General Biology Education: The Same Old Same Old

 

There was a time when dozens of general biology textbooks flooded the college market. They were expensive to produce, but the market was huge. Students did not like buying them, since they were expensive, but they did it. Writing a general biology textbook that was widely adopted was a ticket to at least moderate wealth. From 1992 to 2006, I was on that yellow-brick road. But I never got to the Emerald City, as publishers canceled my contracts. (I got to keep the advances, though.)

This is no longer the case. One editor, who had once worked with me on the general biology textbook that never went to press, said the market had imploded. This is because the textbook itself is no longer very important. Is it well written? Are the explanations clear? Nobody really cares anymore. The most important things now are the online resources, such as homework and quizzes. I believed that my textbook, focusing on world issues, was the best-written manuscript, and I continued to believe it until the contract was canceled in 2006. I still believe it. But now nobody seems to care whether the book is well-written, and relevant to world issues, or not.

At the time I started, as today, general biology textbooks were almost all alike. They have an utterly predictable chapter order: The scientific method; cells, genetics and biotech, evolution, an overview of organisms, then ecology. Last, inexplicably, comes human anatomy and physiology.

One problem with this approach was that the instructors sometimes did not get all the way through the book, with the result that the very important ecological concepts, such as overpopulation and global warming, get overlooked. Students think that biology is all about memorizing the steps of mitosis and get no idea that their decisions about how to live, what to buy, etc., all have immense impacts on the ecosystem of the Earth. The most important concepts get left to the end and get lost. Two authors, Joel Levine and Kenneth Miller, disagreed, and published a textbook that began with ecology and ended with cells and molecules. But, at least on the college level, their textbook was not prominent in the marketplace.

My textbook took a very different approach. In my original chapter order, the book both began and ended with ecological concepts. The first chapters were about what happened to energy and atoms: sunlight, photosynthesis, the cycling of nutrients, etc., what is sometimes called autecology. Then came the chapters that worked their way up through the typical chapter order, until reaching ecology again at the end. This time it was about species interactions and ecological communities (often called synecology). I thought it was a brilliant, circular alternative to the typical linear approach, whether the standard cells-to-Earth order or the reverse Levine-Miller order. At first, one major textbook publisher liked it too. But as they did their market analysis, they found that my chapter order would not sell. They got me to change the outline of the book until, just before they canceled it, the chapter order was the same as everyone else’s. This company still does not have a general biology textbook. They figured they could not penetrate the market, especially with a book as unusual as mine.

This approach, imbedding cells-to-heredity into an ecosystem context, had been successfully used decades earlier, in the 1960s, in the “Green version” of High School Biology, prepared by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) committee of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. I am not aware that this book is still in print; it may have last been in print in 1992. This version of the book began with something that many kids had seen—a rabbit hiding under a raspberry bush—and started asking questions about. Learning biology was, therefore, a natural outgrowth of instinctive curiosity. There is a good reason that this book remains one of the most famous in the history of biology education.

I had another original and, I thought, unique feature. I did not separate animal from plant anatomy and physiology. There were no chapters about the digestive system, the nervous system, and plant growth. Instead, I identified four common themes, then used both animal and plant examples of each. These are four problems every organism must solve in order to survive and reproduce:

 

• Energy going into and out of the organism
• Molecules going into and out of the organism
• Internal integration of processes in the organism
• Response to external events in the environment

It turns out that the famous evolutionary scientist George Gaylord Simpson had written a textbook (Life: An Introduction to Biology) that put animal and plant anatomy and physiology together: organic maintenance (procurement, use, transportation, excretion), internal organization, and responsiveness, including behavior.

My proposed merging of plant and animal topics was even more radical than my chapter order. Reviewers liked it but found it very inconvenient.

I have before me a textbook written by a prominent scientist, Gordon Orians. It is The Study of Life: An Introduction to Biology. His organization was different from everyone else’s, including the Levine-Miller organization and my own. His three themes were time, energy, and information.

• Time: Evolution, and an overview of organisms in an evolutionary framework
• Energy: Where it comes from, e.g., photosynthesis, and how organisms use it (and matter)
• Information: How organisms are organized, e.g. DNA, how cells develop, how organisms perceive their environments, and social and ecological community organization.

At a conference of the Botanical Society of America in 1995, during a symposium that I helped organize, I heard Orians talk about this book, which was published and of which sample copies were sent to people and committees for their consideration. He said he had no adoptions. “I mean this literally,” he added. I think he should be proud of his book: it showed his integrated understanding of biology and its relation to the physical and human world. Its failure was caused by the market.

I can’t go around blaming biology teachers for getting into a rut of same old same old. They are busy. I certainly am. I barely have time to manage classroom duties, which now includes online interfaces. I certainly don’t have time to rethink biology education anymore. Looking back on it, I was surprised that (out of dozens of reviewers) so many of them were willing to reorganize their entire courses to accommodate my chapter order, had the book been published. I would have had, I estimated, about twenty adoptions. But since it takes a million dollars to bring a textbook to the market, no company could make a profit from this. I am not a failed idealist, but just a busy one, as I teach the same old same old order of topics. We would have to completely revise the lab schedule otherwise. The person who manages the labs does not have time to do this, nor am I willing to volunteer my time to do it.

And to most students it doesn’t matter. If they are willing to learn, and if the instructor is willing to make the concepts interesting and relevant, they will benefit immensely from general biology, no matter what the order it. Is one chapter order more logical than another? The students do not, and probably should not, care.

Earth First: No Wonder Students Forget Biology

Nearly every biology textbook and course begin with molecules, then cells, and work their way up through genetics to organisms, then if there is time a brief look at ecology and evolution, followed by a big section on human anatomy and physiology. If a student wants to know the relevance and importance of something, they quickly learn by the end of the first week to shut up and memorize molecules.

There have been some exceptions. Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine wrote a Prentice-Hall biology textbook in the 1990s that began with ecology, and worked its way down to cells and molecules. There is a 2010 edition of the high school version of book still available on Amazon. The college version has, as far as I can tell, gone extinct, because college biology teachers didn’t learn biology that way and do not want to teach it that way.

I also had a textbook contract for a while, and I wrote the book (and received part of a nice advance), but the book never went into production. I used a wholly original approach. I began and ended with ecology. The first chapter (after an introduction about what science is) was about the flow of energy from the sun, through the food chains, and into outer space. The second chapter was about the cycling of nutrients through the food chains. But, you may ask, how can students learn about these things without first learning about molecules and cells? Well, you don’t have to know much about molecules and cells in order to understand food chains. Then, starting with the third chapter, I worked up from cells to organisms and then ended with communities and ecosystems. That is, I began with autecology and ended with synecology. For synecology, you do have to know a lot about organisms, but for autecology, all you have to know is that plants eat sunshine and hawks eat little animals and decomposers eat everything after it dies.

By beginning and ending with ecology, I placed humans in the context of the Earth. Earth first. There was no escaping it. Ecology could not be skipped.

I did some other original things also. The anatomy and physiology chapters were built around certain ideas, such as exchange of molecules coming in and going out of the organism; integration of processes within the body; and response to environment. Both plants and animals have to do all of these things, but in different ways. Therefore, each chapter had both plant and animal anatomy and physiology. In this way I could explain how, in many ways, an animal is an inside-out plant.

At first, the publisher signed me up and was excited about how different my approach was. Then one of the editors did a chapter-by-chapter lineup of my book with other texts and said, “Um, your chapters don’t line up with theirs.” Of course, that was kind of the point, I thought.

In general, the reviewers were positive about the book. They probably would not have been positive enough, however, to change their whole class and lab schedule to fit in with it. My book would probably have gone the way of the worthy efforts of Miller and Levine. Alas, for marketing reasons, the publisher probably made the right decision to just pay me off and not go into production.

Gordon Orians also took an original approach in his biology textbook. It had three parts: Time, energy, and information. He built the whole science of biology around these three organizing principles. He said, in a symposium I helped to organize back in 1993, that his book got no adoptions, “and I mean that literally.”

All of us maverick textbook writers, however, might be able to trace our roots back to the “BSCS Green Version” of High School Biology. (BSCS was the Biological Curriculum Study Committee.) There was also a Blue Version, which followed the “molecules to man” organization. The Green Version, however, began with placing the student out in nature and having him or her look around and think about what they saw. It began with a rabbit and a raspberry bush. Right there, you have all the ecological interactions, including the rabbit hiding from predators under the bush. Before the end of the first chapter, the student’s eyes were opened to the wonder of the world. Well, that’s the way it worked for me, when I read that chapter back in high school.

“Rabbits. They keep turning up, in nursery tales and comic strips, in candy shops and cabbage patches....and we know about raspberries...about the bushes along the roadside, which tear skirts and trousers and make a fine place for rabbits to hide.” Page one! And by page two the concepts of producers and consumers, and ecological balance, are introduced.

Modern biology textbooks are thick with condensed information. The textbook we use in general biology at my university is "short," a MERE 620 pages not counting glossary and index. But it is short because the information is crammed in, not because it is readable. My students don’t read them. I don’t read them. We use an occasional diagram, such as the genetic code. The only thing we use is the online, computer-graded assignments. If I had begun science with one of those books, instead of a rabbit and a raspberry bush, I might not have become a scientist at all.

This is Stan Rice, reporting to you from the graveyard where I sit with Miller, Levine, Orians, and BSCS.

Science and Religion: The Case of George Washington Carver

I have written in the previous entry about my immense admiration for George Washington Carver as the model scientist. He is also a very interesting example of the meeting of science and religion.

Throughout his life, but less subtly in his later years, George Washington Carver considered his work to be God’s little laboratory, and that God was revealing the secrets of nature to him.

Carver apparently meant this literally, as when, in 1924, he gave a speech in New York City. The New York Times editorial was highly critical of his religious approach to science.

At first the editorial just seems racist, even though the writer might have meant well (saying that a hocus pocus approach to science makes blacks, who are quite intelligent, look like they are not). But this brings up an interesting point: at what point does religion interfere with a scientist’s quality of work?

I am not talking just about creationism. I have written extensively about how creationists use their pseudoscience as a tool to advance a political agenda. It is really bad science and used to promote a really bad goal. Instead, I am talking about deep religious convictions of scientists that motivate them to pursue scientific research as a holy calling—scientific research that might be just as good as that of any other scientist.

This remains a current issue among scientists. The religious convictions held by Francis Collins were the basis for Sam Harris to claim that he should not be the director of NIH. And the religious faith of Kenneth Miller caused some controversy in the Society for the Study of Evolution when Miller received the Stephen Jay Gould Award in 2011. While, in this link, Jerry Coyne is undoubtedly right that a person who publishes books about science and faith open themselves up for public criticism, I have to wonder if Coyne’s opposition to Miller’s professions of faith is entirely fair.

Is it true, then, that real scientists don’t, or shouldn’t, talk the way George Washington Carver did? To me, this is not a very important question to answer. The real anti-scientists are causing so much trouble that we shouldn’t pick fights with real scientists who happen to be religious. A fair percentage (though of course we keep no records of it) of members of the Oklahoma Academy of Science will describe themselves as people of faith. And if they keep doing good work (such as getting students to look closely at the natural world, which may or may not be God’s creation), I am their enthusiastic colleague. I admit I have problem with some religious institutions, such as Oral Roberts University, whose administration uses every opportunity to promote the belief that God directly told Oral Roberts what the truth was, and that settles it for all time. This resulted in a really disquieting moment at the AAAS Southwest and Rocky Mountain Section meeting in Tulsa in 2012 (which I described in this blog soon after it occurred). My first reaction is always to distrust religious scientists, based on my Oklahoma experiences, which have been mostly negative. But in many individual instances, I have found my religious scientific colleagues to be really fine people.

Some of you might, however, have different views. I encourage comments.