Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk by Massimo Pigliucci (PDF)

Description

Recent polls suggest that fewer than 40 percent of Americans believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution, despite it being one of science’s best-established findings. More and more parents are refusing to vaccinate their children for fear it causes autism, though this link can been consistently disproved. And about 40 percent of Americans believe that the threat of global warming is exaggerated, despite near consensus in the scientific community that manmade climate change is real.Why do people believe bunk? And what causes them to embrace such pseudoscientific beliefs and practices? Noted skeptic Massimo Pigliucci sets out to separate the fact from the fantasy in this entertaining exploration of the nature of science, the borderlands of fringe science, and—borrowing a famous phrase from philosopher Jeremy Bentham—the nonsense on stilts. Presenting case studies on a number of controversial topics, Pigliucci cuts through the ambiguity surrounding science to look more closely at how science is conducted, how it is disseminated, how it is interpreted, and what it means to our society. The result is in many ways a “taxonomy of bunk” that explores the intersection of science and culture at large.No one—not the public intellectuals in the culture wars between defenders and detractors of science nor the believers of pseudoscience themselves—is spared Pigliucci’s incisive analysis. In the end, Nonsense on Stilts is a timely reminder of the need to maintain a line between expertise and assumption. Broad in scope and implication, it is also ultimately a captivating guide for the intelligent citizen who wishes to make up her own mind while navigating the perilous debates that will affect the future of our planet.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author Massimo Pigliucci is professor of philosophy at the City University of New York. He has written many books, including, most recently, Making Sense of Evolution, with Jonathan Kaplan, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Nonsense on StiltsBy Massimo PugliucciUniversity of Chicago PressCopyright © 2010 Massimo PugliucciAll right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-226-66786-7 Chapter One Hard Science, Soft Science You know my methods. Apply them. Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four You can observe a lot by just watching. Yogi Berra “Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist’s field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist’s, and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.” Candid words about the nature of the scientific enterprise as seen from the inside by a participating scientist. And what makes these sentences even more remarkable is that they were not uttered behind closed doors in a room full of smoke, but printed in one of the premiere scientific magazines in the world, Science. It was 1964, the year I was born, and the author was John R. Platt, a biophysicist at the University of Chicago. The debate between scientists on what constitutes “hard” (often equated with good, sound) and “soft” (implicitly considered less good) science has not subsided since, and it provides us with our first glimpse into how difficult-and contentious!-it is to characterize science itself. Platt was frustrated by the fact that some fields of science make clear and rapid progress, while others keep mucking around without seemingly being able to accomplish much of relevance. As Platt put it, in the same article: “We speak piously of … making small studies that will add another brick to the temple of science. Most such bricks just lie around the brickyard.” Physics, chemistry, and molecular biology are considered by Platt (and many others) as hard sciences, the quintessential model of what science ought to be. Ecology, evolutionary biology, and other fields like psychology and sociology are soft sciences, and the highest aspiration of people working in these fields is assumed to be to make their disciplines as hard as physics. Platt’s article is a classic that should be read by anyone interested in the nature of science, and he was right in pointing out the problem; he was not quite as right in diagnosing its roots, however, and even less so at suggesting a possible cure. Nonetheless, Platt’s critique of what others often refer to as soft science provides us with an excellent starting point to explore the idea that, in fact, there may be more than one kind of science, that “science” is a heterogeneous category-a notion that would surprise most in the general public and that will likely be resisted even by a number of scientists. Moreover, our discussion will in turn open up the possibility that there may be ways to identify criteria that not only divide soft and hard sciences, but also separate disciplines that are not quite science yet (and perhaps will never become it) and others that are downright pseudoscientific. This is the task we will pursue over the first three chapters of this book in our quest to explore the complex intellectual landscape first identified by Popper’s original demarcation problem. Strong Inference and the Proper Way to Do Science (or Is It?) Platt’s attack on soft science begins, as we have seen, by stressing the fact that some disciplines seem to make fast and impressive progress, while others have a tendency of going around in circles, or at best move slowly and uncertainly. Before we examine why this is and what could possibly be done about it, a more fundamental question is whether Platt is correct at all in thinking that there is a problem to begin with. It seems clear from even a cursory examination of the history of science that Platt is at least partially correct: some sciences do progress significantly more than others. However, the pattern appears more complex than a simple line dividing “hard” from “soft” disciplines: it is true that, say, particle physics and molecular biology have made spectacular advances during the twentieth century; but it is also true that physics itself went through long periods of stasis on certain problems, for instance the long interval between Newton and Einstein on the question of the nature of gravity. And such periods of slow progress may occur again in the future, even for the “queen” of sciences: for all the talk about a “unified theory of everything,” physicists have been trying to reconcile the known discrepancies between their two most successful theories, general relativity and quantum mechanics, for close to a century; they have not succeed yet. Organismal biology (ecology and evolutionary biology) is often considered a quasi-soft science, and yet it has seen periods of great progress-most obviously with Darwin during the second half of the nineteenth century, and more recently during the 1930s and ’40s. Moreover, there is currently quite a bit of excited activity in both empirical and theoretical evolutionary biology, which may be leading to another major leap forward in our understanding of how organisms evolve and adapt to their environments. Molecular biology, on the other hand, hailed by Platt as a very successful hard science on the model of chemistry and physics, may be in the process of running into the limits of what it can achieve without falling back on “softer” and more messy approaches to its subject matter: it is true that the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 is one of the all-time landmarks of science; but it is equally clear that the much-touted sequencing of the whole human genome has provided very few hard answers for biologists, instead leading to a large number of “bricks laying around the brickyard,” as Platt would have put it. We know a lot more about the human (and other) genomes, but much of what we know is a complex mess of details that is difficult to extricate to achieve a clear picture of how genomes work and evolve. All in all, it seems that one can indeed make an argument that different scientific disciplines proceed at dramatically different paces, but it is also true that a given science may undergo fits and starts, sometimes enjoying periods of steady and fast progress, other times being bogged down into a spell of going nowhere, either empirically (lack of new discoveries) or theoretically (lack of new insights). If we agree that the nature of science is along the lines that I have just described, next we need to ask why this is so. Platt briefly mentions a number of possibilities, which he dismisses without discussion, but that we need to pay some attention to before we move to his main point. These alternative hypotheses for why a given science may behave “softly” include “the tractability of the subject, or the quality of education of the men [sic] drawn into it, or the size of research contracts.” In other words, particle physics, say, may be more successful than ecology because it is easier (more tractable), or because ecologists tend to be dumber than physicists, or because physicists get a lot more money for their research than ecologists do. The second scenario is rather offensive (to the ecologists at least), but more importantly there are no data at all to back it up. And it is difficult to see how one could possibly measure the alleged different degree of “education” of people attracted to different scientific disciplines. Nearly all professional scientists nowadays hold a Ph.D. in their discipline, as well as years of postdoctoral experience at conducting research and publishing papers. It is hard to imagine a reliable quantitative measure of the relative difficulty of their respective academic curricula, and it is next to preposterous to argue that scientists attracted to certain disciplines are smarter than those who find a different area of research more appealing. It would be like attempting to explain the discrepancy between the dynamism of twentieth-century jazz music and the relative stillness of symphonic (“classical”) music by arguing that jazz musicians are better educated or more talented than classically trained ones. It’s a no starter. The other factors identified and readily dismissed by Platt, though, may actually carry significant weight. The obvious one is money: there is no question that, at least since World War II, physics has enjoyed by far the lion’s share of public funding devoted to scientific research, a trend that has seen some setback in recent years (perhaps, not surprisingly, after the end of the cold war). It would be foolish to underestimate the difference that money makes in science (or anywhere else, for that matter): more funds don’t mean simply that physicists can build and maintain ever larger instruments for their research (think of giant telescopes in astronomy or particle accelerators in subnuclear physics), but perhaps equally important that they can attract better paid graduate students and postdoctoral associates, the lifeblood of academic research and scholarship. Then again, of course, money isn’t everything: our society has poured huge amounts of cash, for instance, into finding a cure for cancer (the so-called war on cancer), and although we have made much progress, we are not even close to having eliminated that scourge-if it is at all possible. Part of the differential ability of scientific disciplines to recruit young talent also deals with an imponderable that Platt did not even consider: the “coolness factor.” While being interested in science will hardly make you popular in high school or even in college, among science nerds it is well understood (if little substantiated by the facts) that doing physics, and in particular particle physics, is much cooler than doing geology, ecology, or, barely mentionable, any of the social sciences-the latter a term that some in academia still consider an oxymoron. The coolness factor probably derives from a variety of causes, not the least of which is the very fact just mentioned that there is more money in physics than in other fields of study, and even the large social impact of a few iconic figures, like Einstein (when was the last time you heard someone being praised for being “a Darwin”?). Another reason mentioned but left unexamined by Platt is the relative complexity of the subject matters of different scientific disciplines. It seems to me trivially true that particle physics does in fact deal with the simplest objects in the entire universe: atoms and their constituents. At the opposite extreme, biology takes on the most complex things known to humanity: organisms made of billions of cells, and ecosystems whose properties are affected by tens of thousands of variables. In the middle we have a range of sciences dealing with the relatively simple (chemistry) or the slightly more complex (astronomy, geology), roughly on a continuum that parallels the popular perception of the divide between hard and soft disciplines. That is, a reasonable argument can in fact be made that, so to speak, physicists have been successful because they had it easy. This is of course by no means an attempt to downplay the spectacular progress of physics or chemistry, just to put it into a more reasonable perspective: if you are studying simple phenomena, are given loads of money to do it, and are able to attract the brightest minds because they think that what you do is really cool, it would be astounding if you had not made dazzling progress! Perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence in favor of a relationship between simplicity of the subject matter and success rate is provided by molecular biology, and in particular by its recent transition from a chemistry-like discipline to a more obviously biological one. Platt wrote his piece in 1964, merely eleven years after James Watson, Francis Crick, and Rosalind Franklin discovered the double-helix structure of DNA. Other discoveries followed at a breathtaking pace, including the demonstration of how, from a chemical perspective, DNA replicates itself; the unraveling of the genetic code; the elucidation of many aspects of the intricate molecular machinery of the cell; and so on. But by the 1990s molecular biology began to move into the new phase of genomics, where high throughput instruments started churning a bewildering amount of data that had to be treated by statistical methods (one of the hallmarks of “soft” science). While early calls for the funding of the human genome project, for instance, made wildly optimistic claims about scientists soon being able to understand how to create a human being, cure cancer, and so on, we are in fact almost comically far from achieving those goals. The realization is beginning to dawn even on molecular biologists that the golden era of fast and sure progress may be over and that we are now faced with unwieldy mountains of details about the biochemistry and physiology of living organisms that are very difficult to make sense of. In other words, we are witnessing the transformation of a hard science into a soft one! Despite all of the reservations that I detailed above, let us proceed to tackle Platt’s main point: that the difference between hard and soft science is a matter of method, in particular what he refers to as “strong inference.” “Inference” is a general term for whenever we arrive at a (tentative) conclusion based on the available evidence concerning a particular problem or subject matter. If we are investigating a crime, for instance, we may infer who committed the murder from an analysis of fingerprints, weapon, motives, circumstances, etc. An inference can be weaker or stronger depending on how much evidence points to a particular conclusion rather than to another one, and also on the number of possible alternative solutions (if there are too many competing hypotheses the evidence may simply not be sufficient to discriminate among them, a situation that philosophers call the underdetermination of theories by the data). The term “strong inference” was used by Platt to indicate the following procedure: 1. Formulate a series of alternative hypotheses; 2. Set up a series of “crucial” experiments to test these hypotheses; ideally, each experiment should be able to rule out a particular hypothesis, if the hypothesis is in fact false; 3. Carry out the experiments in as clear-cut a manner as possible (to reduce ambiguities of interpretation of the results); 4. Eliminate the hypotheses that failed step (3) and go back to step (1) until you are left with the winner. Or, as Sherlock Holmes famously put it in The Sign of Four, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Sounds simple enough. Why is it, then, that physicists can do it but ecologists or psychologists can’t get such a simple procedure right? The appeal of strong inference is that it is an extremely logical way of doing things: Platt envisions a logical decision tree, similar to those implemented in many computer programs, where each experiment tells us that one branch of the tree (one hypothesis) is to be discarded until we arrive at the correct solution. For Platt, hard science works because its practitioners are well versed in strong inference, always busy pruning their logical trees; conversely, for some perverse reason scientists in the soft sciences stubbornly refuse to engage in such a successful practice and as a consequence waste their careers scattering bricks of knowledge in their courtyards rather than building fantastical cathedrals of thought. There seems to be something obviously flawed with this picture: it is difficult to imagine that professionally trained scientists would not realize that they are going about their business in an entirely wrong fashion, and moreover that the solution is so simple that a high school student could easily understand and implement it. What is going on? (Continues…) Excerpted from Nonsense on Stilts by Massimo Pugliucci Copyright © 2010 by Massimo Pugliucci. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The author does a wonderful job with the subject, but his predilection for dense and voluminous detail renders the writing impenetrable at times. It’s strange and scintillating how accurate this 2005 work is, in light of the events of 2016-2020, but I fear few will be able to profit from Pigliucci’s prophesies because this work is so … hard to read. So, I give it only 4 stars. A lighter touch might have been profitable!

⭐Organization: The chapters did not flow in any reasonable sense as it pertained to the topic of the book. There were sections in the center where he attacks Bjorn Lambourg, the Postmodernists, as well as includes a history of scientific thinking. While these were enjoyable, all except the attacks on the postmodernists didn’t exactly fit the progression that the author was making. The last two chapters should have been pushed up considerably as the expert problem and checklist of what makes a science should have come shortly after the introduction.Writing: Massimo is a master of concise prose and uses analogies that advance the point at hand. His mastery of what others have said gives him access to wonderful ways to summarize ideas and distill important points quickly; other authors could wind up using twice as many words to say the same thing without adding anything.Notes: Some of the footnotes were both funny and illuminating. I very much wish they’d been the bottom-of-the-page kind rather than the all-lumped-at-the-end kind.Topics: The selection of targets was well done and got at issues that other books seemed to skip like how to gauge expertise and how Bayesianism and Prospectivism can be used to both support the efficacy of science and recognize the problem of qualia.

⭐In spite of the title and cover of this book which give the impression of a popular look at the issue of science and society, this book actually takes a fairly scientific (and philosophical) approach to the topic. Concern about the public’s take on scientific issues has recently fueled the output of many books on this topic, but while a lot of them are either popular views of the issue written by journalists, focusing on many anecdotes and news items or more narrow takes based on one particular scientific topic, this one attempts to be a more systematic look at the issue of science itself from the viewpoint of a scientist and philosopher.The book is divided into a number of different sections starting with the whole issue of how to decide what is science, soft science and pseudoscience moving through a number of case studies and finally ending up with both a coverage of the history of thought on what constitutes science (and scientific methodology) and what constitutes scientific expertise. A number of famous and influential thinkers are quoted and considered from Plato on up to Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn.While some casual readers might find the book to be a bit dense and difficult to follow in some sections, anyone who is genuinely interested in some of the hot-button scientific issues of the day such as evolution, global warming or even unified field theories, will find this book thought provoking at the very least. The most salient point about the book for me is that in the end, the author concludes that while some things are definitely science and others are definitely pseudoscience, there is no black and white border between the two, no absolute certainty in the realm of science and no perfect criteria for determining expertise or who is right. In the end, he encourages his readers to be discerning and to be able to apply a number of different outlooks and strategies in order to arrive at a reasonable perspective on the validity of scientific claims and claims of expertise while always maintaining a healthy and rational sense of skepticism.Finally, there seems to be a warning running through the book not to allow what the author calls postmodern or relativist outlooks erode the barrier between good science and pseudoscience. In a nutshell, this means that the idea that all science is tied to the cultural, social and personal heritage of the scientist in question should not lead us to put pseudoscience on the same level as science.I don’t think the author of this book intended this to be a comprehensive textbook on the history of the status of science in human societies but rather a good overall introduction for popular audiences based on some sketches from the history of thought on the topic as well as current issues that arise.

⭐I agree with the other readers who complain about this book’s (dis)organization and the lack of coherent argument. For example, he discusses the history of the philosophy in one place, doesn’t draw any real conclusions, then leaps ahead a chunk of pages and he explains Bayes’ theorem, saying Bayesianism (as a metaphor) has implications for the philosophy of silence but leaving those up to the imagination.On the other hand, there are ideas here that I haven’t read elsewhere (which makes sense, since I haven’t read anything by a philosopher of science). For instance, the distinction between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism. (The former is used in science so your investigation can get anywhere, and the latter is a belief about the way the world really is. Or something.) Still, he uses this to accuse activist atheists of “scientism,” even though he clearly believes that many religious claims can be debunked by science (he devotes a long discussion to creationism). He fails to discuss here something that I think is necessary–the definition of “supernatural”. Because clearly many phenomena that are thought of as supernatural–be they telekinesis, the efficacy of prayers, or the origins of life–leave empirically observable traces. To claim, as he does, that “the God hypothesis” isn’t really a hypothesis (or empirical claim) restricts the definition of God/the supernatural artificially. I haven’t read the books he’s critiquing here, though, so I’m sure the authors do overstep the reaches of science in places–but he isn’t explicit about exactly what he’s critiquing.Equally unclear are the obscure (but I’m sure philosophically critical) questions he talks about but fails to make accessible to a reader like me–the problem of induction, why the lack of any clear mechanism for a spiritual world to affect the physical world is a serious blow to dualism (to me it seems like most conceptions of a spiritual world deny that cause and effect works the way it does in the physical world anyway), and probably others that I can’t think of right now.He discusses the works of several thinkers from many disciplines, some that I hadn’t heard of–notably, Richard Posner’s work on the “decline of public intellectuals.” Following Posner, Pigliucci rightfully criticizes intellectual “solidarity”–in Pigliucci’s metaphor, the tendency of people to cheer on ideologically obstinate “white knights” who champion their own beliefs. Since I’ve seen too much of this (and participated in it) in the skeptic community, I was glad to see this here.Overall, the book is very bloggerly and made me think. I’m glad I read it, but it was difficult to review, since I have so many mixed feelings.Oh, and on a sidenote, the reviewer who accused Pigliucci of dismissing the contributions of medieval Islamic scholarship to the history of science is somewhat misleading. Pigliucci doesn’t see anyone between Aristotle and the beginning of the Renaissance as worthy of discussion, and his outlook on Roman contributions to science and philosophy is similar to his evaluation of those of Islam. Still, he’s definitely not a fan of Mulsim culture, past or present, and he’s definitely far more interested in the West.

⭐There seems to be a pattern in the last twenty non-fiction books that I’ve read in that they all have to be somewhere between 200 and 400 pages long. While there’s probably a good reason for this, I’d like to see writers producing alternate, shorter versions of their books, so that people, like myself, who just want to read their most important points, can do so. This book is no exception.This book is also, not suitable for everybody. From statistical evidence, it’s obvious that most people have never read a book on critical thinking before, and so, for those people I’d recommend starting with something for beginners, like

⭐Software for the Brain

⭐which is also available in a digital format. From there I’d suggest that they use their new skills to critically examine their own beliefs. Once that is done, they can continue to read this book.The subtitle, “How to Tell Science from Bunk,” gave me hope that after reading the book I’d be able to tell (1) whether or not global warming is largely influenced by human activity, (2) whether or not Dr. Burzynski is a quack, and (3) have a general idea as to how I can answer future questions on the topic, and be able to give advice. It started as quite an enjoyable read, but as it got into history, I felt that there were many pages that could have been summarized or left out, and I would be just as wise about what I expected to learn from the book.So, regarding my first criteria, on the topic of global warming, Massimo gives evidence to show that human activity probably does affect global warming, but is also a bit confusing. He implies that Al Gore was mistaken in some areas, but largely right. I would argue that Al Gore’s prediction of sea level rise was spectacularly misleading by a factor of about 2000%. Perhaps Massimo was talking about some other predictions of Al’s, but I consider this to be nowhere near largely correct, because it could have influenced many people to sell their seaside homes, or even move to other countries that were not going to be swallowed by the ocean.Regarding my second point, there is a small section about medicine in the book. The discussion included HIV, and various authority figures like Prince Charles and the South African minister of health and their crazy beliefs. I found that section quite interesting. Before reading this book I was about 85% sure that Dr Burzynski was full of nonsense, but thinking about it now, I would raise that to about 98%.In general, I found the most important section to be the last few pages, in which Massimo shares a list of five pieces of evidence, suggested by someone else, which could be used to test whether or not someone is really an expert. He gives a couple of examples of how this test can be done.To summarize my thoughts on the book:- Those who have not read a book on critical thinking should start with something targeted at them.- Beginning of the book was very interesting, including the bit on SETI, as well as the last few pages.- Loads & loads of info.- I learned that cold fusion is nonsense (I had not even considered that).- I would have preferred a shorter book.- I have a better understanding of how science works.- The only thing I disagree’d with was that I consider Al Gore to be more wrong than he seems to think.Stephen OberauerAuthor of

⭐The Mischievous Nerd’s Guide to World Domination

⭐P.S. If Massimo, or any other expert reads this review, feel free to comment. If I come up with any ideas to improve this review, I will adjust it accordingly.

⭐Airy fads and pernicious fallacies in the name of God, religious nincompoops who deny Darwin and all science, nitwits who can hardly spell but who know in their hearts that climate change is a Commie plot (!): all these morons and peddlers of pseudo-scientific bulls*** are precisely revealed for the not-very-bright mental sluggards they really are. An invaluable book to gift to students attending religious high schools. Not an easy read but well worth the trouble, “Nonsense on Stilts” is a breath of the clear air of reason in a world that seems to be retreating to the mumbled hypocrisies of organized religions.

Keywords

Free Download Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk in PDF format
Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk PDF Free Download
Download Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk 2010 PDF Free
Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk 2010 PDF Free Download
Download Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk PDF
Free Download Ebook Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk