Reviewing a high-school book in biology

This Lame "Second Edition"
Shows Few Changes

William J. Bennetta

Its pages are still misnumbered, too, and I think that this merits some comment. In the United States a well established convention dictates that any book's main text should begin on a right-hand page, which should be odd-numbered. That prescription, though, is quite incompatible with a notion that has captivated many of the people who design schoolbooks -- the notion that every major part of a book must begin with a glitzy spread. Hence we see more and more schoolbooks in which even the numbering of the pages is bogus. In some of these books, the first unit starts on a spread consisting of pages "2" and "3" -- and there is no page 1 at all. In other books, such as Addison-Wesley Biology, the opening unit starts on a spread comprising an unnumbered left-hand page and a right-hand page "1" that actually is page 2. Schoolbook-designers presumably think that these stunts will dazzle the rubes and bumpkins.

When I reviewed the 1994 version of Addison-Wesley Biology, I began by describing one of its displays of buffoonery: The Addison-Wesley writers had tried to concoct a "Critical Thinking" exercise involving the slogan "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," but they had got the slogan backwards! In the 1996 book, the slogan has been corrected, but the exercise is otherwise unchanged -- "There is a saying, 'Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.' Look up each of the words in the dictionary. Restate the saying in your own words. Explain how this saying relates to evolution."

I can do better than that. I suggest this alternative:

The old slogan "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" summarized an idea put forth in 1866 by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel claimed that he had discovered an important "law" of biology, but he was wrong -- and his "law" fell as scientists learned more about genetics. Go to a library and read about the rise and fall of Haeckel's "law." Then try to learn why the writers of junky schoolbooks are still using the "law" in bogus exercises.

Another item that I cited in my review of the 1994 book was a loopy article called "Native American Agriculture," which was a heap of false or misleading claims about Amerindians. (See "Chief Thunderbottom, the Panderer's Friend" in TTL, November-December 1994, page 6.) The 1996 book has, instead, a piece called "The Columbian Exchange." The new article is less bizarre, in terms of content -- but like the old article, it is out of place and pointless. It seems merely to be another attempt to exploit the recent fad which calls for larding textbooks with irrelevant stories about Indians.

Some of the most egregious passages that appeared in the 1994 book are still in place, either unchanged or with alterations that have achieved nothing. For example:

• Page 5: The definition of species is still confused and absurd.

• Chapter 2, "Methods and Tools of Biology," is still perverse and is still focused on laboratory experimentation, not even hinting at how diverse the modes of scientific inquiry are -- and although the section on "The Nature of Science" shows a minor change, it's just as dumb as it was before. In the 1994 book, as I noted in my review, the writers said that a hypothesis was just any "possible explanation for an event or set of observations," and they evidently didn't know that a hypothesis must be testable by recourse to evidence. I suspect that they saw my review, for they now have added one sentence to say that "a scientific hypothesis can always be tested by examining the evidence" -- but there is nothing to explain what "tested" means or what "evidence" may be. These are crucial matters, since young students often harbor the false idea that mere assertions or stories (especially stories that have been told widely and that "everybody knows" to be true) constitute evidence. Any introduction to the nature of science must include an exposition of what qualifies and what doesn't qualify as evidence, yet there is no such exposition in this book.

• Page 190: The writers are still trying to convince students that there is some special particular connection between outbreeding projects and the escape of captive organisms into the wild. That is rubbish.

• Page 200 retains a phony, sensationalistic passage about eugenics. The passage is obviously based on political propaganda, and even the definition of eugenics is bogus.

• Page 223 still has a fake story about the experiments of Redi -- a story which some schoolbook-company hack invented years ago, and which other hacks have been copying ever since. (Maybe you have seen it: It's the one in which, allegedly, no maggots appeared when meat was protected from flies by a mesh. But Redi's own report tells that maggots did indeed appear -- on the mesh. Here was a signal finding: Although meat couldn't generate maggots unless the meat was exposed to flies, flies could generate maggots without having any access to meat.) I see, however, that Addison-Wesley's writers have lent a new twist to the fake story by giving Redi's first name as "Francisco" instead of Francesco.

• Page 241: Yes, it's still here -- the same load of religious double-talk that appeared in the 1994 version. See "Addison-Wesley's Achievement" in TTL, January-February 1997, page 12.

• Pages 243 and 244: The book continues to present a hearsay account of Lamarck, including the notion that Lamarck's ideas about evolution were somehow "disproven" by August Weismann's surgery on mice. The account is bogus. Please see "The Imaginary Lamarck: A Look at Bogus 'History' in Schoolbooks" in TTL, September-October 1994.

• Page 249 still presents an article called "Punctuated Equilibrium: The Great Debate." The subject of the debate, evidently, is how to spell Niles Eldredge's name. By misspelling Eldredge three times, Addison-Wesley's debaters convincingly make their point -- They haven't seen Eldredge's publications, and their "Punctuated Equilibrium" article is guesswork.

• Pages 277 and 278: The 1996 book, like the 1994, asserts that Carl von Linné called himself Carolus Linnaeus because his work with biological nomenclature had made him enthusiastic about coining Latinate names. That is baloney. See "Fonius Balonius" in TTL, September-October 1997, page 12. (The 1996 book recycles another of the writers' "historical" fictions, too. Page 223 still displays an illustration of an old, torn page bearing a message that purportedly was written by the Roman poet Virgil -- in English!)

• The obsolete phylogenetic diagram on pages 286 and 287 hasn't been changed. It still contradicts the diagram on page 555.

The 1996 book, like its precursor, has 48 full-page "Laboratory Activities" -- and despite some changes here and there, these still constitute a repetitive exercise in fakery. A typical "Activity" is just a simple demonstration that has been disguised to suggest that the student is investigating a "Hypothesis." In each of 35 cases, by my count, the disguise fails miserably: The "Hypothesis" is empty drivel and isn't a hypothesis at all, or the "Hypothesis" isn't tested by the prescribed procedure. As I said in my review of the 1994 book, the "Activities" in Addison-Wesley Biology seem goofy at best, and often pernicious. No student should be subjected to them.

I conclude by noting the modifications to which Addison-Wesley's writers and editors apparently accorded most of their attention during the preparation of this "Second Edition." In the page-margins, all of the items marked "Model The Concept" have gained an additional label: "Activity." And some page-margins have new little items marked "BioJournal," which describe things that students can do to waste time. The label "BioJournal" has been printed in two colors. All the rubes, presumably, will swoon with delight.

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 frequently about the propagation of quackery, false "science" and false "history" in schoolbooks.

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