Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I’m not even sure it’s fair to post a review of a ‘book’ like Rixta Francis’ slim vanity publication. It’s so self-evidently inept, and so unlikely to be taken seriously even by Francis’ allies in the antivax movement, that any comment you can make about it feels uncomfortably harsh. Still, insofar as Francis wants her work to be taken seriously enough that she’s put out a book, then she also invites, and indeed should welcome, critique. It’s also worth dwelling on “The Fiction of Science” as a remarkably clear example of one of the key flaws that drive anti-science thinking. I’ll come to that in a moment. This book sets out to deflate a number of claims made by and on behalf of science. Francis, as quickly becomes evident, doesn’t understand how science as a method of inquiry actually works. There’s no sign of any familiarity with the philosophy of science either; her claim that “Real science means that if you find something that contradicts your theory, you rewrite or discard your Theory” is a classic statement of naïve falsificationism, a view that has been flatly rejected for more than half a century. She complains that most scientific papers don’t actually tell you how they conducted the study, which suggests Francis doesn’t read the scientific literature at all, just second-hand reports of it. Her discussion of the composition of the sun suggests she hasn’t heard of spectroscopy, which seems like a pretty basic thing to know about if you’re going to tell astronomers they don’t know what they’re talking about. The chapter on medical research demonstrates Francis doesn’t know much about the history of science either; apparently Francis thinks diseases only come into being when someone names them, as if, to use one of her examples, no-one had dementia before Alzheimer’s Disease was described as a specific condition. There are no references provided at all, so most of the empirical claims here are uncheckable and thus worthless. But needless to say the claims run from ‘wrong’ (e.g. the claim evolution has stopped) to ‘not even wrong’ (the claim that scientists ‘don’t even know’ if viruses are alive or not: that’s a conceptual, not empirical issue i.e. an issue about what the word ‘life’ means) to 'trivial' (the section on animal intelligence), to ‘offensively wrong’ (the claim that climate scientists deliberately ignore data or that identifying the genetic causes of disease is a waste of money) to ‘dangerously irresponsible *and* offensively wrong’ (the entire chapter on drugs in which, among all sorts of other dangerous advice, Francis dismisses clinically-diagnosed depression as “feel[ing] low sometimes”). But then, Francis is quite up front that this isn’t meant to be a scientific book and that she’s not a scientist, but instead sees herself as particularly good at ‘critical thinking.’ Charitably, then, we should judge the book by that standard instead. When we do, things don’t get any better though. Instead of reasoned, careful, and empirically-informed argument, we simply get a series of false entailments, outright non-sequiturs, fallacious appeals to nature and to antiquity (“But a bit of common sense can tell you that something that has been around for so long must be good”), confusions between teleological and functional descriptions of nature (for instance confusing the question of how viruses make us sick with the question of what viruses are “for,” or declaring “The moon gives us light at night and it influences the tides, but of course there are many more reasons why we have the moon. We just don’t know them,” which assumes that things in nature have some ‘purpose’), unnoticed tendentious assumptions (Francis seems to thinks *any* micro-level mutation is disadaptive and therefore evolution can’t get going), confused concepts (declaring evolution is unscientific because science requires an unchanging and uniformly law-governed universe – a regularity which she later denies at least twice – thereby mistaking the stability of scientific laws for the stability of macroscopic objects, as if ‘giraffeness’ has to be an unchanging law of the universe like gravity), idiosyncratic definitions (“in no way can you say that the whole earth is one area. That means that “global climate change” is an oxymoron”), ad hominem, internal contradictions (temperature measurement is so inherently unreliable we can’t prove climate change is happening yet the Medieval Warm Period is an indisputable fact?) and, above all, appeals to ignorance. A recurring theme throughout this book, and the thing that’s emblematic of so much anti-science thought, is that if Francis doesn’t understand something, then it apparently can’t be understood by anyone else. As one example, after running together evolution and the Big Bang (two entirely separate questions), she argues that abiogenesis is impossible because when you have your dog put down it stops being alive but has the same organised physical structure as it did before death. Francis, as best I can make sense of her ‘argument,’ thinks this means ‘life’ is a mysterious property superadded to matter, and that this makes abiogenesis impossible. Again, if Francis had any familiarity with either biology or philosophy, she would know that life is a functional state: the reason your dog can’t be brought back to life isn’t that some mysterious vital force has left its body, but because once the parts of a body cease to interact in a way that preserves homeostasis, the cells quickly break down irreparably. There’s no real mystery about that. But Francis’ curiosity only seems to extend to asking questions, not trying to understand the answers. Indeed, what becomes clear, time and again, is that Francis has asked questions but then either hasn’t tried to find out the answers or hasn’t understood the answers she’s been given, and then assumes this means that nobody knows. In one very telling moment, Francis tells us “Forget it, there aren’t any explanations for these things. Well, maybe there are, but then they are way more complicated than our limited human brains can ever deal with.” Except, of course, that there are explanations for most of the things Francis finds so mysterious. Some of those explanations are partial and tentative, others are much more settled and complete, but in either case their adequacy as explanations doesn’t, in fact, consist in whether Francis personally finds them comprehensible or satisfying. And that’s the thing that makes this text so useful: over and over again it displays the strange solipsism that characterises so much anti-science thought. The creation of knowledge is a social process; knowledge advances through communities of inquiry, not individuals trying to work everything out for themselves in isolation. But people who are opposed to science very often set themselves personally up as the arbiter of knowledge, and where a body of science conflicts with their pre-existing beliefs or intuitive responses, they assume the latter overrules the former. The inability to understand one’s own epistemic and critical limits is the whole engine room of this book, as it is of so much anti-science commentary. Time and again, Francis assumes her “common sense” trumps the scientific method – except her ‘common sense’ turns out to be a melange of quasi-religious beliefs about the purposiveness of nature, false and often half-remembered empirical claims, and uninterrogated gut responses. She insists that if a scientist can’t explain something to you in plain language, “then you can be sure that either they are dumb, or they have something to hide,” and that “If a scientist tries to get rid of you by stating that you don’t understand anything about science, you know for sure you are onto something.” It never seems to occur to her that some things are just intrinsically hard to understand. Still, there’s at least one statement in this book I think is 100% true: “Why people study for years at university to learn about other people’s theories is something I don’t quite understand.” Indeed, after reading 'The Fiction of Science,' I’m sure she doesn’t.