pseudoscience

Book review – Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason

6-minute read

2020. A time of Trump. Written during a period of pandemic, it is a chronicle of conspiracies embellished with the flowers of falsehoods. In other words, it is tempting to think of the current moment as one of irrationality run rampant. If you have been entertaining similar thoughts, Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason provides a poignant note and a fascinating reflection. Because, when you take some distance, you might ask if it has ever been different. How many people past have wondered the same from their unique vantage point? Have we really made any progress towards enlightenment, or is our history merely the back-and-forth sloshing of the tides of reason and unreason?

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Book review – Natural: The Seductive Myth of Nature’s Goodness

7-minute read

I will come right out and say this: if the subtitle turned you off, give this book a chance. Yes, this is a sceptical take on the subject, but without the typical mockery and ridicule. Natural sees religious scholar Alan Levinovitz critically but thoughtfully examine the appeal to nature fallacy*: the idea that just because something is natural it is good. For a biologist, the “natural goodness” myth is particularly grating as it requires some exceptional cherry-picking to come to this conclusion. As far as logical fallacies go, this is a big personal bug-bear. Why is it so compelling?

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Book review – Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk (Second Edition)

In a time of fake news and alternative facts, being able to separate the proverbial scientific wheat from the pseudoscientific chaff is vitally important. But seeing the wide acceptance of a lot of dubious ideas, critical thinking does not come easily. So, how, then, do you tell science from bunk? Updating his 2010 book Nonsense on Stilts, evolutionary biologist and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci once again attacks this problem from many sides. Going far beyond cheap potshots at pseudoscience, I found a book that takes an equally serious look at the more insidious phenomena of think tanks and postmodernism, with a healthy side-serving of history of science. The result is a readable introspection on what science is and how it is done.

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Book review – Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society

Long-term readers of this blog will be aware that the proliferation of pseudoscience and anti-scientific sentiments disturb me deeply. As someone with a scientific training, my concerns are foremost academic. But as the contributors to this edited collection wish to show, these anti-intellectual trends also impact democracy. This is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the USA and Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy is therefore appropriately US-centric. It is also rather academic and scholarly in tone, more so than other works aimed at a general audience.

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Book review – The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: How To Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake

If the design of the cover didn’t already give it away, the instruction to NOT PANIC on the dust jacket makes it clear this book is riffing on the famous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And just as Douglas Adams’s book was intended to be an indispensable guide to navigating the galaxy, so The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe is an indispensable guide to navigating a world gone mad with pseudoscience, alternative medicine, fake news, and conspiracy theories. Don’t let the book’s bulk put you off, this is an incredibly engaging read with a most humble outlook on life.

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Book review – Science Unlimited? The Challenges of Scientism

You only have to look at the name of this blog to realise that I am a cheerleader of scientific enquiry. The advances in knowledge we have made, and the pace at which it is proceeding, are breathtaking. Yet, there are plenty of people who are not comfortable with the way science has pervaded our lives and cry foul, hurling the accusation of scientism. But what is this beast called scientism? Philosophers Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci have here collected a diverse and sometimes technical collection of contributions to discuss what scientism is and reflect on how useful a term it really is.

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Book review – Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science

Fake news, alternative facts, misinformation. These buzzwords have been making headlines all too regularly in the last few years. Who to trust and how to tell apart well-executed science from bunk has become increasingly challenging amidst the information overload of our internet era. The edited collection Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science brings together 22 contributions that examine the problem of pseudoscience from a variety of perspectives. The unbelievable things people believe in may be easy to mock, but, as this book makes clear, they are no laughing matter.

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Book review – Too Big to Walk: The New Science of Dinosaurs

Every academic discipline has a few, the contrarian naysayers who steadfastly believe their idea is true, even if it flies in the face of natural laws and mountains of evidence to the contrary. Physicists have to contend with inventors of perpetual motion machines, astronomers and geographers have to put up with the growing legion of flat-earthers, and palaeontologists are now faced with this. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Brian J. Ford and his amazing aquatic dinosaurs.

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Book review – The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilisation

From the Giza-pyramid-complex-shaped mountains of dried yeast, to the visual joke on the spine (I see what you did there), The Rise of Yeast is an amusing read about fungus. In case you find that hard to believe, Nicholas P. Money, mycologist and professor of Botany, has been waxing lyrically about micro-organisms for years. Here, he highlights the humble yeast and how it has shaped human history. For without yeast there would be neither bread nor booze.

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Book review – Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

You may have missed it, but archaeology is undergoing a silent revolution. The story of our deep history used to be based on skeletal remains, linguistics, and the analysis of objects and tools our ancestors left behind, but since about three years archaeologists have a new tool in their arsenal. The analysis of DNA from old bones, or ancient DNA. David Reich has been at the forefront of developing this technique and argues that it is rewriting most of what we thought we knew about the last 350,000 years or so of human history. Brace yourself, things are about to get complicated…

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