Books IV

I’ve been naughty in the last couple of months, not writing book reviews of what I’m reading. Here are some...

The Afrikaners: Biography of a People by Herman Giliomee is a scholarly history of the Afrikaners (and, earlier, Dutch) from the colonization of the Cape in 1652 to modern times. While I doubt the book is of general (international) interest, it’s certainly an important contribution to South African historiography and as such will appeal to those who wish to understand the country. Despite being Afrikaans myself, I certainly learnt a great deal and Giliomee’s analyses of events are consistently insightful, if not always entirely convincing.
As is to be expected, the bulk of the book covers the 20th century, with particular focus on apartheid. Several of Giliomee’s arguments here are very interesting, including that the National Party victory in the (all white) election of 1948 (surprisingly, with only 41% of the popular vote) was not a watershed, as the preceding system of ‘liberal’ segregation significantly curtailed black rights. He also argues, convincingly I think, that the root of apartheid among the elite theorists was in fact a moral reaction to the problem of ensuring white domination of the political system and thus ‘white survival’. Crude racism was absent among the framers apartheid, the rationale was that the curtailment of black rights in the ‘common area’ was justified in light of their status as ‘foreigners’ who belong in separate, independent and purportedly equal homelands. As Giliomee goes on to demonstrate in detail, though, the reality was very different. Chronic underinvestment in the homelands, lamented by the elite framers (except Verwoerd), and the fact that only 13% of the country was allocated to blacks resulted in the failure of influx control, the continuation and extension of the highly disruptive migrant labor system and a regime that was brutal and patently unjust. Much less convincing in my opinion are the last two chapters in which Giliomee argues, among other things, that economically apartheid was surprisingly successful, and that de Klerk’s failure to avoid a simple majority electoral system was a costly, avoidable, mistake. Also unconvincing is his contention that de Klerk’s failure to ensure the survival of Afrikaans as a public language is much to be lamented; the dominance of a common and international language – English – is far too beneficial (via network effects and others) for nation building and a proper national debate for this to be compelling. (As luck would have it, Giliomee has a recent op-ed about the continued existence of Afrikaans language universities).
There were a couple of other problems. Giliomee repeatedly assumes a great deal of background knowledge of the history and devotes only a couple of paragraphs to several important events. Additionally, I thought the book focused excessively on elites and intellectual history; more social history and more in-depth descriptions of daily life would have been welcome.
Criticisms aside, however, The Afrikaners is magisterial and, while certainly not the final word, will likely remain influential for a generation.

Clay Shirky is one of the most insightful analysts of the internet and how it affects society. His book, Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together, is an extension of his previous arguments that the internet drastically lowers transaction costs thus greatly easing group-formation and collective action, which in turn erodes the “institutional monopoly on large-scale coordination” (p. 143). Prominent themes include the mass amateurization of publishing (and how this causes big problems for traditional publishers because the one-to-many pattern – broadcasting – is being replaced by a many-to-many pattern), the end of professional filtering (“publish, then filter”, “failure for free”), and how the web eliminates the technological barriers to participation, which means it’s no longer the case that small things get done for 'love’ (non-financial motivations) and big things for money. It’s now possible to do big things for love – like writing the largest, best and most comprehensive encyclopedia in history. Also important is that the distribution of attention, participation and contribution on the web follows a power-law distribution and not the familiar normal distribution (see Shirky’s original essay on this).
I very highly recommend the book; indeed, I’d say it should be required reading.
See also: his TEDTalk.

Think by Simon Blackburn is by far the best single-volume introduction to philosophy, or, as Blackburn puts it, ‘conceptual engineering’. Covering all the major topics in Western philosophy – free will and determinism, the existence of God, morality, rationality and reasoning, epistemology, the self, the existence of the external world and more – Blackburn gently and perspicaciously explains the important thinkers and their important thoughts. Suitable both for the uninitiated and for those with philosophical training (I’ve read it three times, and, despite four years of formal training, benefited each time), I cannot recommend it enough. Indeed, on Huxley’s principle that you should know something about everything and everything about something, I pretty much think everyone should read it. Atheists and skeptics, for one (um, two?), will come away with a significantly more sophisticated understanding of the fundamental philosophical issues.

The locus classicus of the modern skeptical movement is arguably Carl Sagan’s last book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. I figured it’s about time I read it. Hopefully this isn’t too blasphemous, but I wasn’t as impressed with it as the wider skeptical community seem to be. For one thing, Sagan patches together a lot of recycled material from essays and speeches and the result is a book that occasionally doesn’t quite flow or fit together coherently. (Books of essays that pretend to be monographs are a pet peeve of mine). Don’t get me wrong: the writing is fantastic but, while the individual paragraphs are all good, they often don’t fit together.
I don’t want to overdo my criticism though; The Demon-Haunted World is certainly a fantastic book and one very much worth reading. I particularly liked Sagan’s explanations of the scientific method (and ‘baloney detection’), and he covers the European witch craze brilliantly. Also impressive is his trademark mixture of critical analysis and wonder: the universe, contends Sagan, is beautifully intricate and deserving of awe. Also significant is his explanation of how science combines radical open-mindedness with ruthless criticism of ideas. (See also this video that I linked to previously).
One final comment: contrary to a blurb on the book that Sagan is “unfailingly respectful of religion”, I was quite surprised to see how critical he is of it. He doesn’t seem to belong to the school (Novella et. al.) that strictly adheres to the principle that advocating scientific skepticism and atheism should be kept separate. I say right on.
See also: an interview of Sagan’s wife Ann Druyan on Point of Inquiry that also includes a speech of Sagan’s to a skeptical meeting. He’s extremely eloquent, so you’ll enjoy it methinks.

The Men Who Stare At Goats by Jon Ronson is a hilarious but rather frightening account of "what happens when a small group of men - highly placed within the United States military, the government, and the intelligence services - begin believing in very strange things." The title comes from a program at Fort Bragg where, for a time, members of Special Forces tried to stare goats to death. Equally remarkable and crazy is the CIA’s experimental clairvoyance program (it turns out thinking really hard about where Soviets subs are doesn’t work), a general who tried to walk through walls and the use of the song “I love you” from Barney the Dinosaur as a torture device. Unsurprisingly, the military is not immune to human folly: there are those who believe fervently in woo and the paranormal. That these people wield tremendous coercive power just makes it all the more frightening.
The style is informal and journalistic, the content gripping and the book a pleasure to read. While there are no hard-core intellectual analyses, Ronson knows it’s all bollocks – he lets the silliness speaks for itself. Overall, a fun book on a serious topic that will keep you interested throughout.
Oh. And the book is being turned into a major film, starring George Cloney, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor. The trailer is here.

My reaction to Amir Aczel’s Pendulum: Leon Foucault and the Triumph of Science was... meh: it’s intellectual bubblegum lacking real substance. The topic is Leon Foucault’s 19th century demonstration of the rotation of the Earth (the first time this was directly observed). While there is plenty of interest, I thought 239 pages were excessive; Aczel could have covered all the major points in ~120, and consequently there is a lot of filler material. Aczel, I think, also exaggerates the importance of Foucault’s demonstration. It’s not plausible that the lack of a direct observation of the Earth’s rotation was the crisis he makes it out to be since a rotating Earth is the only scientific fact that could possibly explain the day/night cycle in a heliocentric solar system.
It’s not all bad, of course. The book explains the pendulum experiments very well (there is also a technical appendix to supplement the more popular account in the text), and I found Aczel’s sketch of early 19th century French intellectual life particularly interesting.
Overall, though, I’d advise steering clear.

Given my numerous criticisms of Michael Shermer on this blog, you might think that I’m a sucker for punishment for reading his Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstitions and other confusions of our time. But the book is another classic of modern skepticism, so read it I did. Overall I thought it was pretty good. I really enjoyed Shermer’s analysis of Holocaust denial and especially the fascinating cult around Ann Rand (he calls it “The Unlikeliest Cult” given that individuality and reason is at the heart of Objectivism). Shemer’s list and explanation of the ways thinking can go wrong is standard fare, but decent, and his chapters on the psychology of the belief in paranormal phenomena (particularly among smart people) is insightful.
That said, I couldn’t escape the impression that the book was almost there, but not quite... Just as I started to enjoy it, Shermer would make a factual or logical mistake, or advance an unconvincing argument. This I found rather frustrating: the subject matter is inherently interesting (and Shermer knows his stuff), but, frankly, I ultimately think he’s just not a top drawer scholar.
Read it, I think, but read it critically.

Fiction

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson is fun post-Cyber Punk mind candy. Unusually for science fiction, it’s a bildungsroman; the central plot device being a unique computerized book that educates an indigent young girl. Interesting on the consequences of nanobots and matter compilers (c.f. this Economist piece on 3d printers that I linked to previously).

The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass (i.e. the His Dark Materials trilogy) by Phillip Pullman are billed as children’s books, but the themes and vocabulary seem geared to adults to me. Anyway, it’s high-class fantasy that’s well written, exciting, and highly imaginative. All the novels certainly held my attention throughout, and they’re a subtle but effective critique of religion and obscurantism. Recommended.

The best novel I’ve read in a long time is Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast. (While Theroux – father of my favorite documentary filmmaker, Louis Theroux – is best known for his travel writing, he’s also produced a ton of fiction). Allie Fox, a deluded technical genius, hyper-individualist and Rousseauian romantic, decides to leave the United States and take his family to the jungles of Honduras to live a simpler and ‘genuine’ life. As the story progresses, Fox becomes progressively more deluded and erratic, leading his family from one disaster to the next.
The characters are brilliantly drawn, the prose is superb and Theroux manages to paint a sympathetic picture of a peculiar, darker, side of human nature. Read it.
Also: the book was made into a movie, starring Harrison Ford.

Set in 4034 AD when humanity has ‘made it to the stars’, Ian M. Banks’ The Algebraist is top-notch science fiction mind candy. I wouldn’t say it’s literature, but it’s a fun page-turner. I especially liked that for much of the book Banks doesn’t resort to faster than light travel (there are wormholes though), and sticks to plausible physics. Also pleasing was that the aliens weren’t implausibly anthropomorphic (contra, say, Star Trek). The space battles were cool while remaining realistic.

Books III

I do book reviews once in a while, but I've been naughty and haven't done one in months... To make up for it, here are no less that 8 mini-reviews.

Somewhat strangely, I was introduced to the theory of evolution by natural selection (while I was in high school) through evolutionary psychology, specifically, through Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. And, following Pinker’s references, I read Dawkins, Dennett, Cosmides, Tooby and that crowd. To put it mildly, Stephen Jay Gould was never popular with these writers so I found myself being suspicious of and vaguely hostile to Gould, despite having read only bits of his work. When I came across a collection of Gould’s writings, The Richness of Life, in a bookshop last year it struck me how unreasonable this attitude was: partisans never paint a flattering picture of their opponents. I would have to read Gould himself to come to a fair assessment. So I bought the book and read all 600+ pages and I am extremely glad I did. Gould was without doubt a masterful essayist, a stupendously gifted writer, enormously erudite and capable of making charming connections between seemingly disparate topics. In fact, I would go as far as to say that Gould was one of the greatest 20th century essayists, up there with Medawar and Berlin.
That is not to say that I agree with Gould about everything or that I think his work was uniformly excellent. On the contrary, I think “The Spandrels of San Marco” was a travesty (and unoriginal to boot), and “More Things in Heaven and Earth” (his infamous New York Review of Books piece) was just horrendous. Gould's views about evolutionary psychology (“ultra-Darwinism” he called it) and the evolution of the human mind generally were silly. And, the actions of Science For the People – with which Gould was centrally involved – were inexcusable. Moreover, Gould misled the public because he failed to be clear about when he was explaining or illustrating settled science and when he was engaging in partisan debate.
All that said, I don’t think we should condemn him too much: it’s human (‘all too human’) to be led astray by one’s passionate political and moral convictions. Besides, there is no doubt that nearly anyone has much to learn from Gould and that his essays are, on the whole, delightful, cogent and enlightening. Read Gould (but with eyes open and pinches of salt at the ready).

Unfortunately, South Africa does not have very many science journalists who know their stuff (see George Claassen on this point), so we better support and treasure the ones we do have. Leonie Joubert (who blogs and has a Mail & Guardian column) is certainly on the side of science and reason and, yes, she knows her stuff. Scorched, her first book, is a riveting and beautiful account of the science of climate change and the projected effect this will have on South Africa. While not perfect (there are a few stylistic solecisms, there are missing references and Joubert sometimes bombards her readers with facts) Scorched ought to be widely read. The South African reality-based community, at a minimum, should all go out and buy this book and policy-makers would do well to pay attention.

The Tipping Point, published in 2000, is Malcolm Gladwell’s first book and though it is considerably less serious than his subsequent offerings, it is still worth a read. (It helps that it is short and very easy to read – I finished it in a couple of hours). The book, says Gladwell, is a biography of an idea: that products, messages and behaviors spread like epidemics. Broadly speaking, then, Gladwell is popularizing a kind of memetics, with the addition that ‘little causes can have big effects’ and that there can thus be dramatic and rapid changes when the Tipping Point is crossed. Gladwell illustrates these ideas with his trademark case studies and anecdotes, in this case, the sudden popularity of Hush Puppies in the 1990s, the dramatic fall in crime in New York, the success of Sesame Street, suicide in Micronesia, and others. Along the way, he outlines three ‘rules’ of the Tipping Point: the Law of the Few (“a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work” [p. 19] and these people can be divided into Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen), the Stickiness Factor (“there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable” [p. 25], often by tinkering at the margins [p. 131]), and the Power of Context (“human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they might seem” [p. 29]).
Gladwell has often been criticized for being unoriginal and not particularly rigorous and, frankly, I mostly agree. Indeed, Gladwell has admitted to the former (he’s a popularizer of science, not a scientist). The latter charge is more damning and is in evidence throughout the book. The ‘rules’ of the Tipping Point, for instance, are extremely vague, even when fleshed out considerably more than above, and there are no doubt many exceptions. Moreover, several of Gladwell’s examples are rather pat – he seems to simplify complicated phenomena for the sake of narrative clarity. For example, the story Gladwell tells about how HIV spread in North America – through so-called Patient Zero, Gaetan Dugas – crudely simplifies the real situation, and has been disputed.
Nevertheless, Gladwell remains my favorite science journalist, despite his flaws. I read his articles and his books because they introduce me to interesting research, which I can (and do) then follow up for myself. This may be condescending, but I don’t really expect scholarly rigor from Gladwell: he writes popular science for a wide-audience, not academic tomes for specialists. Just like you don’t watch the latest shoot-‘em-up for intellectual stimulation, or read trashy romance novels for their literary merit, or, indeed, read Science for its humor, so you shouldn’t read journalists for unimpeachable rigor or entirely justified true beliefs. In short, read journals, not journalists, for rigor. A well-written and entertaining but simplified account of solid research, worked into an interesting narrative, certainly has its place. And that is exactly what Gladwell provides.

Dark Continent My Black Arse by Sihle Khumalo is an engrossing, entertaining, funny and wonderfully politically-incorrect account of the author’s trip, entirely overland and by public transport, from Cape to Cairo. While not quite up there with Paul Theroux or Bill Bryson’s travel writing, the book is nevertheless very good indeed and worth the price of admission. A single complaint (the skeptic in me couldn’t let this go…): Khumalo on a number of occasions endorses bollocks, most notably, saying that rhino horn is ‘the best medicine for sexual vigour’. Six words: magical thinking + placebo effect + lamentable superstition.

Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is an absolute tour de force, a modern masterpiece. [Mild spoilers follow]. The central character is the eight-year-old American Jew Philip Roth, who inhabits an alternative history where Charles A. Lindbergh, the notoriously anti-Semitic aviator who was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, wins the 1940 presidential election. True to form, Lindbergh then tacitly supports the Axis powers in World War II (under the guise of isolationism) and enacts successively more repressive anti-Jewish laws (under the guise of assimilation). The rest of the novel follows Philip and the rest of the Roth clan as they come to terms with, and accommodate to, the new dispensation. [Spoilers end].
I don’t pretend to be a competent literati, so I won’t do much of a review except to note that the prose is sublime and that Roth has a preternatural ability to render the psychology of people buffeted by events beyond their control and understanding. I said the same about McCarthy, but I think it’s equally true of Roth: he deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life is, in my view, Richard Dawkins’s best book since the excellent Blind Watchmaker. The device around which the book is built, modeled on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, is a pilgrimage starting at the present with Homo sapiens, and working backwards in time to meet our common ancestors with the rest of life. The first rendezvous, for example, is with chimpanzees and bonobos (our common ancestor lived 5-7 million years ago), the 6th with the New World Monkeys (40 million years ago), the 17th with amphibians (about 340 million years ago), the 23rd with lancelets (very approximately 560 million years ago), and so on. Along the way, various creatures tell tales, among other things, about the history of life, the principles and quirks of evolution, and the methods and techniques biologists use to figure all this out. The book, then, is simultaneously a history of life, a primer on evolution, an account of human ancestry, and a survey of the diversity of life.
While it’s quite an investment of time – 629 pages in paperback – The Ancestor’s Tale richly repays that investment: I haven’t learned so much from a single book in a very long time. Not only that, but it’s as beautifully written as we’ve come to expect from Dawkins, and, perhaps more importantly, it illustrates the wonders of life, and sparks one’s curiosity and enthusiasm for such under appreciated critters as sponges, lungfish and fungi.
The dust jacket quotes the Financial Times thusly: “One of the richest accounts of evolution ever written”. It’s not hyperbole.

John Allen Paulos is a rare specimen indeed: an effective popularizer of and unflinching advocate for mathematics who is himself an academic mathematician. Not only are his mathematical credentials excellent, more importantly for his role as popularizer, Paulos writes exceedingly well. In his third book, Innumeracy, Paulos argues mathematical and, more particularly, statistical ‘illiteracy’ (the eponymous innumeracy) leads to the misunderstanding and misinterpretation of reality. He shows persuasively that the innumerate are vulnerable to personalizing the random, and thence to charlatanism, magical thinking and pseudoscience. The book is not, however, an abstract treatise on the importance of mathematics, it’s a vade mecum for the educated but innumerate. As such a guide, the book succeeds admirably: it gently introduces the basics of number and probability with a series of well-chosen examples. Overall, it is a superb little book which, I daresay, might benefit the numerate as well.
I can’t resist quoting Paulos at length:

The discrepancies between our pretensions and reality are usually quite extensive, and since number and chance are among our ultimate reality principles, those who possess a keen grasp of these notions may see these discrepancies and incongruities with greater clarity and thus more easily become subjects to feelings of absurdity. I think there’s something of the divine in these feelings of our absurdity, and they should be cherished, not avoided. They provide perspective on our puny yet exalted position in the world, and are what distinguish us from rats. Anything which permanently dulls us to them is to be opposed, innumeracy included. The desire to arouse a sense of numerical proportion and an appreciation for the irreducibly probabilistic nature of life – this, rather than anger, was the primary motivation for the book.

Trick or Treatment?

I reviewed Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst's excellent book, Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial, a while ago and now the brilliant Harriet Hall of Science-Based Medicine has done the same. Hall's review is much more substantive than mine was and she's certainly in a better position to evaluate the book. I highly recommend her review (and, certainly the book itself).

Books II

Every month or so I write mini-reviews of some the books I have read recently.

Perhaps reading multiple rave reviews set my expectations too high, but I wasn’t blown away Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. To be clear, the book is excellent and thought-provoking, but it’s not quite up there with the recent non-fiction classics (How the Mind Works, Guns, Germs and Steel and so on). Tavris and Aronson are both eminent social psychologists and their aim is to demonstrate just how much people are beset by cognitive illusions such as confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. The book is at its best when the authors summarize the relevant social psychology demonstrating, for example, that memory is a ‘self-justifying historian’ and fallible in the extreme, that clinical judgments divorced from experimental evidence is a recipe for disaster, that the criminal justice system regularly convicts innocent people because it does not sufficiently account for human fallibility and so on. The book deteriorates towards the end because the authors stray too far from solid evidence: the final chapter (“Letting Go and Owning Up”), for example, is insipid because they don’t seem to have evidence for their thesis that knowing about biases and cognitive dissonance can reduce their effect. Further negatives: Tavris and Aronson continually use a decidedly unhelpful metaphor of “the pyramid” (don’t ask), their emphasis on cognitive dissonance over the other biases seems overdone, some of their examples are a bit pat, and there are some contradictions (they claim, for example, that Americans see mistakes as stupid, but then insist in the final chapter that people who admit making mistakes are honored). Despite these problems, Mistakes Were Made is a fantastic book; the only people who won’t find it enlightening are those already familiar (and comfortable) with the illusions and biases literature. (See also: Tavris’ interview on Point of Inquiry and her blog interview with Greta Christina).

Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism by Philip Kitcher is an excellent little book that just blows the anti-evolutionists out of the water. Kitcher, a philosopher of science, wrote the book while he was a visiting scholar at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University in the company of Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin and others. At least one good thing and one bad thing resulted: the good thing was this book, which is a scholarly, scientifically well-informed, philosophically savvy and utterly convincing demolition of “scientific creationism”. The bad thing, to speculate somewhat, was Kitcher’s later horrendously misinformed tract against sociobiology, Vaulting Ambition. That is, I strongly suspect Kitcher was convinced by the radical science nutters (led by Gould) that sociobiology was dangerous pseudoscience. Speculation aside, Abusing Science is terrific – it may have been published in 1982, but it’s still relevant for the simple reason that creationism (even its latest incarnation as “Intelligent Design theory”) simply doesn’t change.

I really like Michael Shermer in several ways – I think he’s charming, smart and exceedingly eloquent (there is no better testament to his abilities than his TEDTalk on skepticism). However, I have to admit that I wasn’t all that impressed by Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design. Firstly, some fairly minor quibbles: Shermer comes across conceited (naming a ‘law’ after himself, talking excessively about his achievements), he seems to be naïve about philosophy of science (in stark contrast to Kitcher) and, inexcusably, I spotted far too many logical fallacies. My real problem with the book, however, is that I thought it was unscholarly and its arguments were mostly unconvincing: I just don’t think Shermer did enough intellectual legwork. (The one exception is Shermer’s admirably clear treatment of the anthropic principle). Obviously, I already agree with his conclusions and I’m certainly not his target audience, but he does not marshal the best arguments for evolution and against intelligent design. That said, I think people who believe in intelligent design or creationism would benefit from Why Darwin Matters and I would recommend it for that audience, those already familiar with evolutionary biology can steer clear. (See also: Shermer’s interview on Point of Inquiry and his talk at the Cato Institute about the book. Note: he comes across far better in person than in the book).

I reviewed No Country For Old Men last time round, and my views of Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road, is very similar. The novel, very briefly, follows a father and his young son’s journey south as they struggle to survive several years after an unnamed disaster brought an end to civilization and made the cultivation of food impossible. It is a gripping, terrifying and epic tale, told in McCarthy’s inimitable, free-flowing prose. The Road, make no mistake, is a terrific novel and I expect McCarthy to win the Nobel Prize before long. Like with No Country For Old Men, however, I really didn’t like the ending. [Warning: plot spoilers follow]. As you’ll know if you’ve read the book, in the end the father dies of an illness and the boy is rescued by some mysterious man who had been tracking them. I smell a deus ex machina (in the original sense of an arbitrary and convenient plot device introduced to end a story satisfactorily). Every single other character the father and son encounter on their journey is horrible: there are thieves, murderers, cannibals, and blood cultists, among many others. Indeed, even the old man they help turns out to be an ungrateful wrench. Yet, suddenly, just when it is convenient, “the good guys” arrive out of nowhere to save the boy. I hate to sound callous, but McCarthy should have stayed true to his story, stuck to its bleak themes, and let the boy die. [Spoilers end]. That said, read the book, it’s superb. (See also McCarthy interview on Oprah).

Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst is an outstanding, indeed exemplary, treatment of medical pseudoscience and quackery. Singh, a science journalist, and Ernst, the world’s first professor of alternative medicine, examine four common alternative modalities: acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and herbal medicine. In each case, they relate the treatment’s history, discuss its principles and methods, summarize the relevant clinical evidence and then make an overall assessment. Their conclusions will not surprise skeptics: with the exception of the herb St. John’s Wort (for depression), there is no evidence that any of the above-mentioned modalities have an effect beyond placebo, and some (chiropractic particularly) carry non-trivial risks.
Importantly, Singh and Ernst start the book with a chapter entitled “How Do You Determine the Truth?” which explains the scientific method and, vitally, its rationale, using historical medical advances (James Lind’s cure for scurvy and Florence Nightingale’s innovations, particularly). That first chapter alone is worth the price of the book: it is a perspicacious, detailed, persuasive, and unusually interesting defense of evidence-based medicine. Further virtues: the book is easy to follow but not superficial, the prose is lively and engaging, the explanations and illustrations are clear throughout and, probably most importantly, they get the science exactly right. Pretty much the only negative thing I have to say is that the introduction contains a bit too much foot-stomping and puffery about the authors’ neutrality, love of truth and rigor – a bit of humility is in order. My bottom-line: read this book, buy copies for your quackery-loving friends and family and spread the word. (See also: Singh's interview on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe).

Martin Gardner may have written the first edition of Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science in 1952 bit it is still relevant and certainly still worth reading. The first thing that stands out about this book is just how dedicated and scholarly Gardner was: he pioneered modern scientific skepticism so he could not rely much on previous work. As a result, he was forced to do an enormous amount of original research – he had to wade through countless obscure pseudoscientific tomes and then rely on his own judgment for a conclusion. Remarkably, despite taking positions on over twenty pseudosciences (sadly, many of which are still current), Gardner got it entirely right in almost all of the details. Moreover, his style is extremely appealing because he avoids hectoring and the temptation to nitpick, being content, on the contrary, to let silliness speak for itself. Finally, Gardner's book is particularly valuable to skeptics because it provides a sense of perspective and proportion: many of our current problems (like celebrities endorsing pseudoscience) is not new, and might have been worse in the past. Fads & Fallacies, in short, is a classic that richly deserves a continued readership.

Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage is an enormously important book that has not received nearly as much attention as it deserves. (By the way, I’ve blogged about an aspect of this book before). Keeley, an archeologist who specializes in Neolithic Europe, argues we have “artificially ‘pacified the past’ and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare” (p. vii). His thesis, in other words, is that prehistoric warfare was at least as violent as modern warfare, and probably much more so. Keeley marshals masses of evidence in support of this conclusion, including excavated fortifications, mass graves, skeletons of unequivocal murder victims, in addition to an argument from ethnographic analogy. The latter argument is especially interesting: to establish the plausibility of prehistoric warfare, he reviews the evidence that current non-state societies are far from peaceful. The evidence here, incidentally, is absolutely overwhelming: over 40% of all people in tribal societies die violent deaths, compared to less than 1% for the U.S. and Europe in the 20th century including both World Wars. Had the world experienced violent death-rates in the 20th century comparable to those of non-state societies, billions of people would have died, instead of hundreds of million. Some negatives: Keeley’s prose is a touch purple in places, he extrapolates a bit too far once or twice (taking findings about trade in non-state societies to make recommendations for state policy), he denigrates Western military strategy too much and I think he caricatures Hobbes’ position. Overall, though, the book is fantastic: it is scholarly, interesting and entirely convincing. A particularly nice quote to give you a feel for the book:

The burned villages, the arrowheads embedded in bones, the death tolls, and the mutilated corpses speak more truthfully, more passionately on this dismal subject than all the recorded verbiage of the living, which is riddled with cant, sophistry, and flights of fancy. The dead voices heard here tell us that war has an ugly sameness; it is always a compound of crimes no matter what kind of society is involved or when in time it occurs. After exploring war before civilization in search of something less terrible than the wars we know, we merely arrive where we started with an all-too-familiar catalog of deaths, rapes, pillages, destruction and terror (p. 173-174).

Books I

Since starting this blog I have labored under the delusion that I would write a proper review for each and every book I read. Clearly, that was never going to happen (I like reading far more than writing), so I’ve now decided to follow Cosma Shalizi’s example and write regular mini-reviews.

Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson is a superb biography that incorporates all the materials that were embargoed until 2006. Isaacson does his level best to explain the science in a cogent manner and, while I remain as mystified by relativity and quantum mechanics as ever, that illustrates the near impossibility of explaining modern physics to a popular audience rather than Isaacson’s limitations as an author. A particularly noteworthy aspect of the book is the astounding amount of fact checking that went into its creation as revealed by the Acknowledgements: I don’t think I’ve come across another book as carefully peer-reviewed as this one. (I spotted just one small error that got past the reviewers).
Einstein’s life, it should be said, was full and extremely interesting and thus certainly worthy of a long biography. Isaacson lives up to his subject: he writes well (if not brilliantly), adroitly weaves together the different threads of Einstein’s personality and career, and manages to convey Einstein’s greatness without becoming obsequious. Apart from a couple of inevitable differences in interpretation, the only negative thing I have to say is that Isaacson is unnecessarily repetitive in places. Overall, though, it’s a fascinating life, brilliantly portrayed. (See also: Isaacon’s interview about the book on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe starting at 34:30).

Why Is Sex Fun: The Evolution of Human Sexuality by Jared Diamond is utter junk. I can’t believe the author of Guns, Germs and Steel could produce something this bad. The less said about it the better – don’t read it, ever.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac Mccarthy (fiction). Atmospheric, absorbing, sublime prose, and totally believable. I’m not a huge fan of the ending (or the movie adaptation, for that matter), but it’s still one of the best novels I’ve read in ages.


The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome by Robin Lane Fox is an enormously ambitious book: it is a survey of almost a thousand years of complicated and interesting history in only 600 pages. Frankly, I’m generally skeptical about epic surveys – telescoped history is often watered-down history. Not so with The Classical World, it is a magnificent, full-blooded, exciting and sympathetic account of Greece and Rome. Few scholars, I suspect, could pull-off anything similar: Lane Fox’s classical knowledge is veritably encyclopedic. A particularly congenial aspect of the book is how Lane Fox’s love for his subject matter shines through; he makes no apologies for his passion. Negatives: a sometimes-ponderous writing style and a surfeit of French words, the themes of ‘luxury’, ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ seem occasionally procrustean, the book has a slow and somewhat confusing start and Lane Fox can be a bit pompous at times. All that said, the book is a recommended introduction to the classical world.

Contact Wounds: A War Surgeon’s Education is Jonathan Kaplan’s sequel to The Dressing Station (which I read – and loved – a couple of years ago). The book is a memoir of Kaplan’s early life (including a trip to Israel just after the Six Day War) and his medical education both as a student at the University of Cape Town (my alma mater) and his residencies in various parts of the world. The book ends off with events in Kaplan’s life subsequent to the publication of The Dressing Station, most notably, his stints in Angola and Iraq. Kaplan writes exceedingly well and Contact Wounds radiates humanity, remains interesting throughout and documents an amazing life. My only worry about the book is that it reads like a novel, which isn’t bad in itself, but I’m somewhat dubious Kaplan remembers as many details as he pretends to about when he was, say, 14. Nevertheless, Contact Wounds is a riveting, eye-opening read.

I hate to say this, but I was thoroughly unimpressed with Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hitchens writes beautifully, is widely educated and is a highly skilled polemicist, but, honestly, I found his arguments unconvincing. Given that I already agree with many of his conclusions and given the purpose of the book, this criticism is very harsh: Hitchens has failed to contribute to the ‘new atheist’ debate in a meaningful way. A relatively small failing I think speaks volumes: like a bad undergraduate essay, God Is Not Great is based almost exclusively on secondary-sources, it seems without Jennifer Hecht’s Doubt: A History Hitchens would not have been able to write his book. Bottom-line: watch Hitchens speaking (where he is second to none), but don’t read his book. (See also: Hitchens' interview about the book on Point of Inquiry).

A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology: The Plants and Animals Who Taught Us the Facts of Life by Jim Endersby is a new kind of intellectual history of biology that doesn’t focus on personalities (‘great men’) but on specific model organisms. Each of the 12 chapters focuses on one particular organism (Drosophila, humans, Equus quagga, guinea pigs etc.) and discusses at length how the organism came to be used and what questions biologists used it to answer. A theme running through the book is how difficult it is to transform a wild-type into a model organism: often it took years of patient work that bore no fruit in the short term. George Streisinger, for example, is the unsung hero of evo-devo; it took him nearly a decade to breed zebrafish suitable for scientific work. Another interesting theme of the book is that it took a whole community of researchers, collaborating openly and trusting one another, to produce scientific breakthroughs using a specific organism. Thomas Hunt Morgan and his ‘fly-boys’ (champions of Drosophila) set the precedent: they gave away whole colonies of newly standardized flies to any interested researcher and eventually even produced a newsletter, Drosophila Information Service, to spread useful fly information.
Negatives: Endersby’s last chapter reveals little about its purported subject, OncoMouse, and degenerates into an entirely uninteresting essay about what Endersby thinks about genetic engineering, the philosophy of science and so on. His editor should have spared him. A final, much less serious, criticism: the book sometimes gets bogged down in historical minutia (like what effect Great Britain’s 1845 abolition of the tax on glass had on the cultivation of flowers) but Endersby rarely strays too far from biology.
Overall, A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology is an original, interesting, well-researched and informative history. It comes highly recommended.

Book Review: How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World

I expected to like, enjoy and agree with Francis Wheen's How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions (retitled Idiot Proof for the American market). I really did. Unfortunately, however, while I certainly agree with a broad array of his conclusions, Wheen significantly undermines the value of his book by turning it into a catalog of things he disagrees with, which only partially overlaps with scientific consensus. Specifically, Wheen arrogantly treats debatable political questions as if they were skeptical issues, that is, he condemns Francis Fukuyama in the same terms as Deepak Chopra, equates supply-side economics and homeopathy, thinks Margaret Thatcher no better than a quack, treats Samuel Huntington no better than a postmodernist and so on. This, I will argue below, is dubious at best and is hubristic in the extreme. Before we get to my criticisms, however, some praise is due and Wheen’s argument needs sketching.

Wheen is a big fan of the Enlightenment; a devotee of Kant, Voltaire, Jefferson, Diderot, Hume, d’Alembert, and their ilk. (Hooray to that!). These thinkers, contend Wheen, may have been diverse but they all shared a characteristic ethos: “a presumption that certain truths about mankind, society and the natural world could be perceived… and that the discovery of these truths would transform the quality of life” (2004: 3). What is more, these thinkers ‘insisted on intellectual autonomy, rejected tradition and authority as infallible sources of truth, loathed bigotry and persecution, were committed to free inquiry and believed knowledge is indeed power’ (p. 5-6). The Enlightenment’s legacy, Wheen goes on to argue, was enormous: it resulted in “the waning of absolutism and superstition, the rise of secular democracy, the understanding of the natural world, the transformation of historical and scientific study, the new political resonance of notions such as ‘progress,’ ‘rights’ and ‘freedom’” (p. 6). Assuming these achievements are desiderata (as seems reasonable), it would certainly be undesirable were the Enlightenment values forgotten – indeed, the purpose of the book, Wheen says, “is to show how the humane values of the Enlightenment have been abandoned or betrayed, and why it matters” (p. 8). And it matters because "[t]he sleep of reason brings forth monsters, and the past two decades have produced monsters galore… the proliferation of obscurantist bunkum and the assault on reason are a menace to civilisation" (ibid.: 7). The villains in Wheen's piece include "holy warriors, anti-scientific relativists, economic fundamentalists, radical post-modernists, New Age mystics or latter day Chicken Lickens" (ibid.: 311-312).

Mumbo-Jumbo is explicitly modeled on Charles Mackay's classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and succeeds admirably in some respects, particularly when he turns to manias such as the dotcom bubble. The book as a whole is well written, clear, decently researched, funny in places and right on target with quite a few issues. Indeed, if only Wheen had steered clear of political questions and social science problems, his book would have been very good. His attack on the business self-help movement (Ch. 2) is sound, his chapter on post-modernism (Ch. 4) is superb (the best part of the book I’d say), his skewering of doomsday nuts, UFO-believers and quacks (Ch. 5) is admirable, and even his rant against breaches of the wall of separation between church and state (Ch. 6) is good. In fact, I would recommend the book – with some reservations – if it consisted only of the just-mentioned chapters and the introduction. Wheen, however, overlooked this felicitous possibility.

As I mentioned above, despite his book’s several merits, Wheen significantly undermines its value by arrogantly consigning every political ideology and every interpretation of social phenomena but his own to the same category as the genuine pseudosciences. While it is appropriate to condemn, perhaps even ridicule, positions that are anti-science, that fly in the face of scientific consensus (e.g. creationism, psi) or that are manifestly silly (e.g. cerealogy), it is not cricket to do so on issues about which reasonable people can disagree. When there is no scientific consensus (or any other kind of consensus) on some issue, that is, when intelligent, thoughtful people occupy a large range of different positions, it is plainly hubristic to condemn, or ridicule or accuse one’s opponents of obscurantism and irrationality. Fallibilism, we should remember, is an important virtue for any thinker: certainty (about empirical questions) is epistemologically unsound and confidence is appropriate only when there is consensus among the relevant experts. Having a strong opinion on a currently controversial question is perfectly acceptable, of course, but you should understand the arguments in the debate and realize that you could be wrong. That is, it is perfectly acceptable to take sides in current debates if (a) you know the relevant literature and have (what you think are) good reasons to prefer one side and (b) you don’t pretend to be infallible. It is patently ridiculous, though, to be certain when (a) there is nothing remotely resembling consensus and (b) you don’t even provide solid reasons for your own position. Wheen, I submit, is so arrogant he appears to be certain his and only his narrow set of political opinions (basically, unreformed Keynesian Labour with a dose of muscular foreign policy focused on opposing Islamic fundamentalism) is the only reasonable position and is in no need of real, systematic defense.

Take, for example, Wheen’s treatment of Margaret Thatcher: he begins the book by comparing her to Ayatollah Khomeini, and then goes on to pan her economic policies (and monetarism and supply-side economics generally) as ‘Voodoo economics’, accuse her of supporting terrorism, being a crazy religionist, and much else. Indeed, he has nothing whatsoever positive to say about her. (Nor, I note, any other politician save Ralph Nader. Not even Clinton or Gore is spared: Wheen calls Gore an “expensive mountebank” [p. 106] and says Clinton is “a sexual predator and alleged rapist [and] a man of no discernible moral scruples” [p. 198]). Now, while no one should think Thatcher was perfect or an unmitigated blessing, as The Economist notes in its review of Mumbo Jumbo, reasonable people – some of them experts – credit Thatcher with turning the British economy around. Let’s not forget that, for all of the post-war period before Thatcher’s rule, Britain was ‘the sick man of Europe’: other European countries consistently outgrew it, to the extent that its GDP per capita rank position began to drop. One of the primary reasons for this economic lethargy, many others and I think, was a radical, highly organized and irresponsible special interest group: the labor unions. (For background, see Olson, 1982). During her first and second terms, Thatcher won a bitter and protracted battle to reform the labor market. This, together with a series of other important economic reforms, is widely credited with injecting dynamism into the economy, resulting in a long period of fast, sustained economic growth. You may or you may not agree with this analysis, and I won’t here try to convince you, I’m only highlighting the fact that there is a reasonable argument to be made, endorsed by many clever people and some experts, that Thatcher’s rule, for all its faults, had some positive effects. Once we acknowledge reasonable, intelligent people think, for reasons that aren’t crazy, that at least some of Thatcher’s economic policies were beneficial, Wheen is utterly exposed. It is simply untenable to equate ‘Thatcherism’ or ‘Reaganomics’ (supply-side economics, monetarism and so on) with homeopathy, Iranian fundamentalism, or the irrational exuberance of the dot-com era. And do so without real argument! Frankly, this sort of uninformed arrogance doesn’t merely annoy me, it outrages me. (I am not saying, of course, that supply-side economics hasn’t been taken too far, or stretched too thin, I’m saying it’s not pseudoscience or anything close to it. If Wheen actually knew something about, say, the Laffer-curve, he’d know it’s more than “discredited superstition” [p. 18], there is a lot of research behind it. Politicians have indeed misused it, as is their wont, but that doesn’t invalidate the notion.)

I said above that, had Wheen restricted himself to genuine pseudoscience (quackery, self-help and so on) I would have recommended his book, but with a few reservations. And the reason I would have reservations even then is that Wheen regularly makes small but annoying factual mistakes, worryingly often commits logical errors (erecting straw men and making ad hominem attacks being most common), sometimes employs very weak arguments, occasionally descends to ugly pettiness and plays hard and fast with evidence on a number of occasions. I won’t try to substantiate all these charges, I’ll simply illustrate a few of them.

Firstly, an example of childish pettiness: in the midst of a discussion of Tony Blair’s political ideology, known as the “Third Way”, we find the following: “Blair also revealed that the Third Way was ‘vibrant’ and ‘passionate’, rather like Bill Clinton’s libido, but also ‘flexible’ and ‘innovative’, like Clinton’s definition of sexual relations” (p. 227). What? Does Wheen really think it is a good idea to intersperse a purportedly serious discussion of the most important political movement of the 90s with weak jokes about Clinton’s sex life? Secondly, a couple of examples of small but annoying factual errors: Wheen thinks Dwight D. Eisenhower was a four star general (p. 172) when he wore five, thinks the “linguistic turn” was a postmodern phenomenon (p. 85) when it was a mainstream philosophical development, and believes Francis Fukuyama is a historian (p. 70) when he’s a political scientist. While these mistakes are of course innocuous individually, cumulatively they undermine one’s hope that Wheen cares about evidence and checks his facts. Thirdly, an example of Wheen playing hard and fast with evidence: “By then, Thatcher’s application of Friedmanite principles – restricting the money supply, cutting public spending – was indeed producing results. During her first year inflation surged from 9 per cent to more than 20 per cent; interest rates and unemployment both rose sharply” (p. 18-19). While inflation did double in the first fourteen months of Thatcher’s first term, it is utterly disingenuous to attribute it to her policies. Thatcher took office in May 1979, after the Iranian Revolution (which culminated in February 1979) set off the Second Oil Crisis, during which the crude oil price more than doubled. Now, either Wheen knows this and he’s deliberately withholding information from his readers to score points (which is bad) or he doesn’t know and is thus ignorant of basic international history (which is worse).

I could carry on multiplying examples of Wheen’s errors or defend Fukuyama, Paul Kennedy, Samuel Huntington, Thomas Friedman and others from the charge that they’re comparable to charlatans like Deepak Chopra, and so on. But I don’t want to try my readers’ patience. I think the take-home message is clear at this point: maybe a third of the book is decent, the rest is poor to appalling. Rather don’t read this book, you have better things to do.

References

Olson, M. (1982) The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven: Yale University Press)

Wheen, F. (2004) How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World (London: Harper Perennial)

(Other reviews: Complete Review, Guardian(a), Guardian(b), Telegraph, and Washington Post).

The angriest book review, ever...

So I was browsing around Amazon.com for books to order and I came across a customer review by one Michael J. Mcdermott of The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War by David Smith. Writes Mr. Mcdermott (in part):

A pompous, bigoted, self serving, atheist political tirade with nothing new to add to the debate, save a sophomoric level of inept 'scholarship' in service of a transparent sham of propaganda and sophistry. In his sad excuse for recycling the propaganda of the radical leftist / gender feminist / homosex lobby, malignantly narcissistic pseudo-pundit David Smith spends far more time telling his readers how objective he intends to be, than actually engaging in any sort of open minded investigation. In doing so, he provides no new insights in to his alleged subject of war, but does open a window on the preening self aggrandizing egoism that fuels the Thought Police in the pathetic farce that passes itself as 'higher' education; and particularly the rigidly narrow and dogmatic agenda of conformity in 'Academentia' better known as the "Pander or Perish / Cannibal Soup" social engineering pogrom.

Wow... Read the rest of it, if you dare.