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Junk Science: How Politicians, Corporations, And Other Hucksters Betray Us Hardcover – 3 Oct. 2006

English edition by D. P. Agin (Autor)

3.8 5 ratings

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In a provocative study, a geneticist examines how government, industry, and faith groups twist scientific fact for their own purposes, offering the real-life facts behind the lies, fear mongering, ignorance, and data faking in such areas as genetically modified foods, aging, pollution, global warming, cloning, health care, and more. 25,000 first printing.

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"JUNK SCIENCE is a passionate, minutely-informed and scrupulously fair analysis of all the abuses and misuses of science that are rampant today--a clarion call to action which concerns us all. One might wish that such a book were not needed, but it is, more now than ever before."--Oliver Sacks, M.D., author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat

About the Author

Dan Agin has a Ph.D. in biological psychology and thirty years of laboratoryresearch experience in neurobiology. He is Associate Professor Emeritus of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago, and editor in chief of the online journal ScienceWeek (http://scienceweek.com).

Dan Agin has a Ph.D. in biological psychology and thirty years of laboratory-research experience in neurobiology. He is Associate Professor Emeritus of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago, and editor in chief of the online journal ScienceWeek (http://scienceweek.com).

Chapter One
Science, Junk Science, and Dogma

Rome has spoken; the case is concluded.
--St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any error.
--J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967)

What happens when dogma rules? We need the past as a guide, since only through the lens of history are the realities of the behavior of whole societies completely visible. To ignore our past, to avoid learning from it, is a mindless attitude that only increases the likelihood of personal and social calamity. What a tragedy it is that history is hardly ever taught to children as a cautionary tale. Instead, history is taught as an exercise in tribal self-glorification, a pedagogical scheme that may be useful to politicians in their manipulations of the public, but a scheme that in the long run produces social dangers and the catastrophes of war.

Galileo and the Moons of Jupiter

So we begin with Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), a man whose very name has come to signify the perpetual battle between dogma and science, a battle won by dogma, a defeat now recognized as a disaster for human society.

The story of the Church against Galileo has been repeated (and often distorted) over and over again in history and literature. But what was the crux of it? Some say that the officials of the Church of that time were aware of the truth of Galileo's assertions that the Earth revolved around the Sun, but were incapable of publicly admitting this because of fear of demolishing the philosophical structure upon which the Church rested--the theological position, originating with the ancient Greeks, that a mechanistic interpretation of nature could never be more than a model, an intellectual artifact, since between theory and reality there would always be a gap that could not be bridged by human reason. The Church had received from the ancients a fundamental view of the cosmos that the Church had preached since the beginning of Christianity, and that view could not be denied without demolishing the foundations of the religion itself. At least, according to this interpretation of the crux of the conflict, that was the view of Church officials of the seventeenth century. Of course, eventually, after two hundred years, the Church did accept the Galilean/Copernican view of the solar system, and without destruction of its theological foundations. (Some may argue that if anything the foundations were strengthened.)

The other view of the crux of the matter is simpler and focuses on the elemental battle between dogma and reality, the refusal of the dogmatists to acknowledge reality, the stubborn efforts of the dogmatists to contrive and deny even when one is handed a telescope and told to look at the moons of Jupiter and see whether or not they are real. So goes the story of the Church and Jupiter's moons, although if officials of the Church refused to look, many academics, the so-called philosophers of Pisa, also refused to look.

Why not look? Because to look and see what Galileo (and others) said could be seen would demolish the foundations of one's reality. The dogma was that the Earth did not move. And even of those who accepted the Copernican idea that the planets (other than Earth) revolved around the Sun, many would not accept the idea that the Earth itself revolved around the sun--because they believed the Earth would then lose its moon. Thus, to see the moons of Jupiter was to understand that a planet could revolve around the sun without losing its moons, and that the Earth could do this also.

Here are Galileo's own words about the import of Jupiter's moons:

Here [in the Jovian moons] we have a powerful and elegant argument to quiet the doubts of those who, while accepting without difficulty that the planets revolve around the Sun in the Copernican system, are so disturbed to have the Moon alone revolve around the Earth while accompanying it in an annual revolution about the Sun, that they believe that this structure of the Universe should be rejected as impossible. But now we have not just one planet revolving around another while both make a large circle around the Sun, but our eyes show us four stars that wander around Jupiter, as does the Moon around the Earth, and these stars together with Jupiter describe a large circle around the Sun in a period of twelve years.

But the hard evidence that there were indeed people who refused to look at Jupiter's moons is scanty, most of the evidence in comments by Galileo himself. The best surmise is that there were indeed people, academics, philosophers, Church officials, who refused to look, even when others did look and were looking all over Europe as soon as the announcement of the Jovian moons was made. And if they looked, did they believe the moons were there? In this context, the important point is not who looked and who refused to look--no, the important fact is that there were probably enough people of substance, even of eminence, people of the established order who refused to look, assuming that Galileo did not concoct the idea of refusals, as some have suggested.

Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in the year 1610. On June 22, 1633, he received the final sentence of the Church, with the following words read out to him:

You have rendered yourself vehemently suspect of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the Sacred and Divine Scriptures, that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world; and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture.

Never mind Galileo's subsequent recantation, the question of who looked or who did not look, the question of how many Church officials quietly accepted the reality of Jupiter's moons, the crux of the matter, the essence of dogma, the fundamental and unresolvable confrontation between dogma and science is clear in the above paragraph, in the accusation read to scientist Galileo Galilei as on Wednesday, the 22nd of June in the year 1633, he knelt on the floor in a room adjoining the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. His crime was to refute a doctrine with a telescope, counter a dogma that suddenly, with the invention of the telescope, became a dogma based on junk science.

And the junk science endured. When Harvard University was founded in the year 1636, the assembled university scholars did not accept Galileo's work and they remained firmly committed to the Ptolemaic theory of the universe. Were they too busy to look at Jupiter's moons?

Galileo's major work on the solar system, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was not removed from the Roman Catholic index of prohibited books until 1835, two hundred years after the Church forced his recantation.

Dogma is not easily melted.

Phrenology and Inherited Traits

The junk science foisted on human society by the Church during the two centuries following the invention of the telescope concerned man's view of the world. At about the same time the Church finally accepted the reality of the Galilean world, a new junk science arose concerning man's view of himself, his view of his mind and brain, and this new junk science came to be a precursor of twentieth-century catastrophe.

Both science and junk science have a powerful impact on the public when concerned with mind and brain, the workings of intellect and emotions, and the differences in individual character.

In the eighteenth century, knowledge of...

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Thomas Dunne Books (3 Oct. 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 323 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0312352417
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312352417
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 17.09 x 2.78 x 23.44 cm

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D. P. Agin
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Dan Agin Ph.D.
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Dan Agin's forthcoming book is More Than Genes: What Science Can Tell Us About Toxic Chemicals, Development, and the Risk To Our Children (Oxford University Press. October, 2009). He's the author of Junk Science: How Politicians, Corporations, and Other Hucksters Betray Us (St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books. 2006). He's Emeritus Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago. His scientific interests are biological psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral genetics. He occasionally cavorts around the online science digest ScienceWeek. He can be reached at dpa@scienceweek.com
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Roger D. Launius
A Pro-Science Manifesto
Reviewed in the United States on 16 September 2015
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I love these type of books because they allow me to feel superior. I and the author, at least in our own minds, have a clear understanding of the realities of the world not present to others less well-read, less-inquisitive, and less-focused on the natural world and humanity’s place in it. Dan Agin, associated with the University of Chicago and an editor for ScienceWeek, pulls no punches in going after people who refute the place of science in modern life. He finds that businesses for their profits, politicians for their next elections, and religious groups for their peculiar beliefs attack scientific findings on a relentless basis. Agin is at his best in going after Christian fundamentalists, but he does not mince words in others areas.

There are seven parts in this book. In them Agin discusses science and dogma, consumerism and science, medical issues and pseudoscience, climate change and environmental science, religion and evolutionary biology, genetics and race, and the failures of all to stem the tide of anti-intellectual claptrap being passed off to people everywhere. He views all of the current controversies as a set of political problems. They have to be solved or humanity is doomed. It’s just a question of when.

He rallies support for the educational system, which he views as the last bastion separating humanity from nonsense. He asks quite pointedly, and not without a lot of alliteration: “Are the schools to be bazaars of babble, where myths and delusions with or without religious vintage are taught to children as ‘science’ alongside real science?" (p. 200) Agin makes the case that everyone is at fault. He singles out for denunciation industry, which he claims has operated repeatedly as if “social responsibility reduces profits” (p. 278). He questions if that is truly the case, but corporations have acted again and again to avoid social responsibility to the detriment of all. Government is just as bad, in Agin’s view, finding “many examples of modern government twisting science in various domains, including nutrition, environmental pollution, medical care, health care, support for antievolutionism, twisting of the facts concerning human cloning, global warming, missile defense, defense against terrorism, and so on” (p. 282).

The religious war against science is especially troubling, and those embracing anti-science perspectives based on their religious conceptions are damaging not only themselves but all others that they are able to foist their ideas upon. “During the past decade in America,” he writes, “we seem to be stepping backward, with some religionists advocating use of the Bible as a science text in public education” (p. 284). Religionists are aided in this effort by politicians who seem incapable of dealing with polarizing positions on science. The media is no help, despite their role as a watchdog. “He asks sadly: “Can we expect these people to be sophisticated enough to protect the public against junk science hawked in the interest of political of social or commercial agendas? (p. 287). Finally, our educators and scientists have failed as well; they have not insisted on an appreciation of science, the scientific method, and the questioning nature of life as fundamental to all Americans.

This is a straightforward reading experience. It should make those questioning scientific results on the basis of their preconceived beliefs uncomfortable. Instead they will probably ignore or denounce it.

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Richard Brookes
"Junk Science" Trashes Religion
Reviewed in the United States on 26 November 2008
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Just as I was enjoying this book for its overview of how science has been inimically twisted and corrupted to serve the views if governments, industry and politics, the narrative takes a left turn and viciously attacks religion for its views on evolution, Darwinism and stem cell research. I am not a religious person. My education is in science and I have been an avid follower of progress in both the physical and biological sciences. BUT, I think that scientists, along with the general public, need to be tolerant of other views and keep their minds open. I sense that Dr. Agin is promoting his own brand of philosophical thought, atheism. He surely delights in pointing out the "failures" in logic with respect to religious thought and totally dismisses any idea that religious thought has any value. (an aside... I just read today that people that attend religious services live longer...) I love exposing the "politicians, corporations and other hucksters" and their twisting, corrupting and sometimes downright subverting science for their own ends. I am much less enthusiastic about trashing religion to advance Dr. Agin's personal agenda. I still retain the view that science and religion can co-exist and complement each other. The fact that the two have differences, and sometimes battle over the place in our lives each deserves, adds to our existence, not detracts. It is for each of us to decide how we can use the ideas from these differing approaches to the world and to take either away would make us poorer. So, summing up, I would say that half this book is good and half not so good. I only wish that Dr. Agin had stayed the course with his original premise and had not succumbed to his own brand of "junk science." Science utilized to further his personal agenda is junk too.

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The Professor
Much good material
Reviewed in the United States on 10 March 2007
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Junk Science: How Politicians, Corporations, and Other Hucksters Betray Us covers a variety of important topics such as diet fads, aging and longevity, quack doctoring, the race and IQ myth, among other topics. Having subscribed to the Skeptical Inquirer since the magazine was first published, and other similar journals as well, I was very familiar with much of the material in this book. I found little I disagreed with except the chapter on Intelligent Design. Even in this chapter the author was surprisingly honest. He made it clear that any view of evolution that allows any room at all for the divine is creationism. He is makes his opposition to theistic evolution abundently clear. The testimony of J. F. Haught, who so impressed Judge Jones in the Dover case, University of Chicago Professor Dan Agin calls a "higher creationist." Haught, who believes that God used evolution as His means of creation, is wrong, Agin emphasizes, because in science "one does not introduce supernatural powers or supernatural forces or supernatural entities to explain anything" (Agin stresses the word anything) (p. 204). Agin then adds that "particularly not necessary for the work of science is any 'ultimate reality' such as that proposed by the higher creationist J. F. Haught." He goes on and condemns the Catholic church for "apparently supporting intelligent design theory" (p. 204). As Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin said in his review of Carl Sagan's posthumously published book, Billions and Billions, evolutionists "have a prior commitment, a commitment to naturalism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door" (1997, p. 31). Those who try to blend theism and evolution, Agin stresses, are not helping the creation evolution problem. The God hypothesis is a"wizard of Oz" explanation "leading back to shamanism and witchcraft" and can not be tolerated. He concluded that we should teach children the reality that our creator is natural law, time, chance, and mutations, and we should not teach myth such as theistic evolution.

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A Pro-Science Manifesto

"Junk Science" Trashes Religion

Much good material