Category: books

Our new book on ideological threats to science

July 25, 2025 • 8:15 am

By “our,” I mean a group of 39 essays (and more than 39 people) about how science is being corrupted by the Left.

Now I know what you’re gonna say: the 39 chapters in the book below (find it here on Amazon) deal exclusively with threats to science from the Left but, as we all know, at the moment the threats to science from the Right (aka, the Trump Administration) are far more serious. In the short run that may be the case, but in the long run, well, who knows, but the threats from the Left continue, and that’s for sure. So think of it as a bunch of scientists and other academics analyzing how our trade is being hurt by “progressives.” And, at the time we submitted our manuscripts to editor Lawrence Krauss (who added a nice introdution), Trump hadn’t yet started slicing federal grant money from “bad” universities (I see that Penn and Columbia have just caved).

Luana and I have reworked our Skeptical Inquirer piece, “The Ideological Subversion of Biology” for the book, but there are lots of new and exciting contributions, at least judging by the titles (I’ve been gone and haven’t read most of them).

One that I have read is the introductory piece by Richard Dawkins, a new 33=page essay called “Scientific truth stands above human feelings and politics.”  It’s really, really good. We have Alan “Hoaxer” Sokal writing on “How ideology threatens to corrupt science,” Sally Satel on “Social justice, MD: Medicine under threat,” Carole Hooven on “Why I left Harvard,” Alex Byrne and Moti Gorin on “A deafening silence: bioethics and gender-affirming health care,” Elizabeth Weiss on “Burying science under indigenous religion,” Nicholas Christakis on “Teaching inclusion in a divided world,” Steve Pinker on “A five-point plan to save universities from themselves,” and 31—count them, 31—other essays. If you want to see the state of the art in how progressives ruin science, this is your book. Buy it ($35 hardcover, $17 on Kindle) and curl up in bed with these essays and a glass of sherry.  But wait! There’s more! See below the picture.

The book comes out in only four days, so get yours now. I’m not saying this to sell books; I can’t even remember if we get any remuneration for our contributions, but I don’t care.

UPDATE: I’ve put screenshots of the Table of Contents below”

Krauss is also releasing daily podcasts in the same order as the book’s chapters (sadly, Luana and I didn’t record one).  Below is the first one (one hour) with Richard Dawkins discussing his chapter with Lawrence, and Niall Ferguson’s interview is also up (they may have skipped Alan Sokal as there are 20 podcasts from 31 essays). You can find all the podcasts here.

Although Dawkins is dismissed by a certain group of know-nothings as a “white old man” whose thoughts are irrelevant, his chapter (and the interview) show that he hasn’t missed a lick, even at 84. Would that I could be half that cogent at that age!

The table of contents:

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UPDATE: As a reader noted (and I predicted), the Great Benighted, which includes the Hateful “Friendly”  Atheist, has gone after the book before it was even issued.  I very strongly doubt that the HA even read the book before he went after it.  So, you know, ignorance.

WEIT, now online in Arabic!

April 23, 2025 • 11:20 am

I have long wished for my first trade book, Why Evolution is True, to be published in Arabic. That’s because many who adhere to Islam take the Qur’an literally (it’s almost a requirement) and the Qur’an is explicitly creationist, saying that Allah created the Universe in six days and that humans were created from a glob of mud.  I am unsure how often evolution is taught is universities or secondary schools in Islamic countries, but I at least wanted the evidence for evolution that I adduce in WEIT to be available to Arab-speakers.

The book was translated into Arabic by the Egyptian Translation Service, but their copyright has apparently run out, and at any rate, someone told me that the translation was now available free on the internet.

So, if you are in an Arab-speaking country, you can find the contents of WEIT here or by clicking on the title page below. You can also find the pdf here.

I was amused to see that when I translated the cover into English, it reads this way:

So be it, I am Dr. Quinn. Spread the word about this so that others can read the book, a book up to now available only in one small bookstore in Cairo, and only in a few copies (I have only one).  Certainly the original book in Arabic, as Rodney Dangerfield might say, “got no respect.”

Books to read

March 28, 2025 • 11:21 am

Between reading science stuff that I’m going to write about elsewhere, and my pleasure reading of a mammoth book (not one about the woolly mammoth!), I don’t have many books to report on. In fact, I’m about to be at a loss for books to read, and thus will tell you what I’ve read as a way of extracting suggestions from readers.

For a while I was on a Holocaust kick, and (as I think I mentioned earlier) I read The End of the Holocaust, by Alvin Rosenfeld, which you can get from Amazon by clicking below. His thesis is that the true horror of the Holocaust has been lessened by everyone using the word to mean “any bad thing that happened to a lot of people.” The book is especially concerned with Anne Frank, who, he says, was just one of a number of young victims who wrote about their situation, and somehow the attention devoted to her alone lessens the experience of other victims. Well, you can argue about that, but I think the book is worth reading now that words like “genocide,” “concentration camp,” and “Holocaust” are being thrown around willy nilly in a way that distorts their original meaning.

After that I read another short but very famous book about the Holocaust, Night, by Elie Wiesel. Click below to see the Amazon link:

Wiesel, a Romanian-born Jew, was taken to the camps with his family when he was young, and managed to survive two of them, writing several books about his experiences (this one, like the others, is either partly fictional or completely fictional but Night is mostly true). Wiesel was separated from his mother and sisters at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and they did not survive (they were probably gassed). Throughout the book he tries to stay with his father and keep him alive, but the father finally expires on a forced, foodless march through the snow as the prisoners are marched to another camp by the Germans as the Russians approach. Wiesel survived, but just barely.

After the war, Wiesel dedicated himself to writing and lecturing about the Holocaust, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.  Night is one of the best books about the Holocaust, at least in conveying its horrors, and was recommended by Rosenfeld in the book above. I too recommend it highly, and, at 120 pages, it’s a short read.

Here’s a photo of Buchenwald five days after its liberation by the Red Army, showing the arrangement of bunks and the skeletal nature of those still alive. Wiesel is in the photo; I’ve circled him next to one bed post. What better proof can you have that you really did experience what you wrote about?

Buchenwald concentration camp, photo taken April 16, 1945, five days after liberation of the camp. Wiesel is in the second row from the bottom, seventh from the left, next to the bunk post. From Wikimedia Commons

And below is the behemoth I just finished, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Circle Award in 2009. Click the cover to go to the Amazon site.

Several people recommended this book highly, and while I think the 730-page monster was very good, I didn’t find it a world classic. It recounts the life of Thomas Cromwell, who started life as the son of a blacksmith but worked his way up to being the head minister of Henry VIII. It deals largely with the intrigues and relationships of Henry’s court, which reminds me of Trump’s America.  Henry was sometimes amiable, but would ruthlessly order the death of those who crossed him, including Anne Boleyn, who met her end simply because she couldn’t provide Henry with a son that could be his heir.  Sir Thomas More is a prominent character, and he too meets his end for refusing to affirm that Anne Boleyn was the lawful queen. Everyone tiptoes around in constant fear of the KIng.

The book is quite involved, and has a big list of characters which are listed on the first page and to which one must constantly refer. It is the convoluted plot and surfeit of characters that made the book hard for me to read. Perhaps I’m getting old and my concentration is waning.  But the dialogue is fascinating, and parts of the book are quite lyrical, with the prose style changing quickly from conversational to rhapsodic. Here’s what Wikipedia says about Mantel’s writing of the book, and the effort shows.

Mantel said she spent five years researching and writing the book, trying to match her fiction to the historical record. To avoid contradicting history she created a card catalogue, organised alphabetically by character, with each card containing notes indicating where a particular historical figure was on relevant dates. “You really need to know, where is the Duke of Suffolk at the moment? You can’t have him in London if he’s supposed to be somewhere else,” she explained.

In an interview with The Guardian, Mantel stated her aim to place the reader in “that time and that place, putting you into Henry’s entourage. The essence of the thing is not to judge with hindsight, not to pass judgment from the lofty perch of the 21st century when we know what happened. It’s to be there with them in that hunting party at Wolf Hall, moving forward with imperfect information and perhaps wrong expectations, but in any case, moving forward into a future that is not pre-determined but where chance and hazard will play a terrific role.”

The book (part of a trilogy) was made into a mini-series for t.v., and here’s the trailer. It feature Cromwell, Cardinal Wolsey, Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII. Has anyone seen it?

So that’s my reading. Now I ask readers to recommend books for me—and other readers. They can be fiction or nonfiction, so long as they’re absorbing.  I’m not sure I’m yet ready now for another 700-page novel (Amazon’s version says only 600-odd pages, but I have an older edition).  Please put your recommendations, as well as the subject of the book, in the comments.

Dawkins and Pinker discuss evolution

March 13, 2025 • 11:15 am

Here’s Richard Dawkins ostensibly discussing his new book (The Genetic Book of the Dead) with Steve Pinker, but of course you can’t confine a discussion between these two to a single book. Even from the beginning it ranges widely, in which Pinker discusses not only the epiphany that The Selfish Gene gave him, but levels some trenchant criticisms at Lewontin and Gould’s attacks on adaptationism, and (to my delight) at Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, which never held any water save (perhaps) as the notion that fossil evolution proceeds at varying rates. (People often forget that the novel parts that Gould saw about punc. eq. was its mechanism not its speed: a mechanism that involved questionable propositions like leaping adaptive valleys, macromutations, and species selection (see here for a summary of my beefs with punc. eq., along with scientific references). I myself crossed swords with Gould about these issues, and have concluded that his greatest contribution to science was not any novel paleontological discoveries, but his popularization of evolution in his Natural History essays. (Even those were misleading when they discussed adaptation and punctuated equilibrium.)

Other things discussed: the ubiquity of selection, the nature and importance of epigenetics, the motivation for Richard writing several of his many books, and even “the meaning of life.”  I’ve listened to about 40 minutes of this discussion, but my tolerance for any podcast, even one with these big brains, is limited.  At 1:05:15 begins a Q&A session in which Steve reads audience questions written on cards.

Notice Steve’s cowboy boots, custom made by Lee Miller in Austin.

My Quillette review of Francis Collins’s new book on healing America with science, truth, trust, and faith

March 13, 2025 • 9:15 am

As I note in my new review of Francis Collins’s new book, The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust, he’s a very good scientist and science administrator, but also a pious evangelical Christian (remember the frozen waterfalls that brought him to Jesus?).  Collins had previously written a book arguing that science and Christianity were not only compatible, but complementary ways of finding the truth, but now he’s produced another. As I say in my review of the new book in Quillette (click on screenshot below, or find my review archived here):

While much of the Road to Wisdom reprises the arguments of the earlier book, this new one takes things a bit further. Collins is deeply concerned about the divisions in American society highlighted by the last presidential election, by people’s inability to have constructive discussions with their opponents, and by our pervasive addiction to social media and its “fake news”; and he believes that accepting a harmony between religion and science will yield the wisdom that can mend America.

As the author of Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible, I wouldn’t be expected to laud Collins’s thesis, and I didn’t.  You can read the review for yourself, but I spend a lot of time criticizing Collins’s claim that science combined with religion is the best way to find the “truths”to repair the deep divisions in America’s polity. Even if those divisions—Collins largely means Republicans vs. Democrats—can be repaired, saying that the way forward is combine the “truths” of science and religion is a deeply misguided claim.

I won’t go into details, but of course religion is simply not a way to discover truth, especially since Collins’s definition of “truth” is basically “facts about the world on which everyone agrees”: in other words, empirical truth. Religion can’t find such truths, as it lacks the methodology.  Note that Collins does not espouse Gould’s “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” claim that science and religion are compatible because they deal with completely different issues, with science alone getting the ambit of empirical truth. Gould’s claim, described in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages, was also misguided, and you can read my old TLS critique of it here.) No, Collins asserts that religion can find empirical truths. Sadly, he gives no examples where religion can beat science–just a bunch of questions that religion can supposedly answer (e.g., “How should I live my life?”).

I’ll give one more quote from my review:

What are the truths that religion can produce but science can’t? Collins’s list is unconvincing. It includes the “fact” of Jesus’s resurrection and the author’s unshakable belief that “Jesus died for me and was then literally raised from the dead.” In support of this claim, Collins cites N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God as compelling evidence for the Resurrection, which Collins claims is “historically well documented.” But when I worked my way through the entirety of Wright’s 817-page behemoth, I found that the “historical documentation” consists solely of what’s in the New Testament, tricked out with some rationalisation and exegesis. Neither Collins nor Wright provide independent, extra-Biblical evidence for the crucifixion and resurrection, much less for the Biblical assertion that upon Jesus’s death the Temple split in twain and many dead saints left their tombs and walked about Jerusalem like zombies. Absent solid evidence for these claims, they are little more than wishful thinking.

Other “truths” that one finds in religion are “moral truths”: the confusing set of rules that Collins labels the “Moral Law.” To him, the fact that our species even has morality constitutes further evidence for God, for Collins sees no way that either evolution or secular rationality could yield a codified ethics. That claim is belied by the long tradition of secular ethics developed by people like Baruch Spinoza, Peter Singer, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls. While many faiths and societies aspire to common goals like “love, beauty, goodness, freedom, faith, and family,” this does not suggest the existence of a supernatural being.

Click below (or here):

Although it seems obvious to me that religion and science are incompatible insofar as both make empirical claims (granted, some of faith’s claims are hard to test), it’s not obvious to the many Americans who blithely get their vaccinations but then head to Church and recite the “truths” of the Nicene Creed. Sam Harris pointed this out in a piece he wrote opposing Collins’s appointment as NIH director:

It is widely claimed that there can be no conflict, in principle, between science and religion because many scientists are themselves “religious,” and some even believe in the God of Abraham and in the truth of ancient miracles. Even religious extremists value some of the products of science—antibiotics, computers, bombs, etc.—and these seeds of inquisitiveness, we are told, can be patiently nurtured in a way that offers no insult to religious faith.

This prayer of reconciliation goes by many names and now has many advocates. But it is based on a fallacy. The fact that some scientists do not detect any problem with religious faith merely proves that a juxtaposition of good ideas/methods and bad ones is possible. Is there a conflict between marriage and infidelity? The two regularly coincide. The fact that intellectual honesty can be confined to a ghetto—in a single brain, in an institution, in a culture—does not mean that there isn’t a perfect contradiction between reason and faith, or between the worldview of science taken as a whole and those advanced by the world’s “great,” and greatly discrepant, religions.

While I wouldn’t have opposed Collins’s appointment on the basis of his faith, I would have if he had shown any signs that his faith would affect his science. As it turned out, it didn’t: Collins left his religion at the door of the NIH.  But he continues to proselytize for both Christianity as the “true” faith and for a perfect harmony between science and religion.

In a patronizing New Yorker article (is that redundant?) about Collins and his book that I just discovered, I was sad to see another pal soften his views about Collins, science, and faith:

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who fiercely criticized Collins’s nomination on account of his “primitive, shamanistic, superstitious” religious views, told me in an e-mail that he had changed his mind about Collins, for two reasons. “One is the sheer competence and skill with which he’s directed the Institutes, blending scientific judgment with political acumen,” Pinker wrote. “The other is a newly appreciated imperative, in an age of increasing political polarization, toward making institutions of science trustworthy to a broad swath of the public, of diverse political orientations.” In a way, I thought, Pinker was saying that representation matters: science has an audience, and the right speaker can persuade all of that audience to listen. “A spokesperson for science who is not branded as a left-wing partisan is an asset for the wider acceptance of science across the political spectrum,” Pinker said. But Collins is more than a spokesperson for science. He is also a kind of representative, within the scientific community, of American communities that his peers sometimes fail to reach.

Pinker’s first point is right, and, as I said, I wouldn’t—and didn’t—oppose Collins’s nomination as NIH director.But the author then interprets Pinker as making the “Little People” argument: science will be accepted more broadly if scientists accept religion, even if those scientists don’t practice it. In other words, we have to avoid criticizing superstition if America is to fully embrace science.

But while there’s no need for scientists to bang on about religion when we’re teaching about or promoting science, no scientist should ever approve of a belief in unevidenced superstition, or of any system of such supterstition.  Yet that’s exactly what Collins does in his book, and it’s why the book is misguided, flatly wrong about accommodationism, and unenlightening.

Upcoming talk and new book on ideology and science

February 27, 2025 • 9:00 am

I have two announcements this morning:

a.) First, next Monday, Mar 3 at 12:30 Chicago time (1:30 Eastern time), I am having a 1-1½-hour discussion with DIAGdemocrats  (“DIAG” stands for Democrats with an Informed Approach to Gender. And their slogan is “Liberals guiding our party back to reason and reality.” It’s tailor made for me!) Their “who we are” description is here, and the mission statement here. But there’s a lot of other stuff, including critiques of existing claims and studies involving gender. You can even send emails to your representatives in Congress from the site.

DIAGdemocrats also has a YouTube channel of previous discussions here, an Instagram page here,. and a Facebook page here.

The topic of our discussion is in the headline below, which I believe will link to the discussion on Twitter when you click on it (it will also be archived). We’ll be talking about various things, including the KerFFRFle with the Freedom From Religion Foundation that led to the resignation of Richard Dawkins, Steve Pinker, and I.  But the discussion is likely to be wide-ranging and there will be a Q&A at the end.

As you can tell from the group’s name and the website linked above, it is is dedicated to a rational, science-informed approach to gender issues.

b.) And I want to call attention to this upcoming book edited by Lawrence Krauss; it’ll be available starting July 29 (I believe there will be an audiobook later). Click on the screenshot to go to the Amazon site:

Here’s the Amazon blurb:

An unparalleled group of prominent scholars from wide-ranging disciplines detail ongoing efforts to impose ideological restrictions on science and scholarship throughout western society.

From assaults on merit-based hiring to the policing of language and replacing well-established, disciplinary scholarship by ideological mantras, current science and scholarship is under threat throughout western institutions. As this group of prominent scholars ranging across many different disciplines and political leanings detail, the very future of free inquiry and scientific progress is at risk. Many who have spoken up against this threat have lost their positions, and a climate of fear has arisen that strikes at the heart of modern education and research. Banding together to finally speak out, this brave and unprecedented group of scholars issues a clarion call for change.

I’ve put a list of the authors below. The contents include the second and unpublished part of Richard Dawkins’s essay on sex, a slightly revised version of my essay with Luana Maroja, “The Ideological Subversion of Biology,” plus a bunch of pieces appearing for the first time.  There are six sections as well as an introduction and afterword by Krauss. Keep your eye open for further announcements here or a view of the contents that will likely appear on the Amazon site.

Dorian Abbot

John Armstrong

Peter Boghossian

Maarten Boudry

Alex Byrne

Nicholas A. Christakis

Roger Cohen

Jerry Coyne

Richard Dawkins

Niall Ferguson

Janice Fiamengo

Solveig Lucia Gold

Moti Gorin

Karleen Gribble

Carole Hooven

Geoff Horsman

Joshua T. Katz

Sergiu Klainerman

Lawrence M. Krauss

Anna Krylov
Luana Maroja

Christian Ott

Bruce Pardy

Jordan Peterson

Steven Pinker

Richard Redding

Arthur Rousseau
Gad Saad

Sally Satel

Lauren Schwartz

Alan Sokal

Alessandro Strumia

Judith Suissa

Alice Sullivan

Jay Tanzman

Abigail Thompson

Amy Wax

Elizabeth Weiss

Frances Widdowson

New book argues that Alzheimer’s research is flawed, fraudulent, and incompetent

February 13, 2025 • 11:00 am

I have a friend with Alzheimer’s so I was especially depressed to read Jesse Singal’s discussion of a new book, Doctored, claiming that research on both Alzheimer’s disease and drugs that purport to ameliorate is all badly flawed, even fraudulent. You can read Singal’s discussion below (free access by clicking on the headline), and access the book on Amazon by clicking on the cover below.

An excerpt from Singal:

In his book, Piller, an investigative reporter at Science magazine, presents copious evidence of severe fraud, negligence, and buck-passing in Alzheimer’s research. From fabricated images published in major research journals (many of them still unretracted) to data manipulation conducted by pharmaceutical companies to the complete negligence of federal watchdogs, Piller’s reporting demonstrates indisputably that the field of Alzheimer’s research is in sorry shape.

Things are so bad, in fact, that the dominant theory that has guided researchers’ efforts this century — that Alzheimer’s symptoms are caused by the buildup of proteins called “amyloid plaques” in the brain — is now in serious question. That might explain why, as Piller notes, a recent meta-analysis of the available research found no evidence that any of the available Alzheimer’s drugs cause noticeable improvements in the cognition or daily functioning of patients. We’re two decades and many billions of dollars into the modern era of Alzheimer’s research, and we have precious little to show for it — a particularly dire state of affairs given that this dread condition is only going to hit us harder as America’s population continues to age. Piller’s book, which was released February 4, tells the story of a wild and heartbreaking goose-chase.

While Doctored is gripping in its own right, it also serves as a warning about the collapse of trust in expert authority. Thanks to the capacious new markets for crankery carved out by social and “alternative” media — not to mention a worldwide populist revolt against “the establishment” in general — there’s more grifting and science-denial than ever before, and the worst purveyors of pseudoscientific sludge rake in millions precisely by positioning themselves in opposition to mainstream science.

The lesson for scientists is to clean up their act and to stop misleading people about their work. I mean, I never had any doubt whatever that Alzheimer’s was caused by plaques in the brain.  Now that is not at all certain; the plaques could be a byproduct or a correlate and not a cause. If there’s that much uncertainty about it, why haven’t I heard about it.  Of course, journalists are responsible for this, too, but good scientific journalism is a species going extinct.

I believe that Singal has already been demonized on BlueHairSky, though he hasn’t been banned. The reason: the place is full of immigrants from Twitter who are “progressive” liberals and couldn’t stand the free speech on X. Singal described his apostasy: 

The background here is that a subset of users on Bluesky disagree with my reporting on youth gender medicine—a subject I’ve been investigating for almost a decade, and have written about frequently, including in The Atlantic and TheEconomist. (I’m currently working on a book about it, commissioned by an imprint of Penguin Random House.) I’m not going to go deep here, but I’d argue that my reporting is in line with what is now the mainstream liberal position: See this Washington Post editorial highlighting “scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them.”

But perhaps because I wrote about this controversy earlier than most journalists, and have done so in major outlets, I’ve become a symbol of bigotry and hatred to a group of activists and online trolls as well as advocacy orgs like GLAAD that push misinformation about the purported safety and efficacy of these treatments, and attempt to punish journalists like Abigail Shrier for covering the controversy at all.

Bluesky appears to have attracted a particularly high number of these trolls, and even before I arrived on the platform, some of them were making sure I wouldn’t feel welcome there. Nora Reed, an online influencer and cultural critic, wrote in November that “I think we need a plan for if Jesse Singal shows up here in advance.”

Back to his own Substack, though; Singal won’t win many friends by arguing that both scientists and liberals have exacerbated the problem, the former by acting precipitously or even duplicitously (the attempt to dismiss a lab-leak theory for the covid virus by scientific officials in the Biden ambit is a good example), while the left-wing public by always saying “trust the science” without realizing that a. scientists are human, with all the good and bad behavior that implies and b. science like investigating covid moves quickly, and what is true today could be false tomorrow.

But I shouldn’t exculpate the Right as well. After all, that’s the side of the political spectrum that still pushes creationism as well as quacks like RFK Jr. And Trump and his cronies are busy slashing scientific research almost willy-nilly. Singal, though, concentrates on the Left, perhaps because that’s where he resides:

At a time of such uncertainty and such dangerous overcorrection, it can feel awkward or difficult to point out, as Piller does in Doctored, just how broken some of our cherished mainstream scientific institutions are. Isn’t that playing right into Trump’s hands?

I don’t think so. The strategy adopted by many mainstream liberals in response to the populist surge — effectively, plugging our ears and chanting “trust the science” over and over — might be comforting, in that it offers a Manichaean worldview in which improving the world is a relatively straightforward matter of convincing people of their own ignorance so that they will board the science train with the rest of us.

But this effort has clearly failed. Some populist distrust of mainstream science is unwarranted and harmful, such as most strains of vaccine skepticism, but in plenty of instances, they are more or less correct not to automatically trust mainstream scientists, even if they arrive at that conclusion for reasons some of us might find uncouth. (Update: I added ‘automatically’ post-publication because I think it’s an important modifier here.)

In other words, while it’s easy to accuse those red-staters out there of exhibiting an alarming lack of faith in science, especially now that their wrecking-ball avatar is in power, it’s harder — and arguably just as important — to ask whether perhaps we have too much faith in it. The scientific establishment hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory in recent decades, given the replication crises that have roiled multiple fields, the data-fraud scandals popping up everywhere from cancer research to business-school psychology, and the frequently overconfident proclamations experts made about thorny Covid-era issues like mask mandates and school closures. And yet liberals tend to continue to reflexively trust many institutions that haven’t earned it, to the point where some of us have turned this sentiment into a mantra: “Science is real,” you will see on signs planted in front of many liberal homes.

I will read this book, as I’m particularly interested in how “fraud” was involved in Alzheimer’s research. Here’s one bit from Singal:

Piller’s book provides numerous damning examples of the difference between science as we idealize it and science as it is practiced by real-life human beings. For example, much of the data fraud in Alzheimer’s research, alleged and proven, involves doctored images. This fraud was uncovered not by journal editors or peer-reviewers — the individuals supposedly responsible for such quality-control — but by unpaid sleuths “who use pseudonyms to post comments” online, as he writes, in the hopes of someone who matters noticing and acting. (One notable exception is Elizabeth Bik, a Dutch microbiologist and legendary image sleuth who has taken on Alzheimer’s fraud.)

Who would have thought that we’d be catching so much fraudulent work by analysis of published images. One might conclude that reviewers of manuscripts aren’t doing their work, but I suspect that a lot of the fraud involves the same images repeated in different papers, and no reviewer has time to compare images in a submitted manuscript to other images by the same authors, but in different journals.

Doctored was released February 4 of this year.

To avoid making this post too long, I’ve put the book-publisher’s (Simon and Schuster’s) description below the fold. Click “read more” to see it:

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