Reviewing a high-school book in biology

The Return of the Menace

David L. Jameson

When I reviewed that 1995 book in The Textbook Letter, I said that it was a menace to science education. I observed that it might appeal to teachers who didn't know much about biology, but it wouldn't be acceptable to teachers who knew their subject.

[Editor's note: Two reviews of the 1995 version appeared in TTL, July-August 1996, with these headlines: "This Book Is a Menace" and "Turn It Off."]

Now the menace has returned. The 1998 version of The Dynamics of Life is a reincarnation of the 1995 version, with some minor, poorly done changes. Some old material has been recast in new words, some sentences have been restructured, and a few illustrations have been altered or replaced, but The Dynamics of Life is still shallow, gee-whizzy, incoherent and pervasively obsolete. It still won't be acceptable to teachers who know their subject, because it still fails to show an appreciation of contemporary biology or a comprehension of the processes of science.

Here is a case in point. On page 434, in chapter 18, a diagram of primate phylogeny has been replaced by a pie chart which represents "an evolutionary tree of life that shows three major groups: the eubacteria, the archaebacteria, and eukaryotes." But on pages 490 through 493, in chapter 20, we see that living things comprise six (not three) major groups, that these major groups are called kingdoms, that the Eubacteria and the Archaebacteria constitute two of the six kingdoms, and that there is no kingdom called "eukaryotes"! The contradictions are blatant, and Glencoe's writers make no effort to resolve them. The writers evidently decided that the pie chart would serve as a nice decoration for their 1998 book, even though they didn't understand it or grasp its significance.

Page 463 has a new cartoon, and the title of the section that begins on that page has been changed from "Human Origins" to "Human Ancestry" -- perhaps as a sop to creationists.

There are other changes, too, but they do not matter much. What matters is that the Glencoe writers still do not know what they are writing about, and they have not even tried to keep up with science news that has been readily available in the popular media. For example:

• Page 430: The 1995 book's lame passage about bacterial resistance to antibiotics has been recycled, without any improvement or updating, and we see again that the writers don't know how such resistance originates: They have completely missed the point that resistance arises through mutation or recombination in the presence of selection. They fail to present any real-world cases of antibiotic resistance, and they fail to describe the new medical problems that resistant pathogens are posing today. In Glencoe's obsolete book, you will not read anything about the emergence of dangerous, vancomycin-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, even though relevant reports have appeared in scientific journals, in newspapers, and in newsstand magazines. Nor will you see anything about the new, resistant types of tuberculosis pathogens -- strains which defy all of the antibiotics that, in earlier decades, kept tuberculosis in check. Don't Glencoe's writers know that death rates from tuberculosis are increasing nowadays, even in the United States and other industrialized countries? If the writers are aware of this, why haven't they used the resurgence of tuberculosis to teach an impressive lesson about antibiotic resistance, mutation, selection and evolution?

• Page 347: In a section about inbreeding, these writers say that "Breeders are careful not to continue breeding individuals that produce offspring with undesired traits." Then they start their next section with the headline "Hybrids are usually bigger and better." In fact, breeders do use individuals that harbor undesired traits. They use such individuals for creating hybrids, among other things! And the claim that "Hybrids are usually bigger and better" is plain nonsense, no matter how many times it has been copied into schoolbooks.

• Page 387: The 1995 book's old text about the Human Genome Project has been recycled without modification, so the 1998 book declares: "It is expected that the entire human genome may be mapped within ten to 15 years." Daily newspapers tell a different story: The mapping of the human genome has nearly been completed, and some results of the mapping have already attained practical significance.

• Page 387: In material reprinted word-for-word from the 1995 book, the writers refer cryptically to "a technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR)" -- and on page 390, in another recycled paragraph, they mention "PCR" again. But nowhere do they disclose what this mysterious "technique" is or how it works, even though it is crucial in the determination of nucleotide sequences, in DNA fingerprinting, and in the Human Genome Project. Anyone who followed the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson knows more about restriction fragments and the analysis of DNA than is presented in this book.

The Simpson criminal trial is another news item that seems to have escaped the Glencoe writers' attention. Read the boxed exercise on page 390. Here the student has to pretend that he is a juror in a criminal trial, and that the evidence includes diagrams of DNA fingerprints derived from five individuals. After directing the student to choose the individual whose DNA fingerprint most closely matches a fingerprint of DNA taken from the scene of the crime, the Glencoe writers ask, "Would you convict individual 3 of the crime?" -- as if jurors necessarily regard scientific evidence as conclusive. The Simpson criminal trial demonstrated, in a most memorable way, that this isn't so.

I have some other questions, too:

Why, in this day and age, does Glencoe's so-called biology book say nothing about birth control? Why does it ignore the HIV virus's devastation of many African populations and African economies? Why doesn't it tell about the magnificent developmental processes that are common to all animals? (Such processes have been beautifully elucidated by recent genetic studies. Have the Glencoe writers not heard of them?) And why, in this day and age, is a "biology" textbook's exposition of basic genetics limited to what was known in the 1920s?

The minor revisions seen in the 1998 version of The Dynamics of Life haven't come close to rectifying the 1995 versions's deficiencies, and I think that Glencoe should stop fooling around with this book. Glencoe should dump the whole thing and start over, using some writers who know something about the biology practiced by real, working scientists.

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.

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