Skip to main content

A Much-Needed Reality Check

Image
By

A few weeks ago in a nearby Barnes & Noble, I intended to be conservative in my spending. After all, I have plenty of books I already own and haven't read, and working in a library means I have access to hundreds more I might want to read. Seeing Donald Prothero's new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten Our Future immediately overcame my resistance. Prothero, a geologist by training, has written a range of books, including a number that are highly regarded, including his 2007 book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, a thorough debunking of creationist arguments about geology and fossils. Reality Check touches again on creationism, but the larger thrust of the work is an attack on a variety of un-scientific rubbish that has a stranglehold on the minds of many and threatens our very future. From climate change denial and creationism to anti-vaccine activists and those who deny the reality of the finite nature of fossils fuels, Prothero tackles them all. While one can certainly read the entire work, each individual chapter could stand on its own as a debunking of anti-scientific thinking, making it a valuable work to have at hand. Just as valuable, in an era where we are inundated with information, is the overview Prothero provides at the beginning of the book, noting the similarities between different types of science denial as well as a guide for evaluating the reliability of claims we meet on a daily basis. 

Prothero also argues that no form of science denial is truly harmless. While it is clear that the campaign against vaccines has led to the deaths of hundreds in the U.S. alone by completely preventable diseases, and that inaction on the climate due to the obstruction and denial of the reality of the situation will only lead to worse problems down the road, even something like astrology or homeopathy causes harm in that money and time are wasted on ideas and treatments that have no basis in scientific reality. 

I can't state it more clearly than this: Reality Check is one of the best non-fiction books I've read this year. Like Prothero's Evolution and Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True, this book is a quick reference for those confronted by science denialism. Read it, and pass it on. Every citizen deserves to know the truth about some of the most pressing scientific issues of the day, to be able to live their lives based on sound science rather than on the muddled, fearful proclamations of the deniers. If we are to have any future on this planet, or any future worth living in, it will depend on whether we base our choices on real science or fall back on the mysticism and anti-science thinking that threatens to destroy it. 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Unanswerable Questions" for Evolution Part One

By
Creation Ministries International has launched a new initiative, which seems a lot like all the other creationists blitzkriegs before it. With the wonderfully creative tagline of "Question Evolution", CMI intends to challenge "evolutionists" and their "indoctrination" of high school students with the supposed dogma of evolution. They also aim to  cut the population of atheists by half , presumably by challenging the "faith" that every atheist (and only atheists, no "real Christians") is supposed to hold in Darwin's great idea. The main thrust of this is a tract with fifteen "unanswerable" questions for evolutionists. I'm done putting quotation marks around the word, evolutionists; from here on out I ask my readers to recognize that it is a creationist term that is about as silly as calling someone a general relativist (accepts general relativity) or germist (for accepting germ theory). Regardless, CMI seems just as i...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Creationists Don't Understand

By
There are quite a number of concepts that one could successfully argue that creationists fail to understand; whether this is out of a simple lack of knowledge or willful ignorance is hard to say and certainly can't be generalized to every creationist. Some, the everyday creationist, I would like to think simply haven't been exposed to the evidence. Others, the holders of Ph.D's in various fields, especially in the sciences, who happily reject evolutionary theory are willfully ignorant (John Whitmore comes to mind). But I think there is one idea that creationists of all stripes simply fail to understand; evolution is based on solid, visible evidence. Evolution is not some tenant of a "science religion" that descended down to Darwin from on high, it is an explanatory framework based on quite a lot of facts and mountains of evidence. It is evidence that leads to the conclusions of evolution, that life changes over time and, given the long history of the earth, all ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Absurdity/Agony of War

By
Science writer Mary Roach is never one to shy away from parts of science that verge on the absurd, as anyone who has read any of her books surely knows. I'd read two of her previous books, and been enchanted enough by Roach's unique combination of endless curiosity and a wry sense of humor that I rushed to lay my hands on her newest book. Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War will not fail in living up to the expectations that fans of her work will bring. Those who have never read her before will be hard-pressed to put down a book that I finished in a few short days.  The real joy of reading something by Mary Roach is her talent for seeking out strange areas of science that a reader might never have known about. As an investigator, she answers questions you never knew you had. Her newest work   is no exception. We discover, for instance, how the military tests the ability of a fighter jet to survive a mid-air collision with a large bird--by firing a dead chicken...
Post a Comment
Read more