The Undergrowth of Science

In the wrong hands, scientific discovery can be scary stuff. This first-rate book by a British biophycist describes some of the most infamous tales in scientific history and how they happened. The Undergrowth of Science author Walter Gratzer pages 328 publisher Oxford University Press rating 8/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-19-850707-0 summary how science can go outrageously awry

A scientist once wrote that all truth passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed, then violently opposed and eventually, accepted as self-evident. Charles Kettering, the legendary former head of General Motors, once lamented: 'First they tell you you're wrong and they can prove it; then they tell you you're right but it isn't important; then they tell you it's important but they knew it all along.'

Both of these notions are quoted in Walter Gratzer's excellent new book, "The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-Deception and Human Frailty." Gratzer writes exceptionally well. He teaches at the Randall Institute, King's College London. His books include the "Longman Literary Companion to Science" and "The Bedside Nature."

Gratzer examines the underbelly of scientific theory, namely how some of the most delusional and outrageous scientific theories -- Russian water that could congeal oceans, Monkey testis implants that restore declining sexual powers, "truths" about genetics and the discovery of matter -- occur and are widely accepted in the scientific community. This book is equal parts science and history, a collection of gripping tales that remind us to take even the most high-minded and supposedly scientific discoveries with some caution.

Science makes much of its rules and legendary peer review procedures, but personal vanity, contemporary politics, greed, stupidity, and incompetence all pop up in these shocking episodes. Gratzer details how intelligence and reason don't necessarily exclude irrationality. One chapter takes us to eighteenth-century France, where Franz-Anton Messmer persuaded a gullible public of the existence of animal magnetism and harnessed it to cure diseases. (Messmer didn't actually invent the theory of animal magnetism, he learned it from a notorious Austrian priest known as Father Hell.)

One powerful chapter details the tragedy of Soviet genetics, the history of Russian biology in the period between the Revolution and the death of Stalin in l953, a time the author calls "a woeful chronicle of wanton destruction of both a scholarly discipline and the lives of many of its most respected practioners." Gratzer also explores the misuse of science in the Third Reich, and the rise and fall of Eugenics.

This isn't just ancient history, though. Misguided scientific theory is all too contemporary.

"Most remarkable," writes Gatzer, "is the way that false theories and imagined phenomena sometimes spread through the scientific community. A kind of mass hysteria, which parallels in the world at large, such as UFO sightings alien abductions, 'recovered memory' and probably chronic fatigue syndrome, takes possession of a hitherto rational population, like a virus of the intellect. On such occasions scientists in some area of research throw aside, to the amazement of their colleagues, the intellectual constraints that had until then guided their working lives. They become selectively uncritical and intolerant of any unsought evidence. Sometimes such a perversion of the scientific method results from external, especially political, pressures, but at other times it is a spontaneous eruption."

In the media age, these scientific stumbles are particularly dangerous, as they become powerful memes that are rapidly and virally transmitted to the general population by information technologies like TV and the Net.

In this era, science and technology are central to contemporary political, social, economic and cultural lives. How science can sometimes go awry is thus an important story. Despite the fact that Gatzer tells it entertainingly and with enormous authority, this is a disturbing book. Science in the wrong hands, used for the wrong reasons, is scary stuff.

Purchase this at ThinkGeek.

Comments

Re:Pardon me, but "Junk" Science seems to be the r

[bughunter]

The reason junk science is so prevalent today is because we (the United States) have failed to adequately educate our population in the area of science so that they can effectively sort out the bullshit from the real science. When your average citizen has no clue about how their bodies function, or how their TV works, or what happens during a solar eclipse, it's no wonder snake oil salesmen are so successful. I kid you not, just yesterday I saw a TV commercial for a pill advertised to increase a woman's bra size...

And people like you and your colleagues are one of the biggest reasons why our citizens are so susceptible to people selling bad science. At every turn you oppose the teaching of any scientific fact that doesn't agree with your precious world view. The Jihad against the theory of natural selection is just the worst example, but across the board, Christian's intolerance of any disagreement with their dogma has stifled the science education of the average person to the point where they can't reliably sort out the wheat from the chaff when it comes to scientific claims.

And then you turn around and point at the resulting niches and cracks where pseudoscience has gained footholds and you use that to support your claim that science in general is unreliable and deceitful. THAT is the ultimate deceit. Those crackpots might just as well be your direct agents for all the mileage you get out of them.

Go away already and let us educate our people so that they can function in a modern society. God knows they can't even program their VCRs, and before long they will have to be able to program their refrigerators just to be able to eat.