comparable to the effect of an eclipse only if the eclipse was a partial and rather puny one.

Real history always is more interesting than the tripe served up by schoolbook-company hacks, and the same is true of real math.

Notes

1. See "Smiling Jack's Religious Tract" in The Textbook Letter, January-February 1996. [return to text]

2. For more information about natural theology and its persistence in textbooks, see "When the Shark Bites with His Teeth, Dear, Remember That It's All for the Best" in TTL, November-December 1991, and "Old Paley Strikes Again" in TTL, September-October 1992. [return to text]

3. For refutations of some of the fictions that schoolbook-writers commonly peddle when they pretend to tell of Darwin's visit to the Galápagos Archipelago, see Frank J. Sulloway's fine article "Darwin and the Galápagos: Three Myths" in the Summer 1987 issue of Oceanus. [return to text]

4. The confusion of regeneration with reproduction is common in fake "science" books. See, for example, Ellen C. Weaver's review of Merrill Life Science in TTL for January-February 1993. [return to text]

5. American Ornithology was issued in nine volumes, during a period of five years, starting in 1808. [return to text]

6. Here the word mast denotes acorns, beechnuts and other nuts that have accumulated on the floor of a forest. [return to text]

7. The Ornithological Biography consisted of five volumes, the first of which was issued in 1831. [return to text]

8. See Alexander Wilson: Wanderer in the Wilderness, by Robert Plate, issued in 1966 by David McKay Company (New York City). [return to text]

William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook League, and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes often about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and false "history" in schoolbooks.

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