from The Textbook Letter, July-August 1993
Reviewing a science book for high-school honors courses
Biology: Concepts and Applications
1991. 599 pages + appendices. ISBN: 0-534-13368-1.
Wadsworth Publishing Company, 10 Davis Drive, Belmont,
California, 94002.
I Recommend This Book
to All Teachers of Biology
Ellen C. Weaver
Biology: Concepts and Applications is an excellent book.
It is marketed for use in colleges and in advanced-placement
high-school courses, but I recommend it wholeheartedly to
all teachers of high-school biology -- not just to those
who give honors classes or advanced-placement classes. As a
text for a regular high-school biology course, it is vastly
superior to the dull, pompous and error-ridden books that are
offered by most of the schoolbook-publishers.
This is a relatively slim book: 618 pages when the appendices
are included, versus the usual 1,000 pages or so.
Consequently, most topics are presented in a rather spare way.
The subtitle, Concepts and Applications, is appropriate:
The text and special features cover more than 500 applications
of biology to the understanding of practical affairs, and the
applications are indexed at the end of the book. Subjects such
as bulimia, Lyme disease, osteoporosis, sexually transmitted
diseases, sickle-cell anemia, the uses of algae, and the abuse
of anabolic steroids are discussed concisely and rationally.
The author, Cecie Starr, takes a moderately activist stance
with respect to major environmental issues such as population
growth and the use of pesticides. Her treatment of population
is particularly admirable and cogent, making clear that we
cannot escape from the inevitable: "Either we make a global
effort to limit population growth in accordance with
environmental carrying capacity, or we wait until the
environment does it for us" (page 504).
Evolution is handled extraordinarily well, in chapters entitled
"Microevolution," "Macroevolution" and "Human Evolution: A Case
Study." Principles are expounded clearly and are illustrated
with specific examples, and though the discussions are brief,
they certainly cover the key points. As we would expect in a
book of such high quality, evolutionary concepts permeate the
entire text. Lamarck is not mentioned at all.
Starr accords respect to all forms of life, and she doesn't
render value judgments. She doesn't, for example, classify
organisms as "helpful" or "harmful," and she explicitly rejects
the notion that bacteria -- with their enormous range of
metabolic capabilities -- can be considered "simple" (page
229). The long section on "Animal Structure and Function" uses
examples from many divisions of the animal kingdom, though it
focuses on the human in its discussion of vertebrates.
In its coverage of human biology, the book is as thorough as
any of the high-school biology texts, and it is far better than
most of them. Moreover, it doesn't make the mistake of viewing
the human as the pinnacle of evolution. I particularly like
the treatment of human sexuality, including coitus and the
biology of sexually transmitted diseases. Starr doesn't mince
words as she describes the misery wrought by STDS. She tells
of technological methods of preventing conception, but she also
makes clear that the only truly certain method is abstinence.
As a plant biologist, I examined Starr's treatment of plants
with particular care. Her presentation of the process of
photosynthesis is simplified but accurate. So are her passages
about the structure of plants and the roles that plants play in
ecosystems.
The "Commentary" features that occur throughout the book are
usually arresting, and I was particularly delighted by the one
on page 242 -- a quirky look at some of the fungi. "Who among
us," Starr asks, "can praise the fungal species that cause
athlete's foot . . . ? Which home gardeners can wax poetic
about black spot or powdery mildew on their roses . . . ?" But
her real point is stated at the start: "You know you are a
serious student of biology when you can view organisms
objectively in terms of their roles in nature, not in terms of
the impact they have on humans generally and yourself in
particular."
The book is abundantly illustrated, and the captions seem to be
invariably informative and pertinent. Most of the micrographs
have scales. Those that don't should be furnished with scales
in the next edition, and so should some other illustrations of
unfamiliar things. (How big is that wolf spider on page 275,
or that marine copepod on the same page?)
The editing has been meticulous, and I have found no errors.
In my judgment, all the people who were involved in the making
of this book deserve to be congratulated on a first-class
product.
A Pedagogic Perspective
Let me now elaborate on what I said at the start of this
review: Although Biology: Concepts and Applications is a
college text, it should be considered by all high-school
teachers of biology. I suspect that some of my readers who
teach 10th-grade biology will object: Students in the 10th
grade probably know little or no chemistry, and their
vocabularies are smaller than those of seniors. Won't such
students be overwhelmed by a college book? Yes, they will --
if their teacher expects them to master all of it. But that is
true for all biology books, including the typical
high-school biology book that has 1,000 pages. No matter what book
the students use, the teacher will have to direct their reading
and emphasize particular chapters and ideas and topics. The
big advantage of using Biology: Concepts and
Applications is that the teacher can be sure that students
will get information that is sound and up-to-date.
Is a grasp of chemistry necessary for understanding this book?
In some places, probably so -- in the chapter on "Cell
Structure and Function," for example, or the chapter on "Ground
Rules of Metabolism." But many other chapters, including those
that survey the various kingdoms of the living world, are
chiefly descriptive and require no chemical knowledge. In any
event, this book (like the typical high-school biology text)
includes some introductory chemistry, for students who want to
delve.
Is the "reading level" appropriate for 10th-graders? According
to the usual formulas, maybe not. To me, however, the prose in
this well written book seems far more readable and
comprehensible than the disconnected sentences and rambling,
incoherent paragraphs found in the usual high-school biology
textbook. In Biology: Concepts and Applications
students will find models to emulate as they do their own
writing, and they will learn that good writing and good science
go together.
A Solid and Reliable Book,
but Sometimes Old-Fashioned
Michael T. Ghiselin
Biology: Concepts and Applications is an introductory
college textbook, but it is also appropriate for an
advancement-placement high-school course -- provided that the
students really have the necessary preparation. It has been
written with the assumption that its readers already have
studied basic high-school biology as well as some chemistry.
The author, Cecie Starr, offers a preface that tells what she
set out to do when she wrote the book, and her objectives seem
most admirable: Stress key concepts; don't overload the student
with technical terms; strike a proper balance between accuracy
and simplification without patronizing the student or writing
teleologically; and so on.
Starr has had help from experts. (For example, the
paleontologist John Sepkowski assisted in producing a good
diagram, on pages 198 and 199, that shows how animals and
plants have diversified and have suffered mass extinctions
while Earth's crust has moved around during the past 700
million years.) As a result, this book generally provides
solid and reliable information, rather than myths and
misconceptions that will have to be unlearned later.
A lot of material, some of it rather difficult, has been packed
into a relatively small space. Even with appendices, the book
has fewer than 700 pages. Some other college textbooks of
biology, and even some high-school texts, have 1,000 pages or
more.
Starr's book is tied together, with considerable success, by
two main themes: evolution and energy flow. In choosing
specific topics, however, Starr has put her main emphasis on
physiology, especially as it relates to understanding the human
body, human health, and environmental issues. Such
anthropocentrism carries an intellectual price, and Starr has
been willing to pay it. She evidently assumes that this meets
the demands of her market.
The evolutionary theme is introduced at the outset and remains
strong throughout the text, though the main example of
evolutionary history is the history of us primates. While this
is a reflection of Starr's anthropocentric approach, it also
has its merits: Pointing out that we get backaches because our
ancestors switched to bipedal locomotion is a good way to make
readers aware of our evolutionary legacy.
The survey of animal diversity tries to show where certain
anatomical and physiological innovations, such as the addition
of an anus to the gut, have come into the picture. Although
Starr attempts to stress the point that such changes have
occurred in many groups (along with vast diversification of
size, shape and mode of life), it is impossible to do justice
to this matter without citing more examples than can fit into
so compact a book.
The treatment of biological classification is a bit
old-fashioned. Although the text clearly states that
classification is based on evolution, there is no clear
statement of what the relationship between classification and
evolution is supposed to be, except that it has something to do
with lineages and common ancestors. Students are left in the
dark, and the examples do not provide the help that students
need if they are to understand what classification is all
about. (Even the chapter about human evolution is inadequate
in this respect. The diagrams that depict primate phylogenies
are hard to follow, evidently because the artist was not
properly supervised.) This book also needs to be updated with
respect to important developments in the application of
molecular techniques to the reconstruction of evolutionary
histories.
The passage about dinosaurs is another troubling matter. Starr
treats the dinosaurs as if all of them became extinct at the
end of the Mesozoic Era. This is not what happened, however,
and some of the Mesozoic dinosaurs' descendants -- the modern
birds -- are still with us. Starr is apparently unaware that
birds constitute a modified lineage of dinosaurs.
Confusing Terms
This book would be better if Starr had taken better account of
one of the imperfections of language: A word may be used in
somewhat different ways by different persons and in different
disciplines.
Consider the word population. In evolutionary biology,
a "population" is a group of organisms that form a reproductive
community. The population may comprise only a handful of
individuals, living in an area of a few square meters; or it
may comprise millions of individuals, spread over a whole
continent; or it may even embrace all the members of a species
(such as our own) that occurs all over the globe. An
ecologist, however, may use "population" to denote the
organisms that live in some particular area -- an area that the
ecologist may have delimited arbitrarily, on the basis of
convenience, without regard to any biological reality.
These different meanings of population lead Starr into
confusion. In chapter 14, "Microevolution," a list of "Key
Concepts" on page 172 properly reflects the point that
populations, not organisms, are the things that evolve. The
text on page 177, however, defines a population as "a group of
individuals occupying a given area and belonging to the same
species." But that is, of course, an ecologist's definition of
population, not an evolutionary biologist's. What is a
"given area," and by whom is it "given"? These points are left
as mysteries. Much later, on page 492, Starr repeats the
ecological definition of population and then says that
"the population (not the individual or the species) is the unit
of evolution." But how can that be? In some instances, a
species is a population. And what is meant by the
notion that species are not units of evolution? Aren't they
units? And don't they evolve? Of course they are, and of
course they do!
Starr's mishandling of symbiosis and related words is
particularly depressing. Originally, symbiosis meant
what its etymology suggests: "living together." It was a
general term that embraced various associations between
individuals belonging to different species -- associations such
as parasitism, commensalism and mutualism. In parasitism, one
partner benefits while the other is harmed. An example is the
association between a human and the tapeworm that lives in his
gut, or the association between a human and the mosquito that
feeds on his blood. In mutualism, both the partners benefit.
An example here is the association between a plant and the bee
that visits the plant's flowers -- the bee gets a serving of
nectar while the plant benefits by having its pollen
dispersed. In commensalism, the partners are "mess-mates."
One benefits while the other is unaffected, as when a small
fish accompanies a big one and eats scraps of food that the big
one leaves.
Unfortunately, the original definition of symbiosis
became blurred some decades ago, and the word took on a much
narrower meaning, at least in schoolbooks and in popular
speech: It came to denote only mutualism. Now, however, the
original meaning is being restored, and the habit of treating
symbiosis as a synonym for mutualism has
generally been purged from college-level textbooks. In this
respect, Starr is very much behind the times.
She also seems to be confused about commensalism, for she says
that an association is commensal if one partner benefits while
the other is not helped or harmed "much" (page 508). This,
however, violates the basic definition. Many crabs that live
in the gill cavities of mollusks were formerly called
commensals -- but since they steal a fair amount of food and
also damage the mollusks' tissues, an up-to-date author treats
them as parasites, albeit of a mild sort.
I should emphasize that parasitism, mutualism and the other
interspecific relationships are indeed relationships. They are
not "interactions," as Starr calls them. The distinction
between relationships and interactions is important, and a
textbook that fails to honor it can confuse the student. In
the case of a man and a mosquito, the relationship
between the partners is parasitism, but the partners'
interaction consists of specific forms of behavior -- the
mosquito seeks and finds the man, and then tries to draw some
of his blood, while the man tries to evade, or even to kill,
the mosquito. In the case of a flowering plant and a bee, the
relationship between the partners is mutualism, but the
partners' interaction consists of an exchange of materials. In
the case of a small fish and a big one, the relationship
is commensalism, but the partners don't engage in any direct
interactions and don't have any direct effect on each other.
I acknowledge that it isn't easy to understand and define a lot
of the technical words that are used in science. But if we
expect students to master the vocabulary and to be examined on
the proper use of terms, we must provide thoughtful, effective
explanations of what those terms mean.
Ellen C. Weaver is a professor of biological sciences, emerita,
from San Jose State University. Her scientific specialties are
plant physiology and the application of remote sensing to the
oceans. She is an elected fellow of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, she has served as an advisor to
the National Academy of Sciences, and she is a past president
of the Association for Women in Science.
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 The Economy of
Nature and the Evolution of Sex.
Addendum
Wadsworth Publishing issued a second edition of Biology:
Concepts and Applications in 1994. A review of the 1994
edition appeared in The Textbook Letter for
January-February 1994.
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