Biology textbooks

Piltdown man, paleontology’s most famous fake, was announced in 1912, but didn’t make a dramatic entry into biology textbooks until the 1930s. Championed by one man, Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, Piltdown was used as a key point of evidence in support of Osborn’s non-Darwinian conception of evolution. The success of his strategy is an American tragedy. Though Piltdown was deleted from textbooks in 1953, Osborn’s racialized theory remained woven into the story of human development well into the 1970s.

This is a revised version of an article previously published as "What Piltdown Taught.”

"In 2005, Brazilian Biology high school textbooks were evaluated as part of the National Program for the High School Textbook (PNLEM). In this paper, we report results of this evaluation. The evaluation criteria and processes are presented in a detailed manner, as well as the main flaws found in the textbooks not recommended to be bought by the Ministry of Education and the main positive aspects of the approved materials. Nine out of 18 textbooks satisfied the minimum quality criteria for approval. Seven excluded textbooks showed problems in all classes of evaluation criteria. All nine excluded textbooks exhibited problems related to conceptual correctness and adequacy, and accuracy of basic information. The most frequent qualities of approved textbooks concerned aspects of methodological adequacy and knowledge construction. We found no clear evidence that the frequency of choice of the approved textbooks by the high school teachers reflected the quality of the evaluated items, as established by the team which evaluated the textbooks.

Keywords: Textbooks; Biology Teaching; High School; PNLEM."

This analysis, focused on the work of anthropologist Carleton S. Coon, geneticist Bentley Glass, and naturalist Marston Bates, provides insight into the constructed nature of scientific ideas and the limits of science-based claims to authority. Keying into Cold War cultural anxieties, life scientists in the United States between 1945 and 1963 tried to compete with the “hard” sciences for prestige and funding by proposing solutions to perceived social ills based on the claim that they understood the evolutionary process and could apply their knowledge to guide human biological and cultural development. Positioning themselves as critical to the mitigation of political and environmental problems associated with rapid human population growth, biologists and anthropologists modified Progressive era ideologies to address changing attitudes toward race and class without altering the underlying premise that human culture, particularly “industrial civilization,” was an anomalous evolutionary product that threatened the natural order, dictating scientific management and control.

RESUMO Em 2005, os livros didáticos de Biologia do ensino médio publicados no Brasil foram avaliados, como parte do Programa Nacional do Livro para o Ensino Médio (PNLEM). Neste artigo, relatamos resultados dessa avaliação. Os critérios eo processo de avaliação são apresentados de modo detalhado, bem como os principais problemas das obras não-recomendadas para compra pelo MEC e os principais aspectos positivos das obras recomendadas. Das 18 obras submetidas à avaliação, nove satisfizeram os critérios ...

Ankara : The Program of Curriculum and Instruction, Bilkent University, 2013.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2013.Includes bibliographical refences.The purpose of this study was analyze and compare ecology units in four Ministry of National Education (Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı, MEB) biology textbooks, International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) biology textbook and International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) biology textbook in terms of content, presentation and learning. Content analysis was used as a research method and interviews were conducted with biology teachers. The analysis of the ecology-related unit content of textbooks showed that MEB textbooks cover large numbers of life connections and interdisciplinary treatments which makes MEB textbooks advantageous over the other two textbooks. From the perspective of presentation, the IGCSE textbook is the only textbook that has teachers’ resource kit. The other advantageous point is present...

Two influential articles published in the 1970s suggested that pressure from Christian fundamentalists, subsequent to the Scopes trial of 1925, forced American high school biology textbook authors and publishers to significantly limit discussion of the topic of evolution. The conclusions reached by these studies have become foundational for historians examining the interplay between science and religion in the United States in the twentieth century. However, a reexamination of key twentieth century biology textbooks suggests that the narrative that the treatment of the theory of evolution was held hostage to anti-rational cultural forces is largely a myth, created first as part of a public relations effort by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) to differentiate, defend, and promote its work, and later as part of an attempt by scholars to sound a warning concerning the rise of the religious right. A focus on this narrative has not only allowed biologists to sidestep uncomfortable questions regarding the race-biased and class-biased assumptions embedded within the concept of evolutionary progress, it has also limited reliance on the texts in question as reliable reflections of the cultural assumptions of educators and scientists. A reexamination of the most popular American biology textbooks from 1907 to 1963, particularly the work of Ella Thea Smith, provides evidence in support of these contentions.

Gaia theory proposes that a cybernetic system including the biota and the physicochemical environment regulates environmental variables at a global scale, keeping them within a range that makes Earth inhabitable by living beings. One can argue that this theory can play an important role in school science, since it bears upon current environmental problems, contributes to cross-disciplinary learning, and may help students understand the nature of science. Nevertheless, discourses about Gaia include both scientific and non-scientific ideas, and, consequently, this theory has been seen as pseudoscience, or even antiscience, as an unwarranted view, entangled with mysticism. But an informed view about the contributions and risks associated with Gaia as part of science education depends on a general analysis about the treatment of this theory in school knowledge. Here, we offer the first analysis of this sort, critically evaluating how Gaia is addressed in a representative sample of Brazilian textbooks (n = 18). We present data about the presence or not of Gaia theory among the contents covered by the textbooks, the presence of the claim that Earth is living, whether and how they use analogies to justify this claim, the discussion of evidence for and against Gaia, and the treatment of its relevance to current issues. Gaia theory is explicitly addressed in ca. 39% of the analyzed textbooks. There is a general script that the textbooks that explicitly name the theory follow when discussing Gaia. First, they argue that life affects the environment, and support this argument by means of examples, then, explain what the Gaia theory proposes, discuss evidence in favor either of the idea that Earth is living or Gaia theory in general, introduce one or more analogies to justify the claim of a living Earth, and, finally, offer remarks on the current importance of Gaia. Three analogies used by Lovelock himself were found in the analyzed textbooks, Gaia as a superorganism, the analogy between Gaia and a redwood tree, and between Gaia and the Greek goddess of Earth. The most frequent was the superorganism analogy. The idea of a control system including the biota and the physicochemical environment and any discussion about theoretical and empirical advances resulting from Gaia theory were absent from most analyzed textbooks, which focused mainly on the claim of a living Earth. Although Gaia can contribute to the understanding of environmental issues, the treatment found in most of the analyzed schoolbooks puts so much emphasis on the idea that Earth is living and is so close to an animistic understanding of the Earth system that it is likely that it will bring no true contribution to the development of adequate conceptions about that system and the connections between human activities and the environmental crisis.