| Fads And Fallacies In The Name Of Science |
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The book Debunks Pseudoscientific Ideas , and examines how they arose. It is currently (2005) in its 31st printing. The 1957 Dover publication is a revised and expanded version of ''In the Name of Science'', which was published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1952. It was expanded from an article first published in the '' Antioch Review '' in 1950 , which became the first chapter of the book; chapter one explains the attraction of science to "cranks" and "pseudo scientists", who he describes as having five invariable characteristics: # The pseudo-scientist has a profound intellectual Superiority Complex . # The pseudo-scientist regards other researchers as idiotic, and always operates outside the Peer Review system (hence the title of the original ''Antioch Review'' article, "The Hermit Scientist"). # The pseudo-scientist believes there is a campaign against their ideas, a campaign compared with the persecution of Galileo or Pasteur . # Instead of side-stepping the mainstream the pseudo-scientist attacks it head-on: The most revered scientist is Einstein so Gardner writes that Einstein is the most likely establishment figure to be attacked. He writes: "A perpetual motion machine cannot be built. He builds one". # He coins Neologism s. These psychological traits are amply demonstrated throughout the remaining chapters of the book, in which he examines particular "fads" he labels pseudo-scientific. Most of the book's targets have since passed into obscurity (e.g. Fletcherism ), but a few of the ideas labelled "modern Pseudoscience " by Gardner are still extant more than a half century after the book was first published, including:
CRITICISM Modern skeptics (and supporters of the Paranormal ) have accused the book of lapsing into Ad Hominem reportage. Critics of the ," by Bruce I. Kodish, appeared in ''General Semantics Bulletin'', Number 71, 2004. SEE ALSO NOTES ''Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science'' 1957 ; Dover; ISBN 0486203948. Dover had published a collection of mathematical puzzles the year before, and Gardner had already written many articles throughout the 1950s . In the preface to the first edition the Author thanks the Review for allowing him to develop the article as the starting point of his book. In the introduction, Gardner says that he will be discussing modern pseudo scientists, on which few books had then been written. His writing became the source book from which many later studies of pseudo-science were taken (e.g. Encyclopedia of Pseudo-science). All of the case-studies were contemporary fads, but some had a long history, which the book traces (for example on Homeopathy in the "Medical Cults" chapter). On Page 49, Gardner writes: "''...scientific theories can be given high or low degrees of confirmation. Fort was blind to this elementary fact...''" Page 224 describes Jerome Rodale as "also the leader in this country of a movement known as 'organic farming'". (Garder says that the book will only cover U.S. pseudo-scientists, and that is where the contempory case-studies are located.) This section of the book probably contains the ideas which would now be considered the most mainstream (widely accepted in public discourse, in not scientific journals). He writes that ''"Soil and nutrition experts tell us that if plants grow at all, their composition tends to remain essentially the same, with respect to mineral and Vitamin content..."'' which is used as evidence against the organic farming position that ''"food also loses in health value if it is grown in soil that has been devitalized by chemical fertilizers"''. |
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