If you’ve got a few hours (he does go on), read Orac’s contribution to the Offit book club discussion. It’s lots of fun: it’s got the anti-vaxing squirrels chittering insanely. If you don’t have the time to read the whole post, just browse the comments for the laughs!
The ScienceBlogs Book Club has started up again, and this time around the book under discussion is Paul Offit’s Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Offit has an entry over there right now, and more will be piling on soon.
This is a good subject to tackle, too: the anti-vaccination clowns are yet another outbreak of lunacy and innumeracy and anti-science nuttery, and Offit’s book fights the good fight. Expect howls of outrage from the clowns.
(By the way, one of the circuses full of clowns is trying to oppose our poll-crushing. If you haven’t voted for Amanda and science yet, get on over there and make them cry.)
Many of you already know that Slacktivist has been doing a detailed deconstruction of the first book of the Left Behind series. He has posted a long, painful, entertaining analysis of a few pages in order every Friday for over four years: it’s been like gawking at a major train wreck, since the book is terribly written and an incomprehensible edifice of illogic and anti-realism gussied up with the most appalling lack of imagination.
At long last, he has turned the last few pages of the last chapter. There about 11 more books in the series, I think, and some spin-off books and prequels (I saw one for kids about kids living through the End Times), and I kind of hope for his sanity’s sake that he doesn’t start plowing through them, but on the other hand, it has been an entertaining exercise in the schadenfreude of truly bad literature, and I don’t want it to stop. It seems a little unfair that the one enjoyable part of this series, the demolition of its tawdriness, has to come to an end, while the hacks who created these potboilers and milked millions of undiscriminating, credulous readers continue on, making megabucks on dreck.
Jennifer Oullette has put together a pop-sci book meme (and John Lynch has joined in). It’s the usual thing, a long list of books and you’re supposed to highlight the ones you’ve read, this time with the theme being that they’re all about science somehow. I detect a physics bias in Ms. Oullette’s choices, however, despite the excellent beginning — and it’s to that I ascribe my poor performance. That and some weird choices: since when is Neuromancer pop-sci? Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle or Cryptonomicon or Snowcrash would be better choices if we’re going to throw fiction in the mix, or Sterling’s Schismatrix. If we open the door to SF, though, the howling hordes will pour in and we’ll never get anything done.
Anyway, here’s my copy of the list:
Jennifer did suggest that we make additions, so let’s beef up the biology a bit with a few more off the top of my head (OK, McPhee and Rudwick are geology…but that needs bolstering, too!).
Sastra here.
I’m about halfway through, and really enjoying, Robert Price’s new book, Top Secret: The Truth Behind Today’s Pop Mysticisms.
Bob Price has an interesting background: he started out as a roaring Pentacostal Minister, gradually grew into a high-end Christian theologian, and eventually evolved to his present form as secular humanist. He’s currently teaching classes in comparative religion — and also happens to be an expert on HP Lovecraft and science fiction. I think this wide-ranging perspective gives him a particular advantage when dealing with religious topics. He’s been into almost everything, and can compare, contrast, and understand different mindsets with apparent ease. His analogies are often original, and spot on.
Even atheists are still influenced by the religious beliefs they once held. I was raised “freethinker.” Nobody at school knew what that meant, and I had a hard time explaining it, since I wasn’t sure what the alternative was. I wasn’t taught any particular religion, but it seemed to be a cultural prerequisite for having a “meaning,” so I would pick up bits and strands of things that seemed interesting to me, and try them on. I remember deciding in 5th grade to worship the Greek gods, since they would clearly be available, and very grateful for the attention. It seemed odd that they had so few current fans. But, by the time I was a teenager, I became enamored of the “psychic sciences,” and got into New Age.
Having since gotten myself OUT of New Age, I am particularly interested in books and articles that address and critique these self-proclaimed more enlightened, sophisticated, “holistic” forms of spirituality. My interest is not merely personal: such views are still held by many intelligent, well-educated, liberal-thinking people – and many of them take it all very seriously, and yield the power to have it taken seriously in secular arenas. These are not really marginal beliefs. As Price writes:
I published a review in Nature this week, of Ken Miller’s Only a Theory(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and boy, was that a tough one. The catch was that I want the book to do well, and I definitely think it has a place as an appeal to the religious majority to support good science (you know, all those people who see my demonic visage leering out at them from the top left corner of this page and want to call for an exorcist), but it also irritated me greatly on several important points.
I think it’s a much better book than his previous, Finding Darwin’s God(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). That book had one point where it simply drove off the cliff with a bunch of handwaving about god dwelling in quantum indeterminacy, which made it virtually unreadable beyond that point. There is no cliff in this one; instead, it’s threaded with some annoying biases throughout.
The big one for me was a lot of naive American exceptionalism, and that’s the issue for which I took him to task in the Nature review. Why does the US have such an aberrant problem with creationism, while Europe does not? I would have answered with something about a tradition of religiosity and anti-intellectualism, and maybe something about a rough-and-ready credulity that allowed for the rapid proliferation of widely variant sects; the recent renascence of creationism under the guise of ID owes something to raging relativism, too. In Miller’s eyes, creationism has absolutely nothing to do with religion at all — it’s all about the American virtues of rebelliousness and disrespect, to which we also owe our eminence in science.
This is news to me, especially lately since Miller’s co-religionists have been madly flinging bricks at me for daring to disrespect their peculiar superstitions. I also don’t think the sheep flocking to the mega-churches are flaunting their rebelliousness…it’s more an expression of conformity. There isn’t one true revolutionary among the creationist hordes, only a mob trying to defend hallowed superstitions from the encroaching modernity. Any explanation for the popularity of creationism that discounts the impact of religion for the worse is like trying to explain the motion of a car while completely ignoring the engine compartment.
The other annoyance of his book creeps in gradually. He’s clearly a fan of Simon Conway Morris’s view that life roughly of our sort was inevitable, that while evolution would lead to variations in the details, a human-like mind was a consequence that was programmed into the starting conditions of the universe. If we restarted the Earth at a point 4 billion years ago, the planet would eventually cough up a pile of social animals that would start going to church and praising their heavenly creator — maybe they wouldn’t be mammals, but our molluscan or reptilian or echinoderm replacements on Alternate Earth would still be occupying a similar niche to ours, and would still be fulfilling the rough outlines of the vision set in motion by a loving god.
This is, of course, untestable wishful thinking, and not at all supported by the science, which shows a genuine role for chance. Real chance. Not the chance of Miller, which is that of a god who throws dice most of the time, but when it is really, really important, he fudges the results a little bit to make sure he wins.
Still, you should read the book. Ignore the apologetics, and don’t trust anything he says about the origins of creationism in the US, but do read it for the excellent rebuttals to common creationist claims. This is a book I’d hand to any creationist students who try to argue against evolution on religious grounds, but I think it would only take them partway to a realistic view of how life came to be.
I’m very fond of Chris Turney‘s book, Bones, Rocks, and Stars. It’s a slender, simple description of the many tools scientists use to figure out how old something is, and when arguing with young earth creationists, it’s become the first thing I recommend to them. It’s short and easy to read, and focuses on explaining how dating methods work.
Turney has a new book out: Ice, Mud and Blood: Lessons from Climates Past(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). This is the one you’ll be able to hand to climate change denialists, and it’s a winner.
Its virtues are the same as his previous book, the careful documentation of exactly how we know what we know, and less dictation of the conclusions. This is useful, because as we all know, climate is a phenomenon that shows a lot of variability, exhibits patterns in its history, and also has large degrees of uncertainty, phenomena that denialists can seize upon to magnify that uncertainty into a basis for an unwarranted rejection of well-supported hypotheses. So while we can see distinct variations from simple linear uniformity of climate change like the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, that doesn’t change the fact that greenhouse gases profoundly influence earth’s temperature, and it’s clear that CO2 has risen to levels the planet hasn’t seen in at least 650,000 years. The past tells us what we can expect in the future, and it’s grounds for serious concern. Yes, Turner comes down firmly on the side of an anthropogenic cause for the current trend of global warming, and he explains exactly why, step by step.
Where Turner departs from the formula of his last book, though, is that this one, while still fairly short, is much denser and more technical. Anyone can read it — I managed, despite knowing next to nothing about climatology — but it’s not the kind of thing you’ll be able to do in an evening or two of light reading. There are a few places where the level of detail slowed me down to a steady slog rather than a fast flit, but face it, any book that tries to untangle ocean currents, monsoons, El Nino, and past current reversals is going to occasionally demand the same level of studious, focused attention you’d need to clean up a snarled fishing reel. This is a book that is describing some extraordinarily complicated stuff.
If you want just one book, not too thick or too technical, that will give you the intellectual tools to at least understand what the climate change experts are talking about, this is the one. I recommend bringing it to the beach and reading it there — you’ll appreciate the rising tide and the ocean beaches a little more, and perhaps regard them with a little more respectful dread.
It’s true — we’re going to be promoting (or dissecting) select titles in the The ScienceBlogs Book Club, a new feature here. For our first effort, a few of us have read and are discussing Carl Zimmer’s Microcosm — you should head over there and contribute. A book club session without any arguments is no fun at all.
I’ve been sent two lists of “10 Books That Screwed Up the World”, and I’m not very impressed with either of them. The first is from a new book by Benjamin Wanker Wiker of the same title, published by Regnery Press, the imprint of right-wing wackaloons everywhere. Here’s Wiker’s list:
Here’s another list, which seems to be inspired by Wiker’s, but with a few substitutions.
Bleh. A list of books that screwed up the world ought to include books that have actually had some major impact for the worse on the lives of large numbers of people: I can definitely see that for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and the Malleus Maleficarum. Others, not so much. Coming of Age in Samoa may have confused the discipline of anthropology for a while, but putting it on the same list as Mein Kampf is simply ridiculous. The work of Marx has been potent and maybe deserves to be on these lists because we’re still living with the ideological struggle that it was part of…but really, it ought to include both sides, and Adam Smith’s work doesn’t seem to be here.
Darwin’s book is a science text that describes an empirical reality. To claim that it screwed up the world is like declaring that Newton’s Principia, because it described difficult facts, hurt us. It’s only on the list because Wiker is a Discovery Institute cretin.
Kinsey is on the list because he makes homophobic wingnuts feel uncomfortably icky. I don’t think that making the likes of Benjamin Wiker feel all squirmy in his pants qualifies as screwing up the world.
And Behe? You’ve got to be kidding. His book is inconsequential noise, error after error larded with silly egotism. It’s the work of a popular crackpot; if you’re going to include that, then we need to include the works of Velikovsky and Chopra and every astrologer, acupuncturist, homeopathist, quack, and faith healer ever written.
And most damning of all, it is impossible to take these lists seriously when they’ve left off the works that have been overwhelmingly influential, incredibly widely read, and have led billions of people into delusion and stupidity: the Christian bible and the Koran. Toss in the Book of Mormon and Dianetics and any holy book you can imagine as equally fit for condemnation. Isn’t it glaringly obvious that both lists omit any work that is explicitly religious? It’s another example of unthinking privilege handed to theological gobbledygook.
One century, you’ve got Bach, another century, you’ve got Li’l Markie. Christianity has really gone downhill from its prior status as the font of funding for culture and art and intellectual endeavor to being the being the bottom of the barrel source for kitsch and crap. Case in point: Denyse O’Leary’s hideous, horrible, talentless hackery has been nominated for a Canadian Christian Writing Award. Even setting aside the fact that I disagreed vehemently with the content of the book, if you judge it on the quality of the writing, it doesn’t deserve recognition, it warrants condemnation — it’s probably the worst-written bit of tripe to cross my desk all year long, and that’s saying a lot. I’ve got a few people trying to persuade me to review their Christian apocalyptic fantasy novels, and O’Leary’s book is more incoherent than those.
