Evopeach responds to me:
quote:
Funny I jest took a look at two Biology books
Titles, please? I'd like to look them up.
Here's the title of my college bio textbook:
Life: The Science of Biology, Second Edition, by Purves/Orians.
Now, who are Purves and Orians? Well, Bull Purves was professor of Biology at Harvey Mudd College...and the prof from whom I took Biology. Gordon Orians is from the University of Seattle. The book was reviewed by 42 people, including Lynn Margulis, first wife of Carl Sagan and proponent of endosymbiotic theory.
But, none of those reviewers wrote the book. In fact, Purves and Orians didn't really collaborate that much. The majority of the book was written by Purves and covers basic biology from cellular dynamics through evolutionary theory while Orians wrote the sections on population biology. Oh, they certainly listened to their comments and the feedback from the first edition, but the book is theirs, not the reviewers'.
And let us not forget, just because someone's name is on the cover does not mean they had anything to do with the book. This was a fairly big scandal not so long ago as authors finally got a look at the books that bore their names and couldn't find anything that they had written inside.
And then there's just the fact that the books are piss poor. The AAAS did a review of the common science textbooks used for junior high school and not one textbook series from any of the publishers managed to get a good score in the life sciences. And this wasn't an issue of whether they covered evolution. It was rating things such as the ability to state a definition clearly, identifying what the purpose of a section was, etc.
The process by which a textbook is usually written, especially for primary and secondary education, is that the publisher decides to write a book. But, they don't have any authors so they hire a content provider. The content provider, however, doesn't have any authors, either, so they hire freelancers, assigning them topics and the state standards they are trying to meet. The freelancers, independently, write the various sections which is returned to the content provider. The content provider does some fact checking then edits and compiles the book and sends it to the publisher.
Do you really think that a public school biology textbook is "written by evos and reviewed by evos"? Please.
Rrhain
Thank you for your submission to
Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.
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