One of those things we professors have to struggle with every year is textbook decisions. Your standard science textbook is a strange thing: it’s a heavily distilled reference work that often boils all of the flavor out of a discipline in order to maximize the presentation of the essentials. What that typically means is that you get a book that is eminently useful, but isn’t the kind of thing you’d pick up to read for fun, and then we hand it to our undergraduate students, who may be in our class for only the vaguest of reasons, and tell them they must read it. Finally, of course, at the end of the semester most of the students take that expensive reference work down to the bookstore buy-back and get rid of it (not me, though! I’ve still got my undergraduate developmental biology text on my bookshelf).
The other thing that goes on is that as textbooks age, they get denser and denser. Gilbert’s Developmental Biology(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) is probably the best book in the field, and I certainly love my copy, but it’s also been accreting great stuff for years with many new editions. That’s good for me, but I worry that it may be too much for undergraduate students, most of whom want a general introduction and aren’t necessarily planning to go on to do anything specific in development. That’s why I went with Wolpert’s Principles of Development(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)—it’s good, but it’s also a little lighter and a little less intimidating than Gilbert’s.
The other thing I try to do is to toss in some supplemental reading: lighter fare with a narrower theme and, with any luck, a narrative and a more personal insight. That’s sometimes harder to find, but the advantage is that these are books you can imagine someone picking up at a bookstore and reading for enjoyment, so maybe even my students who go on to become doctors or dentists or lab techs or insurance salesmen might continue to browse the science shelf at the Barnes and Noble and keep up with the topic.
This year, I assigned Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and Zimmer’s At the Water’s Edge(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) as the supplemental reading (in past years, I’ve used Brown’s In the Beginning Was the Worm(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), but two is about the limit of what we can handle with discussing a few chapters a week; it might come back in the future). I’ve always felt a little bit of trepidation about using At the Water’s Edge, just because my course is on development, and I could imagine some student complaining that there’s an awful lot of paleontology and physiology in there—but personally, I think a broader integrative view is important, too.
Anyway, I asked my students their general opinion of the books this week, and I also asked them to post a brief comparison to the web. You can read them all here:
I was greatly relieved to learn that my students like the more popular science supplements. Carl will be relieve to learn that his book was the unanimous favorite of everyone in the class. Carroll’s book is good and more tightly focused on the subject matter of the course, but I think great writing wins every time.
Now next Fall I’ll be teaching a general neuroscience course. I’m thinking the two extra books I’ll be using are Soul Made Flesh(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) (Zimmer again! I’ll stick with a winner) and Weiner’s Time, Love, Memory(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll).
…but isn’t the kind of thing you’d pick up to read for fun…
Pshaw! I cain’t think of anything more fun to read than a textbook. OK, maybe, H2G2 and the Buybull;)
Of course, Carl is not a scientist.
But what the heck, neither were Pennock or Forrest, the key Dover witnesses.
I guess you use whats handy.
I still have all of my undergraduate textbooks. Except for the ones for my economics elective, which I gave to my sister (her being an economics major). I still find use for them. In fact I would have found use for my economics books had I still had them. I don’t think I have a single undergrad textbook that I have not used since graduation. I guess it just goes to show that they are teaching it to you because it is useful.
As for textbooks accumulating stuff over the years, you should see Kandel and Schwartz, Principles of Neuroscience. It is about the size of a large dictionary. 1412 letter-size sheets and weighing over 7.5 lbs. It gathered a lot over the last 20 years it has been published.
*raises hand and bounces up and down* OMG, OMG, can I come take your neuroscience course? ^_^
The problem is that all textbooks are deadly dull. I try to avoid using them when ever possible (basically only for background and timelines in intro level classes.) Now of course, that’s in my history classes, which most of you will doubtless regard as being dull as dishwater in any case, but it doesn’t need to be. I tend to use monographs and articles as guide texts for lecture and discussion so that students can see history being written about with passion and incisive argument, not the usual textbook homogenized pablum. It works wonders. The students realize that history is about the argument and interpretation rather than just dry facts and they begin to understand the real process. It’s very much like the difference between reading about an experiment in a textbook and actually doing it. The doing is much more persuasive than the reading (and that from an inveterate reader.)
Uh, sure, I guess. You will have to wait while, though (5-10 years probably), since I am still only a second year PhD.
“all textbooks are deadly dull”?
You dishonor my mentor and coauthor Richard Feynman!
“Footnote to Feynman”, Jonathan V. Post and Richard Feynman,
[Engineering & Science, Caltech, Pasadena, CA, Vol.XLVI, No.5, p.28, ISSN: 0013-7812, May 1983; reprinted in Songs from Unsung Worlds, ed. Bonnie Bilyeu Gordon, intro by Alan Lightman (award winning author of Einstein’s Dreams), Birkhauser Boston/AAAS, hardcover ISBN: 0-8176-3296-4, paperback ISBN: 3-7643-3296-4, 1985.
He was one of the least dull professors in history. His bestselling Lecture Notes in Physics, autobiographical books, lecture transcript, recently published elected letters, and films about him prove that.
There are corresponding examples in other sciences. Carl Sagan, Margaret Mead, Stephen Hawking, … the list is long indeed.
“The problem is that all textbooks are deadly dull. ”
Not true! The textbook for my neuroscience class was Pinel’s Biopsychology , and it was a fascinating read. Even my mom would pick up it and read it whenever I visited her. The most interesting part of the book was, of course, the case studies, including the brain tumor that was removed from the author himself.
Yeah, textbooks do tend towards dullness. Any that are not dull just make the point.
One of the evil effects of the No Child Left Behind Act is the drive to textbooks that “cover” all of the material required. Tests drive the texts and the courses. Kids say the courses are dull, and they are.
In history, one could put together an outstanding history course from four or five great-reading history books. The kids would get more information, and probably learn a lot more. But the good history books don’t come with a list showing where the state standards are buried in the text, or bundled with free test-generator softwar.
And so the kids lose. Academia loses, the schools lose — and the communities and nation lose.
For what topic is it not true?
What? Margaret Mead? The one that got both of her legs pulled by those Fijian girls (for example because she never bothered to learn the language)?
Is Principles of Neuroscience bigger than The Alberts (Molecular Biology of the Cell)? I’d be surprised — The Alberts has A4 format. My brother likes to call it “the little paperback for in-between”.
What? Margaret Mead? The one that got both of her legs pulled by those Fijian girls (for example because she never bothered to learn the language)?
Is Principles of Neuroscience bigger than The Alberts (Molecular Biology of the Cell)? I’d be surprised — The Alberts has A4 format. My brother likes to call it “the little paperback for in-between”.
PZ, you might consider as supplemental reading Oliver Sach’s book, The man who mistook his wife for his hat. It doesn’t delve into the science itself. There’s no discussion of neuron models, neural anatomy and architecture, etc. But it does show what modularity means in the real world, in a way that few other books do. And it’s an easy read. Here’s the Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949/sr=8-1/qid=1166298922/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-7179318-2607167?ie=UTF8&s=books
I trust a brain dissection will be part of the course?
In problem-solving type courses (math, physics, much of chemistry) text books can be incredibly useful. In other subjects, less so. One of my biology professors recently explained that she didn’t expect us to use our books as anything other than references, and I think her attitude is absolutely right for the kind of course it is.
Also, in some fields there seems to be a tendency to abandon text books in favor of “readers”–textbook sized collections of essays, book excerpts, primary source documents, etc. Works very well in many cases.
Chris Hallquist writes, “In problem-solving type courses (math, physics, much of chemistry) text books can be incredibly useful.”
Curiously, R L Moore disagreed. I took a couple of graduate topology courses, without a textbook in sight.
Also, in some fields there seems to be a tendency to abandon text books in favor of “readers”–textbook sized collections of essays, book excerpts, primary source documents, etc. Works very well in many cases.
especially in higher level courses.
As an example, when I taught behavioral ecology at UCB, we used Alcock’s “Animal Behavior” as a text, but most of the course was designed around Krebs and Davies “Behavioral Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach”, which is basically a treatise of the type you mention.
the concepts involved are best looked at from the perspective of case examples.
However, the reason we also used Alcock was because there is also a need for a good grounding in general theory as well, which the students could then see actually tested in the case examples.
worked very well.
I’ve always thought that Sex and Death by Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths would make a great Evolutionary Biology textbook. It’s well written, fun to read, and doesn’t dumb down things at all. It’s also not afraid to wade right on in to all the fun debates (concepts of the gene, developmental systems theory, levels of selection, etc, etc). Everyone I’ve lent my (well-loved and heavily battered) copy to enjoyed it too.
The one problem is that you can get odd looks if you’re reading a book called Sex and Death in public..
–Simon
Finally, of course, at the end of the semester most of the students take that expensive reference work down to the bookstore buy-back and get rid of it (not me, though! I’ve still got my undergraduate developmental biology text on my bookshelf).
If they’re lucky, they get rid of it. When I was an undergrad taking my general education courses, half the time the most expensive books were suddenly in new editions, which meant I didn’t get a dime and was stuck with a $100 doorstop.
When you’re a cash-starved undergrad, throwing your money down the drain this way becomes very annoying very quickly.
Durng.
I’m at the University of Michigan and devo bio was offered here this semester for the first time in something like a decade, so the curriculum was created entirely from scratch. I wish that the profs that taught that course had used supplementary texts like that, Gilbert was very dense, though not as dull as Lehninger, and of limited use. Luckily for us students, though, they didn’t expect us to memorize every little morphogen or gene pathway that Gilbert mentioned, they distilled that for us.
I’ll have to pass the suggestion of supplemental texts on to them.
I liked “Sex and Death” a lot, but it is a Philosophy of Biology book. There is not enough nitty-gritty science to use as an evolutionary biology text.
Have you ever checked Analysis of Biological Development by Klaus O. Kalthoff?
I very much share the distaste for ‘textbooks’ (almost wrote testbooks there, and that’s apt). For teaching honors humanities students, I taught the “Darwinian Revolution” using Helena Cronin’s The Ant and the Peacock, which presents the history of evolutionary theory to modern times with a personal voice. Much more readable and pertinent to continuing controversies than the vaguely comparable treatment by Bowler, though Bowler stuffs in more names and factoids. Cronin was trained as a philosopher then volunteered to be retrained by Dawkins, and writes well – so some surprisingly sophisticated biology gets covered by my non-biology students.
And then I added the current edition (third, 2001) of Appleman’s reader Darwin, full of source excerpts from pre-Darwin to Darwin to current concepts & responses. It seems almost prescient that its selections for modern church statements about evolution include several Islamic excerpts including fundamentalists.
Texts have to have personal voices, like Cronin or like Alcock’s Animal Behavior (for some reason ethology seems actually dominated by such – only Hinde, for example, sometimes appears impersonal).
Texts have to have personal voices, like Cronin or like Alcock’s Animal Behavior (for some reason ethology seems actually dominated by such – only Hinde, for example, sometimes appears impersonal).
yes, it’s almost necessary, as a lot of the concepts in behavioral ecology can seem a bit obtuse to new students, and the field has progressed quite a lot since the strict “ethology” days of Lorenz.
The dilemma is the field is just too damn big. I once compared the indices of Giancoli, a Physics intro text to that of the old warhorse Keeton, and we’re talking 6 pages vs 26 pages of index. When you consider that most folks teach biology as a vocabulary course, its no wonder that folks see science as a collection of facts, not a fascinating and effective means of discovery.
I would love to see a textbook composed of two volumes. The first would be a narrative of discovery, the second would be the facts as we now understand them. Hmmm, sounds perfect for the web…
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