Scott Foresman - Addison Wesley Biology:
In most cases, a unit is about 100 pages long. The fourth and
eighth units are somewhat shorter than that. Apart from the
sequence of its units, The Web of Life has no organizing
principle or theme.
The creators of this book have taken pains to ensure that the
reader will not be overwhelmed. The vocabulary is appropriate
for an average high-school student, new words are defined as soon
as they are introduced, the writing is simple and banal, and the
content of the text is shallow -- so shallow that the writers
have given themselves few opportunities to make blatant errors.
About one-third of the pages have no narrative at all. To rescue
the student from boredom (or maybe to keep him from noticing that
he isn't getting much substantive information about biology),
there are many entertaining events. These take the form of
pretty pictures, cool boxes and sidebars, stories about people,
items about personal health, etc., etc., etc. The Web of
Life looks just fine -- and it weighs only 5.3 pounds, so the
student could even carry it home occasionally.
In judging any schoolbook, we must ask whether the writers have
presented their material competently: If a student were to use
this book, would he be able to assimilate the material that the
writers have chosen to present?
For The Web of Life, the answer is yes. I suspect
that a reasonably bright student could read a chapter of this
book and then pass a test, even if he hadn't been present when
his instructor covered that chapter in the classroom. (He could
pass the same test if he had read the appropriate articles in an
encyclopedia, but he probably would describe both experiences as
"bohhh-ring.")
Now we must ask two more questions: Is the material in this book
meaningful and current? Is it the kind of material that a
high-school student should be learning in a biology course today? For
The Web of Life, the answers are no and no.
In the front of the book, on pages xiv and xv, the writers say
that The Web of Life teaches "Big Ideas," and they tell
the student to "Build a framework of biology by learning and
connecting these Big Ideas." This introduces a list of the "Big
Ideas," each of which will reappear, in a box, in the body of the
book. There are 92 such "Big Ideas," but some of them aren't so
big. Does anyone actually imagine that the big ideas of biology
include things like "Ferns have vascular systems and reproduce by
means of spores" or "Annelids are wormlike animals with a
segmented body" or "A healthy immune system requires a healthy
lifestyle"?
To make matters worse, these writers have missed the biggest
ideas of all. They don't recognize that science is a process --
a process characterized by intellectual discipline, by
controversy, by the continual honing of thought, and by the
reconsideration of accepted facts and theories. They don't show
the student how a pet theory or hypothesis can be destroyed by a
single observation.
Instead, the writers are committed to following old, obsolete
approaches and to repeating old, obsolete information. Why do
they still present genetics in the same way that was common
several decades ago? Why do they continue to present Mendel's
work as the very model of a modern scientific inquiry, even
though -- as Fisher and Wright amply demonstrated in the 1920s --
Mendel's experiments were seriously flawed? (What really makes
Mendel's work exciting and important is that his interpretations
have persisted and have been abundantly confirmed, although his
procedures were imperfect.) And why do these writers continue to
present a long-outdated account of dominance and recessiveness?
Why do they fail to interpret those phenomena at a molecular
level, in terms of the presence or absence of gene products?
Evolution, as presented in The Web of Life, is a process
in which natural selection continually fine-tunes adaptations,
but the important and exciting changes occur only when there are
large, rapid modifications of the environment. This is
insufficient for explaining what we actually observe in nature.
The "Mechanisms of Evolution" (pages 242 and 243) are said to be
divergence and convergence and coevolution, along with adaptive
radiation to fill empty habitats. To me, those seem to be some
of evolution's consequences, not its mechanisms.
Evolution's mechanisms include natural selection, mutation, the
subdividing of populations, and the flow of genes between
populations, as well as random events that alter the frequencies
of alleles. In The Web of Life, these are buried in a
section on the Hardy-Weinberg principle. During the past 40
years, extensive studies of non-Darwinian mechanisms of evolution
have yielded some exciting and wonderful results, but students
will not read about them in The Web of Life.
The treatment of classification in The Web of Life is
jumbled, and it stresses the old, hierarchical, five-kingdom
system. This ignores several decades' worth of research into the
early diversification of life, and it also ignores what we have
learned about exchanges of nucleic acids among the ancient
organisms that gave rise to today's Archaea, Eubacteria and
Eukaryota. There is a vague, half-hearted acknowledgment of
cladistics -- but the writers never use the word
cladistics, and they fail to show that cladistics has
revolutionized our approach to classification. (Throughout the
book, there are strange, quasi-cladistic phylogenetic diagrams in
which various groups of organisms pass evolutionary "milestones."
Each such "milestone" is the acquisition of a new character, such
as radial symmetry, a coelom, a segmented body, or jointed
appendages. That term "milestone" is inappropriate and
misleading, because it implies that new characters appear
regularly, at fixed intervals. If the writers didn't want to use
the scientific term for a new character, synaptomorph,
they should simply have used the phrase "new character.")
The "Classification of Organisms" section in the book's appendix
is atrocious. It is out-of-date by at least twenty years.
Each unit in The Web of Life starts with a spread titled
"Hit or Myth," which is a mess of meaningless factoids. These
things belong on idiot-grade television shows. Their appearance
in The Web of Life tells us much about how the writers of
this book regard high-school students and teachers.
A dozen "Issues in Biology" sections -- with titles like "Science
and society," "The Human Genome Project," "Ethical questions" and
"Mass extinctions" -- are scattered here and there. They are
consistent with the rest of the book: They present "issues" in
the most general, unexciting terms, without discussing the
complexities involved.
They promote confusion, too. In the "Ethical questions" section,
for example, the writers say a little about genetic screening,
and then they declare:
This teaches the student that "ethical issues" have correct
scientific answers, to be discovered through scientific
inquiries. But on the same page, in a "Lab Zone" box, the
writers say:
This second statement contradicts the first one, and most
students will see immediately that the second statement is
equivalent to saying: "Something is right if most people (or most
voters) say so."
In the same "Lab Zone" box, the writers suggest that we can
resolve any ethical question by merely taking a poll. They then
direct the student to collect opinions about "three safety or
ethical issues" from fifteen persons -- any fifteen "who will
complete your survey." (The political scientist with whom I've
been living for the past 50 years would point out that these
writers have ignored everything that we know about how a poll
must be designed and executed if it is to yield any meaningful
results.)
A deeper objection to the "Lab Zone" exercise is that its premise
is simplistic and wrong-headed to begin with. Ask a professional
bioethicist, a religious philosopher or a constitutional lawyer
whether the establishment of ethical standards is only a matter
of conducting a plebiscite and declaring that whatever the voters
like is good or "right."
Not all the "Lab Zone" exercises in The Web of Life are as
bad as the one that I just cited. Overall, the "Lab Zone"
activities constitute a mixed bag. "Dissecting a Chicken Wing"
(on page 714) is a winner -- frozen chicken wings are cheap and
are available in bulk, and each student will get a chance to
dissect real tissue and to make meaningful observations. "Making
a Model of Genetic Material" (page 157) is a loser: Pretending
that a gene consists of many parallel strands of DNA, like the
many filaments within a piece of yarn, is just plain wrong!
The Web of Life is loaded with trendy "bioSURF" notes that
direct the student to specific sites on the Internet. It turns
out that these "bioSURF" sites have been constructed by the
book's publisher. They consist chiefly of links to pages
sponsored by other organizations, and the linked pages are not
always valuable: Often, items found on the Internet are biased,
are lacking in scientific validity and support, or are too vague
to be useful. Indeed, some are aimed at controlling and
manipulating readers, rather than informing them.
If the publisher of a science text wants to recommend Internet
resources, the recommendations must be limited to sites that are
sponsored by scholarly organizations and that will be available,
year after year, throughout the service-life of the book. The
publisher should supply these recommendations to the teacher
only, not to students. The teacher then can monitor the content
and quality of the recommended sites, from time to time, and can
direct students to the sites that are most appropriate to the
course that the teacher is giving.
Equally important is the fact that many students don't have
convenient access to the Internet, either at school or at home.
The writers of The Web of Life have not taken this into
account. Telling students to go to the Internet if they want
up-to-date information is not a substitute for furnishing up-to-date
information in the textbook that they are using. It is a
disservice to the students, and it is one of the many reasons why
I cannot recommend The Web of Life.
Addison Wesley Longman's book Scott Foresman - Addison Wesley
Biology: The Web of Life is such a product, and I hope that
our major education libraries will buy and preserve copies of it.
I hope that The Web of Life will be available indefinitely
to historians because it illustrates, in exceptionally clear and
compelling ways, various aspects of the corruption that has
spread through American public education during the closing years
of the 20th century. It thus deserves a place in our archives, I
assert, alongside Glencoe Health, Glencoe's Biology:
Living Systems, Prentice Hall's World Cultures: A Global
Mosaic, McDougal Littell's America's Past and Promise,
West's United States History: In the Course of Human
Events, Silver Burdett Ginn's World Cultures, and
other particularly flagrant fakes.
The Web of Life is not a biology book or a science book,
by any stretch of the imagination. I think that it can best be
regarded as a kind of valentine -- a gaudy, 5-pound valentine
that AWL has composed for all the state officials who run crooked
textbook-adoption proceedings, and for all the local
textbook-evaluation committees who approve books without reading them.
The Web of Life is a book by fakers
and for fakers, and the fakery begins with the book's very name.
Yes, folks, he has returned again -- old Chief Seattle, the
silver-tongued spokesman for the Eco-Freak Brigade of the Noble
Savages. Readers who keep track of phony-Injun lore will recall
that the Chief is famously associated with a splurge of mawkish
rhetoric titled "Chief Seattle's Speech," though there is no
evidence to suggest that he uttered any of it. In short, the
speech is bogus. Fanciers of phony-Injun stuff will also know
that the so-called speech doesn't contain the sentences that the
AWL writers have used for their epigraph. The writers have taken
two lines from the bogus speech and have doctored them to make
them politically correct. In short, the writers have concocted a
fake "quotation" from a speech that was phony to begin with, and
their epigraph is fakery squared. [See
"Fakery Squared" on
pages 6 and 7 of this issue.]
After that, things just get worse. As we trudge through the
sales-promotion junk at the front of the book, we find a two-page
list titled "Big Ideas." This gimmick seems to suggest that
The Web of Life reflects the national effort, begun a
decade ago, to refine high-school biology and to produce a
curriculum built around the major themes in biological thought.
(The name "big ideas" was applied to such themes in the 1990
version of the State of California's Science Framework.)
But the AWL writers clearly don't know what the major themes of
biological thought may be. Their list comprises no fewer than 92
items, and it is ridiculous. According to AWL, the "Big Ideas"
of biology include such claims as "Sponges and cnidarians provide
food and protection for a large number of organisms," "The health
of the nervous system can be affected by injury, disease and
substance abuse" and "Protists can be classified into three
groups -- protozoans, algae and molds." (Yes indeed! The Web
of Life not only recycles the obsolete notion of a Kingdom
Protista but also bills it as one of biology's "Big Ideas"!)
When content does appear in The Web of Life, it seems to
consist chiefly of two kinds of material. First, there is a lot
of stuff that seems to be hearsay -- the writers evidently are
trying to repeat things that they have overheard somewhere (at a
bus stop, perhaps, or in a bar). Second, there is material that
has been plagiarized from other schoolbooks, most notably from a
lame specimen called Addison-Wesley Biology.
Here are some examples of the hearsay stuff:
Many of the "Investigate It!" items are modified versions of
things that appeared in Addison-Wesley Biology, and they
are as bad now as they were before. In a typical case, a simple
demonstration has been disguised to suggest that the student is
investigating a "Hypothesis" -- but the "Hypothesis" is empty
drivel and isn't a hypothesis at all, or the "Hypothesis" isn't
tested by the prescribed procedure.
One of my favorites in this category is "Recycling Paper," in
which the student has to "Propose a hypothesis about how paper is
recycled." Why? If one wants to know how paper is recycled, one
consults an encyclopedia of technology or one talks with an
engineer at a paper-recycling plant. Asking an uninformed
student to contrive a meaningless "hypothesis," instead of asking
the student to gather legitimate information about the process in
question, is just idiotic. (The rest of "Recycling Paper"
involves a silly operation in which the student makes glop from
water and newsprint. The student never learns how paper is
recycled in the real world.)
Some other "Investigate It!" items are exercises in circular
reasoning. In "Comparing Reptiles and Amphibians," the student
must "Hypothesize which structures could be used for
distinguishing between lizards and frogs." But to carry out the
"investigative" procedure that follows, the student must already
be able to distinguish a frog from a lizard by looking at them.
The exercise is circular and meaningless. And of course, the
title is bogus. Looking at one frog and one lizard is by no
means equivalent to a definitive comparison of reptiles with
amphibians. Recall that typical lizards have traits (such as
tails and scales) which are absent from typical frogs but are
present in some other amphibians.
Fakery prevails in many of the smaller activities, too. Take a
look at "Calculating the Pumping Capacity of a Natural Sponge,"
on page 505. That title is impressive but it's phony, because
the writers begin by telling the answer! They declare that the
pumping capacity of a "typical natural sponge" is 23 liters a day
-- and so much for that. Then the writers say: "How long would
it take for this sponge to empty all the water in an aquarium
holding 38 L of water?" Let me propose some better questions:
1. Imagine a sponge dwelling in an aquarium. Explain why the
sponge can't pump water out of the aquarium. 2. If the sponge
could pump water out of the aquarium, what would happen to
the pumping rate as the water level in the aquarium declined? 3.
Explain why the sponge could never empty all the water from the
aquarium.
Now consider "Is Whale Blubber an Effective Insulator?" (page
658). I first saw this one in Glencoe's Biology: The Dynamics
of Life, where it was titled "Is blubber a good insulator?"
(See my review in TTL for July-August 1996.) Like
Glencoe's version, AWL's version doesn't have anything to do with
comparing the efficacy of insulators. It doesn't suggest what
standard might be used for judging whether a given insulator is
or isn't "Effective." And most importantly, it doesn't involve
blubber in any way.
One more example: Please look at "How Quickly Do Populations
Decrease?" (on page 248). Here too, the title is bogus. This
activity is really an effort to make the student believe that he
can "calculate how long it takes for a population to decline to
the size that it will be affected by genetic drift"
[note 9].
The so-called calculation is based upon the notion that any
population, of anything, is immune to genetic drift if the
population comprises 200 individuals, but drift will suddenly
take effect if the number of individuals declines to 100. That
is nonsense, and the AWL fakers don't even pretend to tell where
they got the numbers 200 and 100. The idea that students may be
subjected to such numerological woo-woo gives me the willies.
The gimmicks keep coming: gee-whiz factoids, phony labs, cutesy
headlines -- and, to top things off, fake "reviews." I must tell
you about these, for they seem to represent a real innovation in
gimmickry. I haven't seen anything like them before.
Please think back to your own days as a high-school student, when
you and your classmates were required to write book reports. Do
you recall that, from time to time, one or another of your
friends pretended to write about some book after he had merely
glanced through it for a few minutes? Well, I infer that some
people are still doing such things -- in the service of Addison
Wesley Longman. AWL refers to the resulting literary creations
as "reviews" and has dumped nine of them into The Web of
Life. Some deal with books, others with videos or films.
All nine allegedly have been written by students.
On page 392, for example, AWL offers us a so-called review by
"Nora Cannick." Here's Nora's trenchant analysis, in full:
And here's an AWL-style review that is ascribed to "Stacie
Simmons":
The rest of the "reviews" in The Web of Life are grade-F
fakes like the two that I've quoted. What a spectacle! The
writers and editors of this "biology" book found time for such
shabby gimmicks, but they could not bother to learn (or to tell)
about how an iron lung functioned, or what August Weismann did,
or how sharks breathe, or what cougars are, or how biology is
involved in the case of Kennewick Man.
Instead, AWL says that the authors of The Web of Life are
Eric Strauss (identified as biology teacher at Boston College)
and Marylin Lisowski (identified as a professor of science
education at Eastern Illinois University). These two are real
persons. I have made telephone calls to Boston College and to
Eastern Illinois University, and I have learned that Strauss and
Lisowski really exist. I don't know whether either of them had
anything to do with the production of The Web of Life.
Eric Strauss's name is new to me, but I've seen Marylin
Lisowski's name on other phony schoolbooks. For example,
Lisowski was one of the five "authors" listed on the title page
of Science Insights: Exploring Matter and Energy, a
middle-school horror issued by Addison-Wesley. Exploring
Matter and Energy was the work of writers who imagined that a
newborn human is 0 cm long, that Earth rotates while its
atmosphere stands still, that Earth is permeated by magical
forces which can affect human fortunes, and that the ancient
Greeks and Arabs spoke English [note 10].
Lisowski was also one of the "authors" shown on Addison-Wesley's
Science Insights: Exploring Living Things. The writers of
that book flatly rejected science while they glorified ignorance
and superstition. They repeatedly urged students to decide
"issues" without trying to learn the relevant facts, they
endorsed the old superstition known as vitalism, and they plugged
acupuncture -- a form of Oriental quackery -- by telling students
that a human body has a magical, undetectable "balance of vital
energy" [note 11].
This brings me to the last aspect of The Web of Life that
I shall examine in this review: The AWL fakers have tried to
promote the same brand of quackery. Their attempt appears on
page 825:
How does acupuncture work? The needles, which are inserted
into the skin at specific points, may stimulate nerves that send
messages to the brain to release endorphins. Endorphins lessen
the feeling of pain and, by acting on special receptors in brain
neurons, give a sense of well-being. Although scientists do not
know for certain how or if acupuncture works, many people do feel
relief after treatments.
All the self-contradictions are obvious. The opening sentence
says that acupuncture works. The last sentence announces that
"scientists" don't know "for certain" whether acupuncture works.
Then the last sentence creates additional confusion with the
statement that people "feel relief after treatments," which any
ordinary reader will take to be another statement that
acupuncture works.
In reality, there is no evidence that acupuncture produces any
physiological effect on pain or on anything else. There is no
evidence that acupuncture -- if it affects a person at all --
does anything more than to act as a placebo. Sure, people have
reported relief of pain after they got acupuncture treatments,
but this is meaningless. People also have reported relief of
pain, during scientific studies, when they underwent sham
acupuncture. They were led to believe, falsely, that they were
receiving acupuncture, and they then experienced a placebo
effect.
Though the AWL writers have generated confusion by inserting a
disclaimer (i.e., the statement that scientists don't know "for
certain" whether acupuncture works), we can see that the purpose
of their write-up is to boost acu-quackery. We also see that
their material has been derived, directly or indirectly, from
some quackish promotional literature -- not from scientific
reports. The signs are unmistakable and conclusive. First, the
write-up furthers the false but palatable notion that acupuncture
needles merely penetrate the skin
[note 12]. Second, the
write-up makes no reference to placebo effects. And third, the
write-up reproduces some familiar, misleading stuff about endorphins.
Acu-quacks have been publicizing that endorphin stuff for years.
Hoping to impart a "scientific" aura to their enterprise, they
use half-truths and distortions to create the impression that
there is a specific, unique link between acupuncture and the
release of endorphins. That impression is false. To learn more
about this matter, please read my review of the 1993 version of
Glencoe Health, another schoolbook that has promoted
acu-quackery. The review ran in TTL for March-April 1995.
The Web of Life has been adopted by the Texas State Board
of Education as a high-school biology book. This is not
surprising, given that the Texas Board has a history of running
ludicrous adoptions and of inflicting trashy books on Texas
students. Someday, maybe, the citizens of Texas will put an end
to such antics and will demand that the Board conduct legitimate
textbook-adoption proceedings. Someday, maybe, Texans will
insist that their high-school students must have legitimate
biology books -- books that can withstand scrutiny and evaluation
by knowledgeable persons. But for now, it appears, Texas
students are supposed to settle for falsity and fraud and the
fake wisdom of Chief Seattle.
Notes
David L. Jameson is a senior research fellow of the Osher
Laboratory of Molecular Systematics at the California Academy of
Sciences. He has written books about evolutionary genetics and
the genetics of speciation, and he is a coauthor of a
college-level general-biology 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.
Reviewing a high-school book in biology
The Web of Life
1998. 1,016 pages. ISBN of the student's edition: 0-201-86954-3.
Addison Wesley Longman, 2725 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, California 94025.
Don't Buy This Shallow, Obsolete Book
David L. Jameson
Scott Foresman - Addison Wesley Biology: The Web of Life
is a traditional, encyclopedic high-school text. It's full of
traditional, obsolete material, arranged in nine units: "The
Basis of Life" (which deals with chemistry and cells),
"Genetics," "Change and Diversity" (which addresses evolution and
classification), "Monerans, Protists, and Fungi" (which includes
a misplaced chapter about viruses), "Plants," "Invertebrate
Animals," "Vertebrate Animals," "Human Biology" and "Organisms
and the Environment."
At this time many questions remain unanswered. Perhaps you
will be one of the scientists who helps [sic] resolve
these difficult ethical issues.
The ethical questions raised by biotechnology have no "right"
or "wrong" answers but are decided by society as a whole.
Beavis and Butt-Head Do Biology
William J. Bennetta
For many schoolbook companies, fraud is a routine activity,
thievery is a daily practice, and the swindling of school
districts is a normal way of doing business. Generally,
therefore, the advent of another fake schoolbook doesn't seem to
be a remarkable occurrence. Once in a while, however, a book
appears which is so blatantly and pervasively phony that it
achieves historical significance and merits special attention.
"The Web of Life"! That catchy subtitle looks as if it
may actually mean something -- and we soon learn where it
allegedly originated, because AWL's writers have put this
epigraph on their book's title page: " 'We did not weave the
web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the
web, we do to ourselves.' -- CHIEF SEATTLE"
Hearsay and Plagiarism
Virgil Gets a Word-Processor
Fake Labs
Gimmicks Galore
The Hot Zone, written by Richard Preston, is a work of serious
nonfiction. It tells the horrifying tale of people infected with
two sister viruses, Ebola and Marburg, and of the doctors who
treat them. The deadliest [sic] of the two viruses is
Ebola. Ebola attacks every organ and tissue in the human body
except skeletal muscle and bone. I enjoyed reading this book and
finding out about two dangerous viruses that I didn't know much
about.
The Double Helix, by Nobel Prize Winner James D. Watson, tells
the story of scientists and their determination to discover the
structure of DNA. The book describes a scientific team working
together to decipher a mystery (with a little help from x-rayed
molecules). Each scientist had his or her own job to do; each
had a unique way of helping out. The unity of these scientists,
and their often humorous relationships with each other, make this
book a page-turner for students of all interests and
backgrounds.
(Tell me, Stacie: Did you write that by yourself -- or did you
have help from Nora Cannick?)
Meet the Authors
Endorphins, the natural painkillers
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