On 2014 Apr 04, GREGORY CROWTHER commented:

I understand and agree with the central point of this article, i.e., that biology textbooks should emphasize scientific thinking and scientific investigation, but often don't. What is the solution to this problem? Duncan et al. imply that the textbook authors should simply prepare their books differently: "Textbook authors might better serve students by focusing more on how the information in their chapters was discovered, rather than devoting most illustrations to describing biology by representing what is known." This reasonable-sounding advice sidesteps the fact that authors do not have sole control of their books; the publishers exert much influence based on market considerations, and professional illustrators (who are actually responsible for preparing the figures) have input as well. Thus, making textbooks more research-based is not as simple as telling the textbook authors to "Make it so." An author of one of the texts reviewed by this article told me that he made his book "as data-intensive as reviewers would stand." In other words, he himself was not the bottleneck in getting more research data into the book. One hopes that publishers and editorial teams are now starting to expect more of a research flavor in their texts.

On 2014 Apr 04, GREGORY CROWTHER commented:

I understand and agree with the central point of this article, i.e., that biology textbooks should emphasize scientific thinking and scientific investigation, but often don't. What is the solution to this problem? Duncan et al. imply that the textbook authors should simply prepare their books differently: "Textbook authors might better serve students by focusing more on how the information in their chapters was discovered, rather than devoting most illustrations to describing biology by representing what is known." This reasonable-sounding advice sidesteps the fact that authors do not have sole control of their books; the publishers exert much influence based on market considerations, and professional illustrators (who are actually responsible for preparing the figures) have input as well. Thus, making textbooks more research-based is not as simple as telling the textbook authors to "Make it so." An author of one of the texts reviewed by this article told me that he made his book "as data-intensive as reviewers would stand." In other words, he himself was not the bottleneck in getting more research data into the book. One hopes that publishers and editorial teams are now starting to expect more of a research flavor in their texts.