Textbook History

[Updated for clarity 2010.07.13]

Alfred C. Kinsey’s 1926 An Introduction to Biology was the first American high school biology textbook organized not against concepts of progress, control and exploitation, but of unity, interdependence and conservation. Kinsey wrote that he believed it “a mistake to test the importance of knowledge by its known, dollars-and-cents application” (v-vi). Rather than promoting the “value of domestic animals” or “man’s improvement of his environment,” Kinsey’s stressed the “ecologic relations of organisms.” Where others focused on the history of vertebrates culminating with human dominance, Kinsey focused on the behavior of insects culminating with balance in nature. Still, the author made sure he didn’t come off as some kind of odd-duck bug lover. In his textbook, Kinsey promoted biology, at least as practiced by a taxonomist like himself, as a rugged sport, full of adventure and manly camaraderie, an antidote to the sissifying effects of the lab and the city.

One might suggest Kinsey was compensating for something. And more than a few have. [1]

Read the rest of this entry »

As we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, I thought I’d take the opportunity to note that though the image of Darwin we share today, that tired but steadfast symbol of rationality and science, dates dates back to the 1880s (see Janet Browne’s article in Isis), for the 30 years ahead of run-up to Origin’s centenary, Darwin, to borrow Peter Bowler’s term, was in eclipse.

This neat bit of ephemera was among the first attempts to restore some of Darwin’s lost luster. Published in 1956, The Darwin Reader was a “best of” (and somewhat sanitized) collection of the writings of Charles Darwin edited by two professors at the University of Michigan, Philip S. Humphrey and Marston Bates. The editors noted that hardly anybody in mid-50s was reading Darwin, professionals included. They thought a good digest would help.

I know nothing of Humphrey. But I know Bates was an amazing man. A contemporary of Rachel Carson, Bates helped popularize ecology, was a fantastic natural historian and popular author and was the person most responsible for that radically influential 1960s biology textbook, the BSCS “green version.”

If you don’t know Marston Bates, go online right now, find a used copy of The Forest and the Sea, and buy it!