Junk Science: How Politicians, Corporations, and other Hucksters Betray Us, by Dan Agin (2006, in press), St. Martin’s Press, New York

In 1628, at the age of fifty, William Harvey published his great work, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals. In it, Harvey pointed out what we now take for granted: that the purpose of the heart was to circulate the blood. This bit of deduction rapidly fell subject to the ire of many of his contemporaries, who could not admit that such a thing might be possible. As Harvey himself acknowledged, "[It] is of so novel and unheard-of character, that I . . . tremble lest I have mankind at large for my enemies, so much does wont and custom . . . and doctrine once sown and that has struck deep root and rested from antiquity, influence all men." (1) Harvey stood firm, however. He understood what his detractors did not—that his method was sound and therefore logically irrefutable. What distinguished Harvey’s mode of inquisition was his reliance on empiric observation, and his determination to remove his own biases from the question at hand. Such efforts to remove bias are not easy, of course, but they presage success: “I found the task so truly arduous, so full of difficulties, that I was almost tempted to think . . . that the motion of the heart was only to be comprehended by God . . . At length, by using greater and daily diligence and investigation, making frequent inspection of many and various animals, and collating numerous observations, I thought that I had attained to the truth.” (1) In the eyes of many historians of science, this was the beginning of the scientific method, the most important tool in the toolbox of scientific research. In taking science out of the realm of subjective desires and expectations, and placing it securely in the realm of the testable, Harvey and his successors began the process by which logic could sweep away superstition, bias could be rejected as fantasy, and the “triumph of man” (Shelley’s words and Shelley’s meaning—not a success, but a progression) could move on. So powerful is scientific method, that it has become universally accepted, and the observations made under its Aegis so convincing, that this objective way of knowing the world has been universally accepted by all humans, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, religious and skeptical alike. Well, maybe not. In Junk Science: How Politicians, Corporations, and other Hucksters Betray Us, Dan Agin, the editor and publisher of Science Week, counts the ways in which the scientific method is being misunderstood, dismissed, misappropriated, twisted, and just plain ignored in contemporary society. And those ways, as readers of this journal are likely to appreciate, are legion. Agin’s book is divided into seven sections, including five on contemporary topics: the marketing of foods and tobacco; the decline of the American medical establishment (including the corruption of the medical profession by big “pharma” and the astonishing prevalence of alternative medicine); the threats to the future of the world (pollution, global warming and military annihilation); religion and its intrusions into biology (evolutionary theory, the stem cell debate, etc.); and finally, the twisting of genetic knowledge to support racial, ethnic, and class determinism. In each of his accounts, Agin offers a litany of offenses against pure reason that range from the preposterous to the frightening. Some offenses spring from ignorance, leading Agin to lament the deterioration of science education in the schools, and to suggest that giving students the tools for skeptical evaluation is far more important than conveying any particular body of knowledge. More aggressively, Agin spares no energy in excoriating those among us who would subvert, edit, or otherwise pervert scientific knowledge to support their own social or political ends. His section on global warming is particularly on target, as his sleuthing uncovers the hidden, and not-so-hidden, interests and connections of those who exploit the small degree of uncertainty intrinsic to the data to try to obfuscate the fact, accepted by a large portion of the scientific community, that we may, as a species, be putting ourselves in grave and rather immediate danger. The fundamentalist agenda of the present administration plays no small role in kicking up a cloud of dust. Agin’s book is, most unmistakably, a rant. He has