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I found Shermer's writing to be very interesting and the ideas both challenging and stimulating. However, as I read, I began to notice misspelled words and grammar problems, and by the time I reached the end of the book I was frustrated with how many there were. There were substitutions and spelling errors such as "heals" instead of "heels", "fraudulant" instead of "fraudulent", "overweaning" instead of "overweening", and grammar mistakes like "...Galois lay the foundation for a branch of mathematics known as group theory" (instead of 'laid').
While everyone makes mistakes in writing manuscripts, a published work should be carefully checked by an editor. What happened here?
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Mike said, "Scientists don't consider that the absence of evidence is not evidence." - Penn and Teller B.S.
Nuff said, ignore this fake wise man. He's like a contentious genie.
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Shermer's book is an endeavor to classify various lines of research into science, nonscience, and `borderlands' science, but he follows no rigorous methodology. Instead, he subjectively classifies various theories, practices, and lines of research into his three categories, based upon how popular certain theories are among mainstream scientists, and how much the theories, practices, and lines of research appeal to his narrow scientific fundamentalism.
There really is no need for this book. The celebrated philosopher Karl Popper brilliantly solved the problem of the demarcation between science, and philosophy, ideology and nonsense decades ago, and his work has been endorsed by scientists from Einstein to Hawkings. The criterion is testability. Scientific theories are theories that are capable of being tested by experiment or observation. Our theories can never be proven correct, although a single counter-instance can prove them wrong.
One can sum up Popper's famous demarcation between science and non-science by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability. Accordingly, theories that are not falsifiable in principle cannot claim to be scientific, and so belong to metaphysics, ideology, or pseudo-science.
Popper's criterion of testability provides a clear, logical way of separating science from ideology and philosophy. Hence, string theory is not science but philosophy, as it currently makes no predictions capable of being tested. Popper argued that Marxism started out as a scientific theory: it predicted that capitalism would lead to increasing misery among the masses, and then be overthrown by revolution and replaced by socialism; it also predicted that this would occur very first in the most technically developed countries. When the so-called worker's revolution very first occurred in then-backward and agrarian Russia, supporters of the theory did not accept this as a refutation: the theory was simply modified so that it became immune to falsification. In other words, Marxism was transformed into an ideology.
The universal property of scientific theories cannot be stressed enough. A scientific theory cannot be merely speculation about a particular fact or an isolated event, because nothing new and non-trivial can be predicted from such a speculation. This point has to be stressed, because it has caused a great deal of confusion among philosophers and historians of science. For example, Shermer writes in the book:
"Popper's endeavor to solve the problem of demarcation ... between science and nonscience begins to break down in the borderlands of knowledge. Consider the theory that extraterrestrial intelligent life exists somewhere in the cosmos. If we find out by making radio contact through the SETI program then the theory will have been proven absolutely ... But how could this theory ever be falsified?"
Shermer's mistake is his categorization of the statement `extraterrestrial intelligent life exists somewhere in the cosmos' as a scientific theory. It is no such thing. It is merely speculation about a specific fact, from which no non-trivial predictions follow. (For instance, it does not follow from this that such life would want to contact us, would share our values, would be friendly toward us, and so forth.) It is no more a scientific theory than the statement `there are white swans somewhere on the lake.' Such statements about specific factual matters can indeed be confirmed, even proven `beyond all reasonable doubt.' But this is only because they are not universal statements. Scientific theories are universal statements about how facts fit together, and from such universal statements follow predictions about specific facts. So, from the universal statement `all swans are white' follows the prediction that `the subsequent swans we will see on the lake will be white.' The former is a (simple) scientific theory; the latter a prediction about a specific fact that follows from the theory, and that may used to test the theory.
Note that Shermer would have formulated his idea as a scientific theory if he had stated it in a universal, testable form, such as: "life arises quickly wherever there is water and an average temperature above freezing, and given a few billion years, some of this life will become recognizably intelligent." This is a universal statement that relates specific facts to each other, can be used to make predictions about how much intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, and can be tested (at least in principle) by sending probes to planets in which conditions for life appear to have been appropriate for a few billion years. If intelligent life is not found, then the theory is refuted, and must either be abandoned or modified.
It is precisely at the "borderlands of science" that Popper's criterion works so well. Parapsychology for instance, most certainly is a science to the extent that it makes predictions capable of being tested. But Shermer gives little attention to this field, as it conflicts with his ideology of materialism.
Shermer is not a scientist, but an historian. And as an historian he has no excuse for being woefully ignorant of the history of science. At one time reports that rocks sometimes fall from the sky (what we know call meteorites) were dismissed by most scientists as superstitious fantasies. The idea that the continents could drift was ridiculed for decades. Even X-rays were considered an elaborate hoax. Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, and Shermer has simply not learned that popularity of ideas cannot be used as a guide to separate science from nonsense.
But Shermer is an intellectual lightweight who is simply out of his league when discussing the philosophy of science. If you want to read something really magnificent on the subject, I recommend "Replies to my Critics", in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Part II, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp.
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This is the second book on critical thinking I read by this author. The other was "Why People Believe Weird Things." They are both excellent. Michael Shermer is quite a polymath and original thinker. Armed with a Ph.D. in History of Science and an M.S. in Experimental Psychology, Shermer has acquired an outstanding understanding of the scientific method.
He is an excellent writer who has developed a lively style. He turns dry material (the integrity of science) into very entertaining books. You will note that my review jumps around quite a bit. That's because the book does too. It does not always follow a sequential pattern. However, it makes the book more fun to read.
At the beginning of the book, the author provides you with very good critical thinking tools, including 10 different steps to test a claim, and how to spot a crank. He also provides his assessment of the scientific credibility of various theories by assigning "fuzzy fractions." A 0.9 denotes a theory that is totally credible and well supported by science. A 0.1 denotes just the opposite. On such grounds, I like his distinction between SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) where he assigns it a respectable 0.5 and UFO where he assigns it a disrespectable 0.1. Thus, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence may have scientific merit. Meanwhile, testimonials of alien abductions have none.
Near the end of the book, Shermer comes back to providing more thinking tools as he shares six key steps on how to develop one's creative genius in the chapter: The Amadeus Myth. This is a fascinating chapter where he uncovers that what we interpret as gifted genius is incredibly hard work. We just observe the end product: virtuosity. But, this masks the incredibly hard life long work these individuals had undertaken whether they were Mozart or Einstein.
Over several chapters he covers the interesting research from Sulloway who conducted psychological analysis of what makes a likely scientific innovator. Through his work, the author studies in detail the profile of Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and other scientists. Such luminaries typically have a very high openness to new ideas combined with an equally high level of skepticism. And, it is this combination that makes them unique. How many people do you know are open to new radical concepts, yet have the critical thinking quotient of testing such wild claims. That's the type of mind that can differentiate between SETI and UFOs without being either embarrassed or gullible.
The author also provides an excellent synthesis on the subject of ecocide. In just a few pages, he summarizes very efficiently what Jared Diamond took over 500 pages to investigate in his most recent book "Collapse." Shermer describes how several regional primitive civilizations exploited their natural resources to the detriment of their own survival. These included the Incas of Machu Picchu and the Polynesians of Easter Island among others. He then asks the chilling question of what will we do? Will we prevent further environmental deterioration? Or, will we commit ecocide too? All along he promotes policies based on the best scientific evidence supported by data absent of any political bias.
Throughout the book, there is an underlying admiration of Darwin. He is the benchmark of scientific integrity, and scientific timelessness. He was with few peers in his capability of fighting the status quo, questioning his theories until he had anticipated every rational rebuttal the scientific community could throw at him. In one chapter, he contrasts Darwin with Freud. Darwin was concerned primarily with the scientific basis of his theories. He never stopped refining them, researching them deeper to make sure of their validity. As a result, Darwin's posterity is second to none. Instead, Freud got more concerned about fame and posterity than the soundness of his theories. As a result, posterity was not kind to Freud. As a sign of things to come within the book, early on Shermer had assigned a fuzzy fraction of 0.9 to Darwin's theory of evolution. Meanwhile, he assigned only a 0.1 to Freudian psychoanalytic theory. In other words, Darwin's theory fully withstood the test of time, while Freud did not.
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I expected more of Mr. Shermer in this outing, given his excellent work in Why People Believe Weird Things. But then, in that book, Shermer took on and successfully skewered the easy targets, such as UFO nuts, believers in astrology and other New Age fantasies, revisionist Holocaust deniers and whatnot. However, his latest effort basically amounts to little more than a barely intelligible rant than thoughtful scholarship. Shermer begins with a bold objective- trying to lay down demarcation lines between generally accepted science (as is generally accepted by scientists themselves), iffy propositions which he calls borderlands science, and a large group of topics that he labels non-science and pseudo science. I must say without hesitation that he fails miserably in his objective, partly due to his poor choice of content, but mostly because of his even poorer writing style.
Although the book starts out well, the writing steadily devolves, and by the fifth chapter, the reader must set his or her shoulders and hunker down for some very painful reading. Like most PhD holders, Shermer has acquired an impressive amount of scholarly trivia over the course of his education, yet somehow did not the master the mechanics of good writing. This actually is not hard to believe, as too many people finishing PhD programs in engineering, science and to the dishonor of all liberal arts traditions, English and history programs can not string together a few decent words of prose. Honestly, many of these programs think that they can make up for a lack of erudite soul with an overdose of abstract quantitation and esoteric facts.
And boy oh boy does this approach show in Mr. Shermer's stilted and constipated text. Moreover, as someone who regards himself as a champion of the hypothesis test and the scientific method, he really should know when to appropriately use such methods, and when not to use them. In reading his text, I got the feeling that in his graduate training he only attended the lectures in his Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences having to do with hypothesis testing, and studiously skipped all the other lectures, particularly those having to do with measurement, validity, operational definition and level of trust in results.
I say this because in his chapter on Psuedoscience and Race, he utterly fails to lay down an operational definition, and merely assumes that everyone shares the same common definition of race and knows what he is referring to. He also fails to consider the history of race and the common knowledge that race is a social construct, not a biological phenomenon. Though he provides a context (U.S. race relations), he does not provide an operational definition. He also seems unaware of considerable population genetic and molecular genetic evidence which would make it impossible for most in America to claim, at least from a genetic standpoint, to be truly 'white' or truly 'black'. Thus, from this one would have to assume, especially when reading Mr. Shermer's screed, that he defines race based on physical appearance pretty much like everybody else. However, scientists would take a different point of view, much as many a bigotted proponent of eugenics have on many occasions.
A second bone of contention that I have with Mr. Shermer's overly scientific and inappropriately quantitative approach to everything is his use in Part II Borderlands People, of quantitative methods to evaluate purely subjective things. Some variables we measure are concrete and have meaning that is fixed, such as weight, temperature and volume, athough we can use metric or English units to evaluate them. However, as I recall from one statistics text (the actual text is Richard M. Jaeger's Statistics A Spectator Sport), things like intelligence or neuroticism are totally subjective because their meaning and their measurement can change depending on who is evaluating and measuring them. For such things, there can be no common agreement as to definition or even measurement.
Which I believe Shermer should have learned, thus invalidating the invocation of Sulloway's work in his exposition. A good educational regimen in statistics (which I believe should begin with Moore's Statistics: Concepts and Controversies) would emphasize the importance of looking behind the numbers, using the appropriate measurement methods, and taking into account information other than that in the test when drawing conclusions. None of this was done within this text.
Still, I did learn a few things, being quite surprised to learn that there was actually a grey champion cyclist, and Mr. Shermer did make a number of correct points. I also give him credit for (grudgingly) admitting, in his last chapter, that scientists are people too, and are motivated by the same concerns and issues like everyone else. Yet, this does not make up for the overall bad writing and worse scholarship. I expect, no, I insist on better from a self-respecting skeptic.