Lorin Kleinman   Reading, writing, and occasionally eating.

At a party the other day, a volunteer for the National Museum of Natural History described a visitor to the Hall of Human Origins. The young woman looked at a male skeleton and noted that the rib cage narrows as it moves downward.  She pointed to a particular spot and asked if that was where the rib was removed to form woman. She was not joking.

Would that this kind of ignorance, of even the most basic facts of science, were an anomaly. As Skeptics Society founder Michael Shermer has observed, the world is decidedly more rational than it used to be: many fewer people believe in witches, for instance.  But pseudoscience persists.

In Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, Michael Specter examines five examples of this way of thinking. Leaving aside  the more common bugbears of skeptics–creationism, global warming denial, alien abduction claims and their ilk, which have been amply documented elsewhere–Specter discusses the fear of science and its disastrous intersection with vaccines, genetic engineering, alternative remedies, race and human origins, and synthetic biology.

The most infuriating, and strongest, section of the book concerns vaccines, and the very determined and deeply misguided people who oppose them.  Their beliefs originated with a journal article which linked vaccines to autism, and which has since been thoroughly discredited. Last year, I found myself in conversation with a woman–an EPA employee, no less–who said that clearly it could be no coincidence that she knew of several children who had been diagnosed with autism soon after being innoculated. I barely responded, being horror-struck but insufficiently informed.  Had I read Specter’s book, I would have pointed out that vaccinations and autism diagnoses tend to take place at the same age (between one and two), as well, of course, as that even a non-scientist EPA employee should know the difference between correlation and causation.  (Of course, that assumes that these parents remember the timing correctly. Specter is sympathetic to the leagues of desperate and confused parents of autistic children, who want an explanation, any explanation, for the plight of their children.)

Denialism is one of a number of interesting current books that allude to the great difficulties we have in gauging risk. Vaccine deniers, while giving entirely fictitious warnings about vaccines, do not tend to consider what happens in their absence. As Specter demonstrates, the pre-vaccine world was far from a naturalistic paradise. (In the developing and often still pre-vaccine world, around 200,000 children died of the measles in 2007. This represented a significant decline in measles deaths–from c. 750,000 in 2000–which of course will not continue if the anti-vaccine lobby has its way.) Specter does not deny that caution is necessary and important, and that scientists can be wrong and even occasionally criminal.  But he depicts a world in which the pendulum has swung so far onto the side of caution that the joys of scientific discovery have practically been forgotten, and the truth is almost incidental.

The world of natural remedies is no less filled with fraudulent claims, and many of these (largely unregulated) substances are not only ineffective, but can actually be harmful. I know this from my own experience: working at a health food store, I regularly saw people looking for “natural” remedies to treat what were clearly real health problems requiring real medicine.  In South Africa, the Mbeki government denied a connection between HIV and AIDS, refusing to provide antiviral drugs and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in the process.

Pseudoscience can be merely irritating, the realm of UFO nuts and astrologers. But as the families of South Africans killed by AIDS, as the parents of any unvaccinated child who has succumbed to a preventable disease know, it can be deadly. In Denialism, Specter issues a clarion call for a rational world view.

All of these books discuss and in various ways combat pseudoscience, and I’ve found each of them instructive and enlightening–if not a little disturbing.

Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, Susan Clancy

There has never been a shred of evidence for any visit to our planet by aliens, but this does not prevent a surprisingly large number of people from believing they have not only seen but been kidnapped by aliens. Clancy fascinatingly describes why this might be.

Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays, Frederick Crews

These book reviews and essays are not all about pseudoscience–there is an excellent piece on the death of post-structuralism–but the largest section of the book is devoted to its varied manifestations in psychology, as part of a devastating critique of Freud. Crews is an immensely lucid and intelligent writer, and is a pleasure to read on any topic.

Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic: More Notes of a Fringe Watcher, Martin Gardner

Gardner, much-lamented grandfather to the skeptics’ movement, holds forth in his wonderfully lucid and entertaining way on good science, bad science, and the people who practice each. (His collection The Night is Large is also marvelous.)

Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, And Sexual Hysteria, Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters

Victims of Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives, Mark Pendergrast

Few topics in pseudoscience are as compelling as the the memory wars of the 1990s, when a large number of women were convinced by irresponsible therapists (who were often under the influence of the execrable book The Courage To Heal) that in spite of the fact that they had no memory of it, they had been abused throughout their childhoods. They were guided by these therapists into developing false memories of abuse, destroying families and lives in the process. Needless to say, the therapists had no understanding of how memory works. Making Monsters stomach-churningly tracks these events and clearly describes the real science of memory.

Pendergrast, whose own daughters falsely accused him of abuse, lays out in heartbreaking detail the tragedy of both his own family and the larger “recovered memory” movement.

An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi

Randi famously demonstrated that Uri Geller’s spoon-bending was a hoax, and has made a career out of debunking other false claims.  Here, he provides a delightful list of all manner of lunatic ideas through the ages.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle In the Dark, Carl Sagan

This is the book that first introduced me to pseudoscience and the skeptics’ movement. It is still one of the best books on the topic, with Sagan at his most brilliant and engaging.

Searching For Memory, The Brain, The Mind, and The Past, Daniel L. Schacter

This is a riveting account of how memory works, how it doesn’t, what the common misconceptions of memory are, and of what can result when those misconceptions intersect with the judicial system.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, And Other Confusions Of Our Time, Michael Shermer

Shermer, the impressively clever founder and director of the Skeptics Society, explains–as well as anyone can–why superstition and pseudoscience are so widespread, and describes some of their odder and more unsettling manifestations, from creationism to Holocaust denial.