Reviewing a middle-school book in life science

Glencoe Science: Life Science
2002. 926 pages. ISBN of the student's edition: 0-07-823694-0.
Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 8787 Orion Place, Columbus, Ohio 43240.
(Glencoe/McGraw-Hill is a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies.)

This Textbook Is a Slick Package
of Misinformation and Mediocrity

Michael T. Ghiselin

Organic evolution is properly depicted as a theory, well supported by many lines of evidence. On page 154, however, the term theory is applied not only to Darwin's model of evolution but also to Lamarck's model -- and then (on page 155) Lamarck's "theory" turns into a "hypothesis." In reality, Lamarck's view of evolution was neither a theory nor a hypothesis, because it could not be tested. As I explained in The Textbook Letter nearly ten years ago, Lamarck's construct rested on the metaphysical assumption that simple animals arose spontaneously and then, under the influence of a "tendency to perfection," progressed to become more complex and more man-like. This notion could not be treated scientifically, could not be supported or contravened by evidence, and was not comparable in any meaningful way to the construct put forth by Darwin [see note 1, below].

To make matters worse, Glencoe's writers assign to Lamarck's "hypothesis" the name "the inheritance of acquired characteristics," but they fail to point out that Darwin too accepted the proposition that acquired characteristics could be transmitted from progenitors to progeny. This distortion of history is common in schoolbooks: Lamarck and Darwin are isolated from one another, as if there were no intellectual connection between them.

The writers again show their discomfort when they make this mushy statement: "Because plants and green algae are similar in their structure, chlorophyll, and how they undergo [sic] photosynthesis, some scientists hypothesize that plants evolved from ancient, many-celled green algae." Here the writers are creating the false impression that a robust scientific inference about evolution lacks empirical support. If they had dealt honestly with that inference, they would have written something like this: Plants and green algae show many cellular and subcellular similarities, and these provide abundant support for the hypothesis that plants have evolved from ancient, many-celled green algae.

Even worse is this mush-mouthing on page 170: "All primates have opposable thumbs, binocular vision, and flexible shoulders that allow the arms to rotate. These shared characteristics could indicate that all primates may have evolved from a common ancestor" (emphasis added). The writers have used the mushy phrases "could indicate" and "may have evolved" to mislead students and, presumably, to keep creationists quiet. Here is an honest statement of the point that the writers have tried to muddle: These shared characteristics, and many others as well, constitute compelling evidence that all primates are descendants of a common ancestor.

On several pages Glencoe's writers present evidence for the fact of evolution, i.e., evidence showing that evolution has indeed occurred. I am glad to see that they have told that "Sometimes, evolution can be directly observed" (page 167), but their material is generally lame, and I perceive that they have copied from other schoolbooks instead of studying the subject matter. For one thing, they say that evidence obtained from embryology and from the analysis of DNA is "indirect" evidence of evolution, but they don't explain what is "indirect" about it or what the expression "indirect evidence" is supposed to mean. For another, they don't cite any biogeographical evidence, even though Darwin himself said that his recognition of evolution was sparked by some of his biogeographical observations. These Glencoe writers should look beyond old schoolbooks, should open On the Origin of Species to the "Introduction," and should notice that Darwin cites biogeography in his very first sentence: "When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent."

The section on the history of classification (pages 22 and 23) is so garbled that I find it hard to imagine how any student could make sense of it. The writers begin by teaching that Aristotle had a system for classifying organisms -- but in fact, Aristotle didn't devise a formal classification system at all. Then the writers say that Carolus Linnaeus developed a "new system" in which organisms were grouped together if they had "similar structures" -- but in fact, naturalists had been doing this for centuries, and there was nothing new about it. Then the writers declare that modern scientists use a classification technique that is based on phylogeny, and that phylogeny means "the evolutionary history of an organism, or how it has changed over time," and that phylogeny is used for classifying "many organisms." The student will conclude that there are other organisms which are exempt from phylogenetic classification, but the writers don't explain why this should be so. Further, their definition of phylogeny is wrong: A phylogeny is not the history of a single organism; a phylogeny is the history of a lineage, with all of the branchings that have engendered new groups from common ancestors. The idea that modern classification revolves around common ancestries appears to have escaped the writers' comprehension.

There is no tree to show the relationships of the dinosaurs to other animals, and the treatment of the dinosaurs in Life Science is exceptionally poor. The illustration titled "Visualizing Extinct Reptiles" (page 420) shows some ancient reptiles, but these don't include any dinosaurs, and the book's text seems to mention dinosaurs only twice. A sentence on page 421 tells that dinosaurs "ruled Earth" until they "died out about 65 million years ago." Then, on page 439, in a passage titled "Origin of Birds," the writers mention Protoavis and make these statements: "Protoavis lived about 225 million years ago. No fossil feathers were found with Protoavis. Scientists do not know if this animal was an ancestor of modern birds or a type of ground-living dinosaur." That is a false distinction because -- in principle, at least -- Protoavis might have been both. The lineage that gave rise to modern birds sprang from dinosaurs that lived on the ground, and modern birds themselves are now considered to be strongly modified dinosaurs. Glencoe's writers don't know these things, so their material about "Origin of Birds" is a failure.

Life Science has several "Science and History" articles, each occupying a two-page spread. A particularly egregious example is the article entitled "Have a Heart," which purports to tell about William Harvey and then about "an American medical pioneer," Daniel Hale Williams, who in 1893 "performed the first open-heart surgery by removing a knife from the heart of a stabbing victim." I guess that we must tolerate the material about Williams, since schoolbooks are supposed to provide students with examples of vocational opportunities, but the material about Harvey is a crime against history. If done properly, an account of Harvey and his studies of the circulation of the blood in mammals can serve as a magnificent model of scientific thinking, beginning with the discrediting of the old idea that blood flowed from the heart to the periphery of the body via the veins. (That idea became questionable after the discovery that veins contained valves.) Harvey's simple, elegant experiments are easy to explain and easy to repeat, and they can help students to understand the workings of their own hearts, but Glencoe's writers haven't explained anything and haven't even told what Harvey did. They have merely reproduced one of Harvey's woodcuts without any indication of what it shows.

The account of Mendel in Life Science is another affront to history: Glencoe's writers, evidently invoking hearsay and speculation, tell students that Mendel was "an Austrian monk who studied mathematics and science but became a gardener in a monastery." In fact, Mendel belonged to a teaching order, the Augustinians, and in his professional life he was equivalent to a modern high-school teacher. He spent most of his career in a monastery at Brno, in Moravia, and he eventually became the monastery's abbot. The garden at the monastery was a convenient place for Mendel to conduct his pioneering experiments in genetics, but the claim that he was employed as a gardener is fatuous guesswork.

In general, the coverage of human anatomy and physiology in Life Science is slanted toward hygiene and other practical matters. This is not unreasonable in a middle-school textbook.

Human reproduction is presented in the form of information, written in a rather matter-of-fact manner, about organs and sperm cells and eggs. Copulation is not mentioned. The writers say that "200 million to 300 million sperm can be deposited in the vagina" (page 639), but they don't suggest how such a deposition might be carried out. The prostate gland is shown in an illustration on page 634, but it is not discussed in the adjacent text [note 2]. The drawing of a spermatozoon (page 634) is poorly executed, and the diagram of the development of identical twins (page 640) does not make clear that both twins arise from just one zygote.

Even sloppier is the picture on page 367 -- a dorsal view of a squid, supposedly showing how "Squid and other cephalopods use jet propulsion to move quickly away from predators." A squid certainly does use a kind of jet propulsion, but not in the impossible way that Glencoe's picture shows. In the real world, a squid draws water into its mantle cavity through paired lateral apertures, then ejects the water through a ventral tube, called the funnel, that is directed forward -- and as the water is expelled forward, the squid travels backward, in keeping with Newton's third law of motion. Glencoe's picture shows something quite different. Because it is a dorsal view, the ventral funnel is entirely concealed. Labels indicate that the squid draws water into its mantle cavity through the aperture on its right side, expels the water through the aperture on its left side, yet still manages to travel backward! If a squid actually propelled itself according to Glencoe's scheme, the squid would travel sideways or, perhaps, in a circle.

The chapters on ecology and conservation, near the end of the book, provide a satisfactory introduction to ecological science and to some of the more important ecological difficulties that confront our society.

A lot of the material in Life Science has been chosen for its entertainment value. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but too much of the material seems trivial. Maybe it is worth mentioning that May is National Egg Month (page 453), but expressing the commercial output of antibiotics in terms of the weight of a space shuttle is downright silly [note 3].

Throughout Life Science, so many of the persons who appear in illustrations are blacks or mulattoes that one might suspect that the book is meant for sale in some foreign country. I understand that Glencoe is trying to suggest, correctly, that science is an appropriate activity for anyone, irrespective of the color of one's skin -- but Glencoe's excessive use of black and mulatto models in a book intended for use in the United States is unrealistic and silly.

Life Science has been designed not to familiarize students with contemporary science but to comply with the ugly realities of contemporary American pedagogy. It is a slick, commercial product, created for a market that prizes misinformation and mediocrity.

Notes

1. See my article "The Imaginary Lamarck: A Look at Bogus `History' in Schoolbooks" in The Textbook Letter, Vol. 5, No. 4. [return to text]

2. Admittedly, a boy of middle-school age doesn't need to know much or worry much about his prostate, but when he is older he probably will experience prostate trouble of one sort or another. Cancer of the prostate is mentioned in a single sentence on page 675 of Life Science, where the writers call the prostate "an organ that surrounds the urethra." They don't say anything about its function or physiology, nor do they direct students to the illustration on page 634. [return to text]

3. On page 681 of Life Science we read: "Pharmaceutical companies in the United States produce nearly 23 million kg of antibiotics each year. That's equivalent to the weight of about 50 space shuttles." [return to text]

This Book Is the Worst

William J. Bennetta

The 1993 version of Glencoe/McGraw-Hill's life-science text was titled Merrill Life Science and had 714 pages [see note 1, below]. The 1995 version was called Merrill Life Science too, but it had 745 pages [note 2]. The 1999 version was called Glencoe Life Science and had 837 pages [note 3]. And now we see the 2002 version, which is titled Glencoe Science: Life Science and is so bloated with glitz and gimmicks and worthless pictures that it has 926 pages! It is the biggest life-science book that Glencoe has yet produced.

It is also the worst, and it is the worst because it is the biggest. Because it is the biggest, it carries an unprecedentedly heavy load of the fumbled factoids, buffoonish guesses, incomprehensible passages, internal contradictions and racist deceits that we have come to associate with Glencoe life-science books. And because it is the biggest, it accommodates a uniquely large number of items in which Glencoe's writers show their contempt for students and exhibit their confidence that middle-school science teachers are uninformed, silly and infinitely gullible.

In my review of Glencoe's 1999 book, I said its major themes were fakery, phony "science" and deep ignorance [note 4]. Those themes are conspicuous again in the 2002 version, as some examples will demonstrate:

• On page 96: "Right now, you are in a stage of your life cycle called adolescence, . . . ." No! An individual animal doesn't have a life cycle. A species has a life cycle, but an individual animal lives once and dies once and then disintegrates. There is nothing cyclic about this.

• Pages 101 and 102: The section titled "Asexual Reproduction" is a farce. Glencoe's writer confuses asexual reproduction with mitosis and growth, and he tells students that a sweet potato growing in a jar of water exemplifies asexual reproduction because the new stems, leaves and roots that the sweet potato generates have been produced by cell division! Then -- as the writers of fake life-science books always do -- he thoroughly muddles asexual reproduction with regeneration.

• Page 155: In a passage about Darwin's voyage on H.M.S. Beagle, a Glencoe faker writes that Darwin "was amazed by the variety of life on the Galápagos Islands." Darwin himself didn't say any such thing. And when he wrote about the Galápagos reptiles, which dominated the Galápagos fauna, he explicitly observed that they were not remarkable for their variety. Rather, he wrote, they were remarkable for their abundance [note 5].

• Page 156: Glencoe's faker now recites the schoolbook fantasy in which Darwin (having recovered, apparently, from being "amazed") sees some Galápagos finches and immediately perceives that all of them had evolved from some South American progenitors. No such thing happened, and Darwin did not begin to analyze his specimens of Galápagos birds until he had returned to England.

• Pages 160 and 161: The section titled "The Speed of Evolution" is another farce. Glencoe's writer uses the word evolution as if it were a synonym for speciation, and his stuff is incomprehensible. As far as I can tell, he's trying to say this: The gradualistic model of evolution implies that speciation must take a long time (perhaps "tens or hundreds of millions of years") while the punctuated-equilibrium model implies that speciation proceeds more rapidly and "can occur over a few thousand or million years, and sometimes even faster." If that is what the writer has in mind, then he has confused two separate phenomena: One of these is the mode of speciation, the other is the rapidity of speciation. His biobabble becomes hopeless when he says that "Evolution by the punctuated-equilibrium model" is exemplified by the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. That doesn't make sense, and the propagation of resistance in populations of bacteria doesn't constitute speciation. Does Glencoe's writer imagine that every antibiotic-resistant strain is a new species? If he does, then he is wrong again.

• On page 215 we find this weird assertion: "Due to the diversity of their traits, about 7,000 species of green algae have been classified." Huh? Are there other green algae that haven't deserved to be classified because they haven't shown enough diversity?

• Page 247: Here, in a "Skill Builder" activity, a Glencoe faker tells students to "Make a hypothesis about what adaptations land plants might undergo if they lived submerged in water instead of on land." There is no "if" about this matter. Though Glencoe's guy doesn't know it, many aquatic plants actually have evolved from terrestrial ancestors, and they display conspicuous adaptations to living under water. One such plant, Vallisneria, is commonly kept by aquarists. Instead of wasting time on a worthless activity devised by a faker, students should observe a few plants of Vallisneria in a well illuminated aquarium -- and when the plants produce flowers, the students should describe the flowers and describe the adaptations that enable the female flowers to capture floating pollen.

• On page 249, a Glencoe hack offers these factoids: "In the ninth century, liverworts were thought to be useful in treating diseases of the liver. The suffix -wort means 'herb,' so the word liverwort means 'herb for the liver.' " So what? Who cares? Well, students might care if the hack had provided some historical context for his factoids and had told why some people imagined that liverworts could relieve liver diseases. That notion was a particular manifestation of a broad superstition, called the doctrine of "signatures" or "signs," which wasn't confined to the 9th century and which still thrives today, especially in the Orient. Adherents to this superstition believe that there is a correspondence between an object's physical appearance and the object's usefulness in curing disease: If, for example, a plant (or some part it) has the shape of a human heart, the plant supposedly can be used for relieving cardiac disorders; if a plant (or some part of it) looks like a human stomach, the plant supposedly can be used for curing stomach trouble; and if a plant (or some part of it) resembles an entire human body, the plant supposedly can serve as a cure-all. This last fantasy accounts for the popularity -- in the Orient and in other parts of the world as well -- of quackish "medicines" that allegedly have been made from the roots of ginseng plants [note 6].

• Page 381: Here a photograph shows a dorsal view of a common North American crab, Callinectes sapidus. The crab isn't identified, and the caption accompanying the photo says only this: "The segments in some crustaceans aren't obvious because they are covered by a shieldlike structure." A Glencoe writer has guessed that the crab's segmentation is entirely hidden inside its body, under its carapace, but this guess is laughably wrong. One can easily see the segmentation of C. sapidus (and of any other brachyuran crab) if one looks at the animal's underside.

• On page 405, in a passage on reproduction in fishes, a Glencoe writer states categorically and falsely that when fishes spawn, the females shed "large numbers of eggs," and the males then "swim over the eggs and release sperm." He fails to disclose that after the egg of a bony fish hatches, the hatchling typically undergoes a metamorphosis. He says that "Certain species of sharks and rays have internal fertilization and lay fertilized eggs," but he doesn't tell what internal fertilization is or how it is accomplished. Moreover, his claim about internal fertilization in sharks and rays is a mess, because he has jumbled and muddled several discrete facts: In all sharks and rays (not merely in "Certain species"), fertilization is internal; in all rays (not merely in "Certain species"), the females lay eggs; in some sharks, the females lay eggs, but in other sharks the females give birth to free-swimming offspring. He mentions that some fishes, such as guppies, "have internal fertilization [whatever that is] but do not lay eggs," and then he writes: "The eggs develop and hatch inside the female's body. After they hatch, they leave her body." (The hatched eggs leave her body? What happens to the hatchlings?)

• On page 412, in a passage about reproduction and development in amphibians, a Glencoe hack conveys the false notion that all amphibians lay eggs. In actuality, some amphibians are ovoviviparous, and some others are viviparous -- just as some fishes are ovoviviparous or viviparous -- but Glencoe's hack doesn't acknowledge this. He does say, however, that the early development of an amphibian typically entails a metamorphosis. Taken together, the passages on pages 405 and page 412 create the impression that reproduction and development in amphibians are radically different from reproduction and development in fishes. In actuality, fishes display various modes of reproduction and development that also occur in amphibians, and vice versa. Students won't learn this from Glencoe's book, but students must learn this if they are to acquire an appreciation of vertebrate evolution. By the way: Glencoe's writers mention frogs, toads and salamanders, but they say nothing at all about caecilians. The caecilians constitute an entire order of amphibians, but Glencoe's writers evidently haven't heard of them.

• Page 409: "Lungfish have been found along the coasts of South America and Australia." The phrase "along the coasts" surely will lead students to believe that lungfishes are marine animals, but this is false. Lungfishes dwell in fresh water, and they occur on three, not two, continents -- South America, Australia and Africa. This distribution indicates that the lungfishes originated in Gondwanaland and spread widely over that continent before it broke apart.

• Page 439, in another "Skill Builder" activity: "Many expressions mention birds, such as 'proud as a peacock' and 'wise as an owl.' . . . make a list of several of these expressions and then decide which are accurate." Decide how? By what means might the students determine whether a peacock feels pride or an owl has wisdom? This idiotic activity serves only to endorse anthropomorphism -- the practice of ascribing human properties, faculties and emotions to non-human organisms. Anthropomorphism has no basis in science, and it has no place in any science textbook or science classroom. If middle-school students haven't outgrown the notion that nature is rife with wise owls, sly foxes, happy clams and other anthropomorphic organisms, the students must be disabused of that notion immediately -- but Glencoe promotes and reinforces anthropomorphic delusions by subjecting students to an absurd exercise devised by a birdbrain.

• Page 495: In another "Skill Builder" activity, students must make a circle graph showing the abundance of various bones in the skeleton of an adult human: "29 skull bones, 26 vertebrae, 25 ribs, . . . ." How could Glencoe's Superintendent of Skills have imagined that a human has an odd number of ribs? How could he have failed to recognize that ribs are paired structures?

• Page 680: "People have long used natural remedies to treat infections. These remedies include garlic, Echinacea (purple cornflower), and an antibiotic called squalamine, found in sharks' stomachs." Ah, yes; we know that we can rely on the writers of phony "science" books to promote quackery and to endorse, explicitly or implicitly, the fallacious notion that any treatment which has been used extensively must be effective. The only noteworthy aspect of Glencoe's effort is the absurd characterization of squalamine as a remedy that people "have long used." Squalamine (which, unlike garlic or Echinacea, is a discrete compound) has been known for only eleven years or so: It was discovered -- in the stomach and liver of a shark belonging to the genus Squalus -- in 1993. It is not employed in legitimate medicine for treating infections or anything else, but it is being evaluated as an agent for arresting certain cancers and for relieving a particular form of macular degeneration. At least one company that sells quackish "dietary supplements" through the Internet includes a squalamine product among its nostrums and promotes the perception that squalamine cures cancer.

In some instances we can tell that the Glencoe writers have deliberately sought to achieve obscurity and to keep students in the dark. As examples:

• Page 296: "In 1983, the first plant was genetically modified, or changed." No, in 1983 the first plant had been dead for a few hundred million years and was in no shape to undergo any manipulation of its genes, but we can guess what Glencoe's writer was trying to say. We cannot, however, guess why he has refused to tell what kind of plant was modified in 1983 or what results proceeded from the modification.

• Look at the splashy spread -- headlined "How Are Animals & Airplanes Connected?" -- which covers pages 330 and 331 [note 7]. On page 331 we read that "Around 1900, two inventors studied bird flight," and that "The inventors" later were able to build a flying machine -- and so much for that. The Glencoe writer who produced the copy for the animals-and-airplanes spread has treated Wilbur and Orville Wright as mysterious figures, has refused to tell their names, and has even refused to identify them as Americans. Why?

• Now look at the spread on pages 486 and 487, titled "How Are Chickens and Rice Connected?" The answer, according to a Glencoe writer, is this:

  One day a doctor in Indonesia noticed some chickens staggering around, a symptom often seen in people with beriberi. It turned out that the chickens had been eating white rice -- the same kind of rice that was being eaten by human beriberi sufferers. White rice has had the outer layers, including the bran, removed. When the sick chickens were fed rice that still had its bran, they quickly recovered. It turned out that the same treatment worked for people with beriberi!

  A "doctor in Indonesia"? Yes, but that doctor was a European. He was the Dutch colonial surgeon Christiaan Eijkman (1858-1930), and the importance of his research into the etiology of beriberi was recognized when he and Frederick Gowland Hopkins shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1929 [note 8]. Glencoe's writer has refused to disclose Eijkman's name, has refused to tell that Eijkman became a Nobel laureate, and has even refused to identify Eijkman as a Dutchman. Instead, the writer has led students to believe that the doctor who noticed those staggering chickens was an Indonesian. How's that for a display of multi-culti racism?

• On page 779, the caption under a photograph says: "In parts of Africa, firewood has become scarce. People in this village now use solar energy instead of wood for cooking." Why has the Glencoe writer refused to tell the reason for that scarcity of firewood in "parts of Africa"? Why has he refused to explain that the scarcity of firewood is a result of overpopulation?

I infer that the people who turned out material for Life Science toiled in isolation from each other. This seems clear because the book displays repetitions, contradictions and goofy conjunctions of unrelated items. For example:

• Biological classification, Carolus Linnaeus, and the Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature are introduced in chapter 1 ("Exploring and Classifying Life"). Then biological classification, Carolus Linnaeus, and the Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature are introduced anew in chapter 9 ("Plants"), as if students had not already encountered them in chapter 1. Then biological classification is introduced again in chapter 12, "Animals," but without any mentioning of Linnaeus or binomial nomenclature. The classification of animals evidently doesn't share anything with the classification of other organisms.

• In chapter 6, a ferociously glitzy spread features Flossie Wong-Staal, who "was on one of the two teams that first identified HIV as the virus that causes AIDS." AIDS? What is that? Students won't see anything about AIDS until they reach chapter 23.

• In chapter 9 we read that the leaves of plants typically have "small openings in the epidermis called stomata (STOH muh tuh)." In chapter 11 stomata are introduced anew, as if they hadn't already been introduced in chapter 9 -- but in chapter 11 the pronunciation of stomata is given as "stoh MAH tuh."

• In chapter 1, in a section on "Modern Classification," a Glencoe writer says that, today, "the basis for the classification of many [?] organisms" is phylogeny. In the rest of the book, however, Glencoe's writers repeatedly ignore classification based on phylogeny, and they invent their own assemblages. For example, they lump birds with mammals, and they teach students that birds belong to "groups" such as "insect eaters," "waterbirds," "birds of prey," and "seed eaters." Those surely are groups, but they are utterly arbitrary groups that don't reflect phylogeny and don't have any biological significance. I wonder why the writers haven't presented such groups as cage birds, cute birds, and birds that have big tails.

• On page 19, a photograph of an aquarium is accompanied by this caption: "The sides of this tank were clean and the water was clear when the aquarium was set up. Algal cells, which were not visible on plants and fish, reproduced in the tank. So many algal cells are present now that the water is cloudy." No it isn't. There are plaques of algae on the aquarium's front wall, but the water obviously is clear. As for the "plants" that the caption mentions: The aquarium contains fishes and stones but no plants.

• Page 400: In the table "Types of Vertebrates," a Glencoe writer lists "salmon, bass, guppy, sea horse, lungfish" as examples of bony fishes, but the lone fish shown in the accompanying picture is none of the above. It's a tuna. In the same table, the writer lists "stork, eagle, sparrow, turkey, duck, ostrich" as examples of birds, but the bird shown in the accompanying picture is a pelican.

• On page 435 Glencoe peddles anew the stale, discredited fable in which birds' wings generate lift by exploiting the Bernoulli effect. The text says: "The wings are curved on top and flat or slightly curved on the bottom. Humans copied this shape to make airplane wings, as shown in Figure 4. When a bird flies, air moves more slowly across the bottom than across the top of its wings. Slow-moving air has greater pressure than fast-moving air, resulting in an upward push called lift." But Figure 4 doesn't show the shape of any airplane wing, doesn't show that airplane wings are "curved on top and flat or slightly curved on the bottom," and certainly doesn't show that humans copied anything from birds [note 9].

While I am telling you about some of the illustrations in Life Science, I must describe my favorite. At the back of the book, in an appendix titled "Science Skill Handbook," the section headlined "Interpreting Scientific Illustrations" includes a picture that is billed as a "labeled diagram of the skeletal structure of a blue whale." The diagram incorporates five labels -- "Shoulder blade," "Finger bones," "Ribs," "Pelvis bones" and "Backbone" -- and each label is joined, by a pointer, to some part of the whale's skeleton. So far, so good. But the diagram doesn't show any pelvic bones, and the pointer for the "Pelvis bones" label, like the pointer for the "Backbone" label, leads to a vertebra! Instead of pretending to teach the skill of "Interpreting Scientific Illustrations," Glencoe should be looking for someone who possesses the skill of making scientific illustrations.

Phony Activities       I've already cited three of the phony activities that appear in Life Science, but I want to note two more:

• Pages 354 and 355 are devoted to an item titled "Design Your Own Experiment: Comparing Free-Living and Parasitic Flatworms." Here Glencoe has recycled a time-waster which appeared (under the same title) in Glencoe Life Science, and which required students to "compare" a live planarian with a dead tapeworm mounted on a glass slide. When Anne C. Westwater reviewed Glencoe Life Science for TTL, she wrote that "Design Your Own Experiment: Comparing Free-Living and Parasitic Flatworms" didn't involve any experiment and didn't illustrate any scientific process [note 10]. It still doesn't -- but Glencoe apparently is confident that teachers won't be able to perceive this.

• On pages 422 and 423 Glencoe proffers an activity called "Design Your Own Experiment: Water Temperature and the Respiration Rate of Fish." This is another time-waster that has been resurrected from Glencoe Life Science. It has been altered slightly, but the alterations don't matter. "Design Your Own Experiment: Water Temperature and the Respiration Rate of Fish" still is just an opportunity for students to abuse some goldfish, and it still lacks any scientific value [note 11]. As before, it finishes with two questions for the students to answer: "1. Fish can live in water that is totally covered by ice. How is this possible? 2. What would happen to a fish if the water were to become very warm." The first question is irrelevant to the manipulations that the students have just performed, and the second question, with its vague phrases "a fish" and "very warm," cannot be answered. Intelligent students will ask "What kind of fish?" and "How warm?" Intelligent teachers will throw Life Science into the trash can.

Hot Flashes       Hot flashes are decorative, ostensibly newsy tidbits that are stuck into stale schoolbooks to make the books seem current and up-to-date. For an example, go to page 415 of Life Science and notice the item about the appearance of deformed frogs in Minnesota in 1995. Bah! Glencoe's writer can't provide a competent survey of the basic biology of amphibians, but he has conjured a hot flash about amphibian monstrosities! For another example, go to page 439 and read, in the section "Origin of Birds," the hot flash about the discovery of Protoavis. Glencoe's writer doesn't understand the significance of Protoavis because he doesn't understand current thinking about the origin of birds, but never mind -- he understands the value of hot flashes for inducing silly teachers to buy trashy books. Now turn to pages 234 and 235, where a Glencoe writer reports that nameless scientists are trying to use "good" fungi to arrest the proliferation of "bad" fungi which are infesting cacao trees. Gullible teachers will be impressed by this hot flash, for it carries the dramatic headline "Chocolate SOS," and the letters "SOS" are more than two inches tall! But the text is incoherent and jumbled, and Glencoe's writer absurdly refers to the infestation of the cacao trees as an "epidemic"; he doesn't know that an epidemic can occur only among humans [note 12]. What those cacao trees are undergoing is not an epidemic but an epiphytotic.

Internet Boxes       Trashy schoolbooks, nowadays, are invariably decorated with inane items that require students to use the Internet. These things serve the same purpose that hot flashes serve: They make the books seem current and up-to-date. Life Science has dozens of them, many of which take the form of boxes that contain instructions like these: "Visit the Glencoe Science Web site at science.glencoe.com for more information about early genetics experiments" (page 127); and "Visit the Glencoe Science Web site at science.glencoe.com to find out more about male and female plants" (page 276); and "Visit the Glencoe Science Web site at science.glencoe.com for information about the uses of chemicals from leech saliva" (page 372).

But why? As far as I've noticed, the boxes consistently fail to suggest why students should want to acquire such pieces of information; and this signals, to any astute reader, that the boxes are nothing but decorative gimmicks. Is there a reason why middle-school students need more information on early genetics experiments? If so, what is the reason? -- and why doesn't that information about early genetics experiments appear in Glencoe's textbook? Is there a reason why middle-school students need information on chemicals taken from leech saliva? If so, what is the reason? -- and why doesn't that information about salivary chemicals appear in Glencoe's textbook? Let me paraphrase what Max G. Rodel wrote in TTL in his review of another Glencoe book that was laden with Internet junk: If a given parcel of information is useful and important, then students should be able to find it in the textbook they are using -- and if it isn't useful and important, then the students shouldn't be led to waste their time by chasing it on the Web [note 13].

I don't know anything about The Princeton Review, but I will say this: If there are any standardized assessments that dignify the ignorance, fakery and biobabble which pervade Life Science, those assessments should be dumped immediately, and the people who have promoted them should be shunned.

Notes

1. Reviews of the 1993 book ran in The Textbook Letter, Vol. 3, No. 6, under these headlines: "This Ignorant, Shoddy Book Deserves Only to Be Junked" and "A Glitzy, Mindless Book That Glorifies Ignorance." [return to text]

2. For a review of the 1995 version, see "The Puffins Don't Help; the Book Is Still Trash" in TTL, Vol. 7, No. 2. [return to text]

3. For two reviews of the 1999 version, see "Another Fake 'Science' Textbook" and "Where's the Text?" in TTL, Vol. 11, No. 6. [return to text]

4. See the first of the two reviews cited in note 3, above. [return to text]

5. Let me quote from chapter XVII in the 1860 edition of Darwin's renowned book The Voyage of the Beagle: "The [reptile] species are not numerous, but the numbers of individuals of each species are extraordinarily great." Darwin emphasized this point by repeating it, later in the same chapter. [return to text]

6. To learn more about ginseng-root quackery, see "Leading Students into the Clutches of Quacks" in TTL, Vol. 5, No. 3. [return to text]

7. The Glencoe writers like to give the impression that they are connecting things, and Life Science has five gaudy spreads that purport to deal with items that allegedly are linked. [return to text]

8. Hopkins was honored for his work with growth-stimulating vitamins. [return to text]

9. For an article on the Bernoulli-effect fable (and the perpetuation of that fable by the writers of trashy schoolbooks), see "On Wings of Ignorance" in TTL, Vol. 10, No. 5. [return to text]

10. See the second of the two reviews cited in note 3, above. [return to text]

11. See the first of the two reviews cited in note 3, above. [return to text]

12. The word epidemic is a combination of the Greek elements epi- (upon) and demos (people). [return to text]

13. See " 'interNET' Gimcracks in an Old, Dumb Book," by Max G. Rodel, in TTL, Vol. 10, No. 3. [return to text]

Michael T. Ghiselin is a biologist, a senior research fellow at the California Academy of Sciences, and chairman of the Academy's Center for the History and Philosophy of Science. His research has emphasized comparative anatomy and the evolution of modes of reproduction. His books include The Triumph of the Darwinian Method and Metaphysics and the Origin of Species.

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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