The Borderlands Of Science

john writes "What I'm looking for is a detailed users' manual for a Baloney Detection Kit (as Carl Sagan called it.) I'd hoped to find this in one of Shermer's previous works, Why People Believe Weird Things, and I'd hoped to find it here. In both cases, the first part of the book did exactly this, but somewhere along the way it turned into case studies of debunking, rather than the process of debunking. (That's okay: they're well-written.)" Read on for john's review of The Borderlands of Science. The Borderlands Of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense author Michael Shermer pages 360 publisher Oxford University Press rating 7 reviewer john ISBN 0195157982 summary Explaining belief in things that seem silly.

Michael Shermer's background is psychology and ultra-long-distance cycling; he's written a number of books on cycling and analysis of (and refutation of) Holocaust deniers. He's also president (apparently for life) of the American Skeptics society and a reasonably good writer. In this book, Shermer spends a lot of time talking about the scientific method, its strengths and potential flaws -- and, more importantly, its system for dealing with its flaws (which he claims "sets science apart from all other knowledge systems and intellectual disciplines" -- a heady claim I wish he discussed more).

Since this is supposed to be a review of The Borderlands Of Science and not Weird Things, I'll just say that if you like one, you'll like the other as well. In Borderlands, Shermer analyzes beliefs that are defensible, beliefs that could (or were once thought to) be scientifically accurate. Among these are, for instance, ramifications of cloning, confirmation bias in explaining racial differences in sports (about which Malcolm Gladwell has also written), and a whole, whole lot of discussion of Alfred Wallace. Wallace and Charles Darwin were both responsible for the theory of evolution. Wallace is not remembered as widely for a number of reasons, which are explored in frightening detail in roughly three and a half of the 16 chapters of this book. Not coincidentally, Shermer did his doctoral thesis on Wallace. The ratio of stuff-about-Wallace-or-Evolution to everything-else, by chapter, is 3:7; Shermer is pretty focussed on this specific discussion.

The book has four sections: a short introduction (which is quite heavy in skeptical theory, exactly what I wanted) and the main body, discussing borderlands theories, people, and history. In "Theories," Shermer tends to stray a little from 'why people believe weird things' into 'why stupid people believe weird things' (as he did in the book of the same title) and that's fun. He covers a lot of quite current topics (like cloning, Wacky Unified Field Theories, and the importance of Punctured Equilibrium in the evolution of evolutionary theory).

In section two, "People," he discusses the Copernican revolution and its effects, then goes off about Alfred Wallace. Here, he does something weird that needs more discussion. In analyzing Wallace, he constructs a psychological profile, which he derived by having a large number of Wallace experts fill out a survey of the "strongly agree, 9, 8,.. 3, 2, strongly disagree" sort, and then uses the results of these surveys to fill in his discussion of why Wallace became a scientific spiritualist, for instance. It's an interesting technique that he also uses with Steven Jay Gould and Carl Sagan. It is tempting to ask how much confirmation bias exists in a survey of this sort, though. Since I've already let the spoiler out of the bag, Shermer discusses Gould and Sagan, spends some time doing a statistical analysis of Sagan's greatness as a scientist (by comparing published papers by topic with a number of other contemporary, canonically great scientists) and pauses briefly to smack Freud upside the head in a somewhat snarky comparison of Freud and Darwin.

Finally, in section three, "Histories," he does a lovely discussion of the myth of pastoral tranquillity, including a quick summary of four ancient civilizations that probably managed to destroy themselves through environmental stupidity without (as he puts it) any need of Dead White European Males coming in and inflicting devastation from outside. Shermer then analyzes (and debunks) the theory of transcendent genius, the Mozart Myth, as he calls it, and goes back to two more chapters on Wallace and evolution, in a discussion of the Piltdown Man hoax and why that should have (but doesn't seem to have) supported the idea that science can be self-correcting and learn from its mistakes.

I like what Shermer is doing, and he writes well and readably. If I sound a bit impatient, it's because I want him to be writing about the application of critical thinking rather than case studies, and when he starts out writing just what I want to read, then goes off in a different direction, he leaves me standing at the intersection saying "hey, wait, this isn't the bus I wanted." The book could stand to be either edited down into two books (a Wallace analysis, and a case-studies book on how science inspects itself), or edited up with a clearer discussion of the math involved in his statistical analysis of Sagan or his psychological profiling of people.

In the end, I liked this book, I learned a fair bit from it, and I would recommend it to people who want to learn more about both critical thinking and science history.

You can purchase The Borderlands of Science from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

I'd also recommend

[k98sven]

"Flim-flam!" or just about anything by James Randi (the guy who exposed Uri Geller),
he's a magician, not a scientist and has a good sense of humor.

(Also don't miss out on his $1 million dollar prize or his weekly newsletter on what the kranks are up to..)

Re:Hmm.. interesting

[crawling_chaos]

Heck.. medical science STILL cant tell you _why_ it works, just that it does.

Urban legend. Try googling "How Aspirin works" The entire line of COX-2 inhibitors came about because someone finally did figure out aspirin works a couple of decades ago. Before that time, there wasn't much need to. Aspirin was on the FDA's GRAS list, so it was not a big candidate for major research dollars.

Re:Hmm.. interesting

[MrGrendel]

You've never studied Buddhism, have you? What you describe as Buddhism is a movement called Pure-Land Buddhism and is in no way representitive of Buddhism in general. It's popular in some places but conflicts with classical Buddhist thought. Traditional Buddhists are not concerned with heaven, gods, spirits or anything even close to those concepts. They suspend judgement on whether or not those things exist because even if they did, they are completely irrelavent to what the Buddhist is trying to accomplish (reaching Nirvana). The supernatural is simply not something worth thinking about. There is a well-known suttra on this subject called Questions Which Tend no Toward Eddification. Westerners have a difficult time understanding the concept of Nirvana. They want to associate with heaven, negation of emotion, or some other simple concept. Understanding the concept requires an understanding of the logical dialectic that Buddhist philosophy is based on. Western philosophy and thought is based on an Aristotelian dialectic which is distinctly different than dialectics used in other philosophies. No dialectic can be shown to be more or less valid or correct than another. They all lead to self-contradictions if followed strictly.

What Buddhists are interested in is ending personal suffering, or rather becoming dissociated with the causes of suffering. That is the basis of Buddhist philosophy and is the entire purpose of the religion and system of beliefs. It is internal and scientific (yes, scientific). Many of the concepts and recent findings of modern psychology were known to Buddhists thousands of years ago because they thought about the mind and behavior in a scientific way. Evidence is required for all beliefs. The Dali Lama has even stated that elements of classical Buddhism should be abandoned if science disproves them. Buddhists are not threatened by science, they embrace it. BTW, Buddhists have been teaching that you rot when you die for a very long time. Buddhist reincarnation is not what you think it is.

Please learn something about a philosophy before you disparage it.