Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense by Michael Shermer ISBN: 0-19-514326-4 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.59 (17 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A Random Walk Through The Borderlands Of Science
Comment: Michael Shermer is currently my favorite skeptic. He always ends up making me think, whether I agree with him or not. The Borderlands Of Science is not Shermer's best book. It lacks the consistency of Why People Believe Weird Things and How We Believe (both of which I think are 5 star books). Borderlands reads like a collection of essays (which I think it is - my back issues of Skeptic are either buried or at school, so I can't compare the essays in the magazine to the chapters in the book). This isn't a bad thing, since the chapters make for good reading and thinking, but I think readers would be happier if they knew that at least some of the chapters where modified from earlier essays (I've searched the book for mention of the pedigree of the material, but I can't find any). That aside, I think that Borderlands has enough meat on its bones for even the most skeptical reader. The highlights for me were the chapters on Alfred Russel Wallace (Shermer has researched Wallace extensively and needs to do a full-length book on him) and the Myth chapters in the last third of the book (the Beautiful People Myth and the Amadeus Myth). I think current subscribers to Skeptic Magazine may find Borderlands a bit of a review, but if you're not familiar with that magazine or with Michael Shermer's writings, The Borderlands Of Science should be a good introduction to both.
Rating: 4
Summary: Not the Applied Skepticism book I wanted, but good anyway.
Comment: 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.)
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 Borderlands and not Weird Things, I'll just say that if you like this, you'll like the other as well. In The Borderlands Of Science, he analyzes beliefs that are at 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 3.5 of the 16 chapters of this book. Shermer did his doctoral thesis on Wallace, not coincidentally. 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, he 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, 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 (but doesn't seem to have) support 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 in how science inspects itself discussion, 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 it, 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.
Rating: 1
Summary: Shermer Ruins the Book by Talking Too Much
Comment: 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 black 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.
 |
Title: Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer ISBN: 0805070893 Publisher: Owl Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
 |
Title: How We Believe : Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God (second edition) by Michael Shermer ISBN: 0805074791 Publisher: Owl Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
 |
Title: The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule by Michael Shermer ISBN: 0805075208 Publisher: Times Books Pub. Date: 02 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
 |
Title: Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (Popular Science) by Martin Gardner ISBN: 0486203948 Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 01 June, 1957 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
 |
Title: The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan ISBN: 0345409469 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
