Why Science Is Wrong… About Almost Everything
Alex Tsakiris
Anomalist Books 2014
Pb, 178pp, appdx, notes, ind, $14.95, ISBN 9781938398315
FORTEAN TIMES BOOKSHOP PRICE £10.00
When a review copy of Why Science Is Wrong showed up, my reflexive response was to forget about it till the next time I write about crackpots. Then, fortunately, I noticed the publisher, Anomalist, and blurbs from the likes of Jeffrey J Kripal, Dean Radin, and Jeffrey Long. This is no crank book. Still, Rupert Sheldrake, who wrote the Foreword, feels compelled to observe that science “is right about a great many things, or right enough.”
Alex Tsakiris, who hosts the Skeptico podcast, is trying to communicate that science’s materialist ideology is indefensible and has been since physicists’ discovery of quantum mechanics. Most FT readers would agree. Many who have followed developments in consciousness studies, parapsychology and research into near-death experiences will find little to dispute here.
What makes Tsakiris’s book so eye-opening and often hilarious is that it exposes hardline defenders of the old order as woefully, even militantly, ignorant. Tsakiris politely pushes them until they’re forced to confess as much, if they haven’t slammed down the phone by then. Prominent psychologists, neuroscientists and professional debunkers turn out to know little about what they’re denouncing or to be unaware of refereed papers in professional journals which cast into doubt the favorite prosaic explanations for extraordinary experiences.
One consequence is that the skeptics who appear on his show are wont to complain of being “sandbagged”. Translated, that means they found themselves up against an interviewer who had done his homework. The relationship between debunkers and reporters is ordinarily thus: debunker speaks, reporter writes it down. No probing questions are asked or welcomed, and the resulting article reads more like stenography than journalism. Tsakiris doesn’t play that game.
I leave it to those who read the book to learn the names associated with the above, but a few will be familiar to FT readers, including the prominent debunker who goes to comic lengths to salvage a “skeptical” claim in the face of assertions from informants (in this case law-enforcement officers) whose patience he tries as he seeks to revise their testimony to his liking. A prominent critic of parapsychology admits that she hasn’t read the literature in a long time and knows little or nothing of the current findings that discredit her well-worn talking points.
Offsetting the chest-thumping bloviation are observations by physicists, neuroscientists and others who are engaged in consciousness research and uncovering data that upend the ever shakier official ideology while pointing to the new science just around the bend. Tsakiris’s book isn’t fat and scholarly, but it’s smart and cheeky, and it’ll confirm all your suspicions.