by Tom Bethell
|
| List Price: | $19.95 |
| Amazon Price: | $14.57 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. |
| You Save: | $5.38 (27%) |
| Average Rating: |  |
| Lowest New Price: | $5.95 |
| Availablitiy: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
|
 |
|
Product Description
Covers subjects spanning evolution, stem cell research, abortion, HIV/AIDS, global warming,and cloning to help you tune up your baloney detector to expose the liberal, anti-religious propagnada we're being fed.
Customers who bought this item also bought
Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 A Monument to Irresponsible Journalism, 2009-01-03
This book is possibly the most detrimental tome ever written when concerning the health, comfort, and survival of the human species. Bethell is clearly a hack journalist and a supporter of the most ridiculous "lunatic fringe" ideas that I've ever seen anyone with credentials have the guts to air publicly. I begrudgingly have to applaud him for that. I also awarded him one star for the book, because there are (only) about two meritorious elements to be found within its pages which outweighed a "0-star" rating.
So, let's start with the good news: Bethell is absolutely right that politics should never govern, guide, or influence science in a perfect world. But of course, politics trickle into every human doing at some point or another (and now that I really think about it, I'm not sure that naive idealism is necessarily a strength). We KNOW that political forces influence the findings of scientific reports--if Exxon-Mobil is funding your climatological analysis, and you want to continue receiving grant money from them, of course you'll be pressured to say that human activity has nothing to do with global warming and that global warming, in fact, is not actually happening. (And almost every "global warming denier" who is a professional, publishing climatologist has received funding from the petroleum industry, which has been thoroughly documented in the books "The Heat is On" and "Boiling Point," written by Ross Gelbspan.)
On the other side of the same coin of political influence are the almost preposterous arguments that well-heeled environmental thinktanks and organizations somehow have more sway over scientists than the multibillion-dollar coal companies, oil companies, and automotive corporations. This is the essence of chapter one of Bethell's book. Anyone who has ever worked for a nonprofit organization knows that environmental charities receive by far the fewest donations, and if you've ever worked for Greenpeace or CalPirg or the Sierra Club, you know that no one is getting rich on peddling Bethell's so-called "hoax" of global warming.
Bethell is right that politics should not drive science or influence scientists to "cook" their data--the evidence is what it is and has to be interpreted objectively by any good scientist. In the introduction, Bethell quotes Deep Throat from "All The President's Men" when he tells Woodward to "Follow the money." If you follow the money, multinational corporations stand to gain trillions of dollars if humans have no impact on global climate and environmental organizations will get very little. But if the environmentalists and climatologists are right, the green movement might get a few hundred million dollars and the corporations will have to change their business models, resulting in a temporary loss of income (as GM, Ford and Chrysler are now experiencing), until they produce products that consumers know will probably secure a better future for their great-grandchildren.
Bethell conveniently and completely ignores the fact in many of his chapters that the impacts of false negatives will be far more costly than the impacts of false positives for many of the issues he discusses, much like Pascal's Wager (i.e., if the Christians are right, the consequences of spending an eternity in Hell are much worse than playing along and going to church so you can spend an eternity in heaven). Similarly, if it turns out that the climatologists are correct and that humans DO influence global climate change that could result in rising sea levels and the submerging of many coastal cities (where the majority of humans live, by the way) as well as many other egregious effects, the costs of "An Inconvenient Truth" becoming real are far greater than the costs of cleaning up our act here and there and becoming better stewards of the Earth. The argument that "it's too expensive to go green" is a thoroughly moot point, because you're not going to enjoy your riches if you can't get food because the soil evaporation rate has become so high that our formerly fertile farmlands have become desertified. (Worldwide, global warming causes at least a $3 billion loss in agricultural productivity annually, and we're just in the beginning stages.)
In chapter 7, he argues that the WHO response to AIDS in Africa was alarmist and fear-mongering, and mostly a waste of time, and that numbers of AIDS deaths in Africa have been severely inflated over the years by public health officials. Keep in mind that Bethell is a high-profile member of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis, so his political agenda, which he never states outright in chapter 7, is that HIV does not cause AIDS. Naturally, his agenda would then lead him to argue that the number of AIDS deaths in Africa have been severely inflated. Ironically, the whole point of his book purports to be that science should be conducted without the influence of political agendas, yet this book is only really about Bethell's political agendas. The author being a class-A hypocrite is among the least of the the problems with "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science," unfortunately.
But back to my original point about the false positives having greater consequences than false negatives, encouraging folks in sub-Saharan Africa to use condoms is a good thing for many reasons, not just because if someone might have HIV, a condom is one of the best ways to limit their transmission of the virus (barring complete abstinence, which people never actually manage to follow through on). In a continent where reliable HIV testing materials are very difficult to come by, having a test or criteria that generate more false positives than one that generates more false negatives is generally a good idea. If everyone behaves as if they could have an STD that they could give to someone else and wears condoms and visits their doctors regularly because of it, transmission rates will DEFINITELY decrease. On the other hand, if we pretend that more people don't carry HIV than actually do because of using tests that generate high numbers of false negatives, then more HIV will be spread from person to person, period. The WHO was trying to prevent a pandemic in a continent with very little infrastructure and money, so erring on the side of caution (as we should all be doing with global warming) would be vastly more likely to help them achieve their goals (and possibly have an added beneficial side effect of securing more economic resources and material goods for a continent that has been used as an economic dumping-grounds by the whole world for the last four centuries). Being alarmist helped the WHO hinder the spread of HIV.
The other thing that Bethell does well in this book is to challenge the scientific establishment, as science at its heart is a continuing process of argumentation based on different ways of analyzing the evidence. Without constant challenges to our existing theories, we may never find out "what is REALLY going on," and that's what science is trying to do. (Bethell himself admits that this intellectual debate is what ultimately always makes science a "self-correcting" system on page vii of the introduction.) But the way Bethell challenges prevailing scientific "ideology" is reckless at best and generally quite odious.
Bethell is a "cherry-picker" in the worst sense of the term. He overlooks mountains of published and peer-reviewed evidence when it doesn't support his main idea. He then provides a handful of arguments for his case in every chapter, most of which come from extremely marginal scientific sources (marginal because his supporting sources are nut-jobs most of the time, not because they have been marginalized by challenging scientific dogma). The book is not footnoted, so if you wanted to follow up and evaluate the veracity of many of his claims you probably wouldn't get very far, and he substantially lacks references from primary-source research and peer-reviewed journals in his "Notes" section.
Moreover, each chapter wouldn't pass a simple test of logical validity. You cannot possibly have a valid conclusion if any single premise that you base that conclusion on is invalid, and Bethell uses invalid premises in every single chapter. Logically, this work is an utter failure, which is a major philosophical problem.
So, allow me, a sexual health educator and a secondary physical sciences teacher with 1.8 Master's Degrees, one of which is in a scientific field (blah, blah, blah, who cares) to give the reader who has been so patient to consult my essay on why "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science" so thoroughly and completely sucks a "Cliff's Notes"-style review, chapter-by-chapter, so that you might not be so unfortunate as to be doped into shelling out $19.95 just so you can anger that left-wing relative that you're intending to purchase this book for:
Chapter 1: Global Warming isn't "real," environmentalists are using fear-mongering tactics to get rich, and it's really too expensive to be responsible caretakers of the Earth, so why bother (plus, a handful of examples from marginal pretend scientists or journalists of Bethell's ilk).
Chapter 2: Nuclear energy is the only answer. Wind and solar won't possibly ever meet our energy needs, so why bother. (I propose storing the used reactor cores and radioactive waste generated by the nuclear plants in Bethell's backyard in Washington, D.C..)
Chapter 3: Surprise! Radiation is actually somehow good for you and radon isn't dangerous!!
Chapter 4: Bethell uses the concept of hormesis (which is a documented phenomenon supported by scientific evidence) to suggest that dioxin really isn't all that bad. The problems with this are as follows: A) tell that to Viktor Yushchenko, and B) hormesis deals with such miniscule amounts of toxic materials that have beneficial results in the human body that the average member of the American public reading this book probably doesn't understand the scale of how tiny these amounts of toxins need to be before they start to kill us (sorry, America, but we're generally pretty proud about being bad with numbers).
Chapter 5: DDT is great! Who cares about all the birds that it kills when we could be saving some probably pretend ridiculous numbers of human lives from malaria, in areas that can barely feed their rapidly increasing populations as it is! (Malaria is the number one infectious killer of people worldwide, but the real problem is that drug companies won't make antimalarial drugs because the people who get malaria are typically too poor to pay for them and make the drug companies richer, yet another fact conveniently omitted by Bethell, because this book is really about proving his own opinions and feeding his own ego.)
Chapter 6: "The fossil record tells us that most species have gone extinct over the eons and that mankind has had nothing to do with their extinction." (p. 87) Thanks for that insightful and truistic tip, Captain Obvious! Read this chapter only if you have too much free time. All it says is that people don't make animals extinct, something we know to be completely untrue, and that there is no widespread extinction going on globally right now because of human activities. Once again, the consequences of a false negative will be far greater than the consequences of a false positive. Conveniently, Bethell says nothing about habitat destruction and the fact that if animals don't have a place to live anymore because we turned it into a city or burned it down to graze cows there for a couple of years, those animals will obviously no longer exist.
Chapter 7: There is no AIDS epidemic in Africa. (Need I say more about how ridiculous this idea really is?) Oh yeah, and there are some insinuations about AIDS being a gay disease early on in the chapter. If this book were a "Politically Incorrect Guide to History," this is the part where Bethell would be telling us that the Holocaust never happened.
Chapter 8: Cloning is bad. Here, Bethell gets it right, but more for ethical reasons than scientific ones.
Chapter 9: Stem cell research leads nowhere, won't do anything for us and should never be funded by governments (thanks, Bethell, but I'd rather hear a stem-cell researcher discuss what the problems of it are, not a journalist writing 14 separate editorials collated into book form). Do not speak of that which you lack almost all understanding of.
Chapter 10: The Human Genome Project is useless, expensive, and won't ever and hasn't ever done anything good for us. We secretly don't know anything about genes and how they work, but scientists pretend they do so they can make money.
Chapter 11: Because of aneuploidy, our current understanding of cancer is completely wrong and the Cancer Genome Project will lead nowhere. Cancers come from viruses, not carcinogens, silly. Thanks, but I'd rather hear this from a cancer researcher, and not from an old conservative male version of Katie Couric with one billionth of the success and credentials, a radio face, and an axe to grind.
Chapter 12: Galileo had it coming to him (take that, Indigo Girls!) and the Church has actually helped science, not hindered it through the ages. The only virtue of this claim is that Christianity fostered literacy, enabling the proto-scientists lucky enough to escape Renaissance torture to record their observations. St. Thomas Aquinas was a great guy, but strangely makes no appearance here, even though talking about him might strengthen Bethell's claims. (Bethell would actually have to be a relatively decent scholar to have mentioned him here.)
Chapter 13: Bethell demonstrates how poorly he understands Darwinian evolution by proposing intelligent design as a better solution a la Ben Stein. There's no mention of the fact that without natural selection, we can't explain drug-resistant diseases or new species of Rift Valley cichlids which have evolved over the past century (or less). Bethell uses the well-documented statistical pattern of "regression to the mean" as an ideological crutch and a handful of case studies to attempt to show that species never evolve into anything different. (Wait--didn't Canis domesticus come from Canis lupus and we have the genetic evidence to back that up?)
Chapter 14: Poor, poor Bethell. He just can't wrap his mind around this darned evolution thing! Nothing about punctuated equilibrium, gene flow, genetic drift, exaptation or any other NeoDarwinian theories are discussed. Bethell claims that Darwin lacked evidence to support natural selection, but conveniently omits the mountains of evidence that Wallace collected that buttressed natural selection. Apparently, just because Bethell can't understand a concept, we're not allowed to, either.
Final Thoughts: Thank you, but Jerry Springer is better at this than Bethell.
In short, I think this book should be burned, which is also why it should be read. You should find yourself laughing out loud repeatedly when you read this, and afterwards, you can use it to line the floor of your bird cage. Bethell won't be around to see the consequences of his ideological folly, which is the saddest thing about him and most people like him. If you don't understand the difference between anecdotal and quantifiable, statistically-backed evidence because you haven't had the opportunity to take a graduate-level stats or research design class, you might find Bethell's arguments convincing. I would also hazard the guess that any reviewer who gave this book more than one star probably doesn't have the training to understand why it's such a complete bastardization of modern science. True, there is dogma out there, and careers can be ended because of it, but Bethell's challenges don't hold any water. If you like Bethell's politics and mistrust science, you also must consider the fact that the money Bethell will be making off this book will largely come from your conservative wallets. Finally, I apologize for all the ad hominem arguments I resorted to in this diatribe, but was too weak to resist them because of how unbelievably horrible this book is.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
could be better, 2008-11-15
This book covers a few topics which are highly controversial (anthropogenic global warming, microevolution, endangered species, AIDS in Africa) and some other topics that may becoming non-controversial (nuclear power, cloning, hormesis).
AGW and evolution cannot be adequately covered in a small chapter in this book so I think the reader will get the least out of these chapters. Also, the author writes in a charged manner and his sourcing is not so evident. I suggest reading books fully devoted to these two topics.
The chapters on DDT, hormesis, and African AIDS were very interesting because I was least familiar with them. The evidence in favor of the use of DDT is large but to be fair, from the tone of the author, the other side of the arguments may not be described in the most charitable manner. Henced a grain of salt must be taken with this entire book.
Hormesis is another interesting topic. It is the idea that small doses of a harmful thing (like radiation) can actually improve health (not to be confused with homeopathy though). There is ample evidence of this but has gotten little spotlight.
I found the medical chapters to be the most boring and probably the least 'political'. The chapter on warfare between science and religion was once again too short and undersourced to be taken too seriously. But I guess it can serve as a springboard for further inquiry.
Since this is supposed to be a politically incorrect book, it would have been interested in see discussions on the nature/nurture and reorientation aspects of homosexuality. However no sexual issues are discussed.
Overall, while not a superbly written book, it does highlight some issues that you may have taken for granted or simply been ignorant of. You will see a different side to some issues where the conventional wisdom
can no longer be trusted.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
This book is a nightmarish disgrace, 2008-11-09
This book is almost completely useless, it is painfully obvious that Mr. Bethell lacks basic scientific knowledge or understanding and is hypocritical in the extreme.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 Modern Science Today!, 2008-09-29
Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. This is a great book! In many ways modern science has become increasingly intolerant of challenges to its motives, methods and conclusions. At one time its reputation was beyond reproach because its members were mostly unified in practicing real science, that is the pursuit of facts and truth. But today is the era of junk science, where too many have preset ideas that are guided by money, political agendas and illusions of grandeur. The author tries to reason with the reader in some of the more well known areas. The bottom line is that we all lose when we have a scientific community that is steered by very unscientific forces.
4 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
A Disgrace!, 2008-02-11
This is not a guide to science! The contents of the book are as inane as its title!
Price is accurate as of the date/time indicated. Prices and product availability are subject to change. Any price displayed on the Amazon website at the time of purchase will govern the sale of this product.
|
Store Categories
|