The Men Who Stare at Goats
by Jon Ronson
Picador, £7.99 (pbk), ISBN 0330375482

Jon Ronson brings his inimitable journalistic talent to bear on the subject of how some bizarre, even unhinged, thinking came to infect the world of US Military Intelligence over the last thirty years, up to and including the ‘War on Terror’. The title refers to attempts by a group of ‘Psychic Warriors’, drawn from the Special Forces, to stop the hearts of tethered goats by simply staring at them. With dogged persistence and skilful tongue-incheek questioning, Ronson always seems able to get his interviewees to reveal more than they probably would have wished and this can make for some riveting reading. Following an interview with Uri Geller in 2002, the trail leads to General Stubblebine, former Chief of Intelligence in the US Army, who became convinced that he could learn to pass through a solid wall by psychic means, and thence to Col. Jim Channon (Retd.). Channon, a disillusioned Vietnam veteran, became obsessed with the wilder ideas of the Californian New Age movement and then tried to sell them back to the Army with the promise that methods supposedly designed to ‘heal’ people could also be used to disorient and disarm them.
While Channon himself might have been motivated, at least in part, by purely humanitarian ideals when he suggested setting up a First Earth Battalion of Warrior Monks, the consequences, twenty years on, may be crazier and more horrible than anything he could have imagined. In May 2003 an American PsyOps unit imprisoned Iraqi detainees in a metal freight-container and bombarded them with music (including the I Love You song from the Barney the Dinosaur children’s cartoon) for twelve hours at a time, and Ronson shows a clear link between this kind of treatment and Channon’s original ideas. As the book points out, it can be difficult for even the most agnostic and sceptical among us to accept that our military and political leaders might operate simultaneously in both normal and supernatural dimensions. Well, here is plenty of evidence that they can.

Mike Hutton

Eight Preposterous Propositions: From the Genetics of Homosexuality to the Benefits of Global Warming
By Robert Ehrlich
Princeton University Press, £11.95 (pbk), ISBN 0-691-12404-3

In his previous book, Nine Crazy Ideas in Science, Ehrlich discussed outlandish scientific ideas and gave them a “cuckoo” rating according to how crazy he reckoned they were. Having a high cuckoo rating didn’t mean that there was no good evidence for a hypothesis, but reflected its sheer strangeness, as instanced by the disturbingly paradoxical ideas of quantum physics. In this new study, he replaces that grading system with degrees of flakiness, from zero to a maximum of four, to rate ideas that are not so much technical puzzles for scientists but issues that may concern the general public. His aim is to help the lay reader to assess the evidence and the reasoning behind the propositions in question.
These propositions are actually expressed as questions: Is homosexuality primarily innate?, Is Intelligent Design a scientific alternative to evolution?, Are people getting smarter or dumber?, Can we influence matter by thought alone?, Should you worry about global warming?, Is complex life in the universe very rare?, Can a sugar pill cure you?, and Should you worry about your cholesterol?
The chapter on that man-made plague, Intelligent Design, is suitably damning, yet, bizarrely, Ehrlich only bestows a 3-flake rating. The excuse for this is that human intervention in how organisms reproduce will increasingly outweigh natural selection, thus reflecting human design. Perhaps he has forgotten the detailed discussions of artificial selection in Darwin’s work. At any rate, this is an odd lapse. The chapter investigating the placebo effect is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. Ehrlich warns of the unblinding of double-blind tests using passive placebos (that don’t mimic drug side-effects): “studies show that with passive placebos between 78 and 88 percent of patients and physicians in antidepressant trials can correctly identify whether the drug being administered is the placebo or the active drug, based on the presence or absence of side effects and other subtle cues.” This unblinding would boost the apparent relative effect of the drug being tested.

Since useful and well-written books about complex issues seem to be quite rare in the universe, this one is warmly recommended.

Paul Taylor

Darwin’s Legacy: What Evolution Means Today
by John Dupré
OUP, £7.99 (pbk), ISBN 0-19-928421-0

Dupré, a philosopher of biology, asks: “What does evolution tell us about ourselves and our world?”. His answer is: nothing. After several rather banal and unoriginal chapters on religion and basic evolutionary theory that Dupré patronisingly states will be ‘the heaviest going for the lay reader’, we learn that empiricism and Darwinian naturalism leave no room for ‘superstitious mythologies’ like religion. So far, so obvious. His main theory is that gene selection and evolutionary psychology are reductive and just plain wrong because, along with natural selection, they fail to explain human diversity.
His proposal is that cultural evolution happens faster than physical evolution; learning and environmental factors play significant roles in the development of the individual. He says: it is hard to separate biological and social causes of IQ scores, that the behaviour of the sexes is culturally determined, that language makes us different from other animals because it allows the development of more complex cultures and that “no history of the giraffe’s neck (…) is independent of the history of the giraffe”. Then he says: “If it is part of our biology, the thought goes, we might as well just learn to live with it. No such implication is necessary, however”. These blindingly obvious statements and platitudes are offered up as a challenge to mainstream evolutionary thinking. They are in fact more indicative of Dupré’s willfully narrow reading of current theory and his over-reaction to it.
While he is right to warn against convenient, over-simplified comparisons between human and animal behaviour, the comparison is not as inherently “flawed”, “suspect” and useless as he claims. His big conclusion, that “development must somehow be put back into our view of evolution”, ignores three things. Firstly, that to respond to learning and the environment we need evolved (genetic) capabilities; secondly, that natural selection is a response to the environment; and thirdly, that the majority of evolutionists are more than aware of the effect of both environment and learning on the individual. His targets, with almost no exceptions, do not exist.

Tessa Kendall

Kuhn Vs.Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science
by Steve Fuller
Icon Books, £7.99 (pbk), ISBN-10: 1-840467-22-3

Anyone espousing a scientific approach to our claims to knowledge about the world will sooner or later run up against a thorny network of critiques of science emanating from such disciplines as philosophy, sociology and that relative, even relativist, newcomer, science studies. It then only takes a few moments before the name of Thomas Kuhn is invoked.

Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962, has often been a favourite touchstone for those wishing to undermine the knowledge claims of science by emphasizing the way that the institutionalization of science shapes the practice of scientists, though this was not its purpose. In Kuhn’s account, scientists labour within officially sanctioned paradigms that determine the direction of their research, until revolutions replace old paradigms with new ones. Exaggerating this, proponents of junk science may try to explain the rejection of their work in terms of blinkered paradigms in sore need of a new revolution.

Karl Popper, of course, is no friend of pseudoscience, having offered us (“notoriously”, says Fuller) a way of demarcating it from real science by means of the criterion of falsifiability: pseudosciences do not and dare not risk making any statements that could be falsified by any possible state of things. Kuhn and Popper clashed in a debate in London in 1965, but although this event is the focus of the book, there is precious little information about what actually took place. Rather, Fuller launches into an intricate historical-sociological account of their theories and their political significances. His thesis is that the wrong man, Kuhn, won, but this seems to have less to do with the adequacy of Kuhn’s account than with his apparent complicity in the way the Cold War shaped the University.

The implied defence of Popper may not bring much cheer to the pro-science camp, given some of the odd remarks Fuller makes. The suggestion that evolution is now only “presumed true until proven otherwise” accompanies various ill-informed jibes about evolutionary psychology. More troubling, perhaps, is his failure to explain the logic of falsificationism versus inductivism, presenting them as postures or ethics. Aside from these worries, there is much of interest for those wishing to pursue the deeper ramifications of a key academic dispute.

Paul Taylor

Vampire Nation
by Arlene Russo
John Blake, £17.99, ISBN 1 84454 172 X

Arlene Russo, editor of Bite Me magazine, surveys the UK vampire scene with mixed results in a book that reads like an extended fanzine. She distinguishes between those who merely adopt the lifestyle, and ‘real’ vampires, who take it seriously but are definitely not undead. Real ones subdivide into sanguinarians who, as the name suggests, consume blood, and psychic vampires, who conveniently absorb psychic energy from others. Real vampires are born not made, we are told. That means the condition can’t be transmitted, contrary to the fictional portrayals, so if it is inherited there are a lot of vampire families keeping quiet. The most interesting bits are the interviews, which Russo uses to explore different facets of the vampire scene, some decidedly racy. The ‘lifestylers’ are more talkative than their ‘real’ counterparts, which skews the responses. Our everyday image, drawn primarily from Bram Stoker and Hammer films, is of someone definitely dangerous to know, but the majority of the interviewees in the book proclaim themselves “safety-conscious and moral”.
It is suggested that real vampires craving blood can alleviate it with black pudding, and the virtues of vegetarianism are extolled – more Count Duckula than Nosferatu – making them sound surprisingly dull. Many sanguinarians have volunteer donors to satisfy their physical, or at least psychological, needs. Those who drink their own blood thinking that they can get energy from it misunderstand the first law of thermodynamics.
Given our conception of vampires stemming from European folklore traditions, it is surprising to find influences from Eastern philosophy, with references to prana. Similarly “ki wavelength” may be a mispronounced reference to chi, giving these princes and princesses of darkness a new age slant. The book has been carelessly proof-read, contains no index, and little analysis. Not a lot to get your teeth into.

Tom Ruffles

Beginner’s Guide to Reality
by Jim Baggott
Penguin Books, £7.99, ISBN 0-141-01930-1

Although the author does not use the word, this is an introduction to epistemology, the study of how we know, and how we can know that we know. Can we, in fact, be sure that anything is real? Three major problems are logical, psychological and physical.
The logical problem is, how can we be sure of reality unless we have some reality to test it against? Descartes proposed the most famous answer, that he was sure he existed because he was asking the question: cogito, ergo sum. But philosophers have since rejected this. The psychological problem is, that everything we ‘know’ is processed by the brain and nervous system. Not only are these fallible, we have no direct apprehension of what they represent. The physical problem is, that modern physics seems to show that at a basic level, the universe is in principle unmeasurable, that is unknowable. Baggott discusses all these, though he starts, as I think rather misleadingly, with social reality, arguing that it only exists as long as we believe it to exist. For example, money is only money as long as we believe in it. I think it is accepted as simply a means of exchange. ‘Belief ’ has nothing to do with it. The final chapter summarises the arguments, and some might like to read this first.
There is another approach to the problem, a religious one that claims direct apprehension of reality. Personally I don’t accept this, but it deserves discussion. The style is chatty and informal, with lots of references to fantasy and science fiction. Some will find it amusing and illuminating, others merely facetious and tiresome; it really is a matter of taste. The wording is sometimes imprecise, for example ‘purpose’ and ‘function’ seem to be equated, and ‘belief ’ is used in various senses, but overall it is a very readable introduction.

John Radford

Jesus Never Existed
by Kenneth Humphreys
Iconoclast Press 2005 £15 (pb), ISBN 0-906879-14-0

That the story of Jesus is almost entirely myth is no secret to readers of this journal. The near-total lack of contemporary evidence for his existence, the implausibilities and contradictions of the alleged narratives of his life, the absence of any trustworthy independent confirmation, all these combine with the blatant borrowings from earlier sources to make it clear that the Jesus venerated by millions is little more than an abstraction. But is he nothing more?
To assert that there was no individual person named Jesus is next to impossible: proving his non-existence is even more difficult than establishing his existence. The author of this latest attempt has studied his subject deeply and marshals a formidable mass of reasons why we should be sceptical. But, no more than others who have tried to do it, he cannot prove his case. Yes, we concur, the teachings and deeds attributed to Jesus can be traced to earlier sources. Yes, the silence of Paul and other early Christians is very significant. Yes, the less-than-blameless history of Christianity, the absurdly-fabricated narratives of the Virgin Mary and the lives of the saints, confirm our scepticism if not our derision. Yes, the testimony of the Dead Sea scrolls, together with countless other non-canonical documents, show that what we are asked to believe about Jesus is partial, selective, and unreliable. Yet for all that, we cannot say with total confidence that there never was a teacher named Jesus. Humphreys doesn’t help his case by presenting his material in snack-size segments, with confusing sidebars. His five hundred pages, heavy with fact, are impressive but wearing. We are overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of the material he is determined to bring to our notice.
And in the end, it doesn’t matter. Yes, it would be sort of nice to know if a historical Jesus ever existed. But the Jesus in whose name the Crusaders went to war, who inspired the Christian missionaries to impose their beliefs on colonial populations, who justifies the likes of George Bush in his divinely-approved mission, is a fabrication. It doesn’t really matter whether a Jesus actually existed or was built from scratch like a robot. As Voltaire said of Jesus’s father, if he did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. And, God help us, between us we invented Jesus.

Hilary Evans

Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos
by Michio Kaku
Penguin Books, £8.99 (pb), ISBN 0141014636

It has become compulsory to describe any book on quantum physics as “mind-blowing”, and there’s no good reason to buck convention with this title. Authored by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, this book covers some of the latest ideas in the search for a “theory of everything” that can unite the cosmological and quantum realms. Currently the best candidate for this over-arching theory looks to be M-theory, a form of string theory, which can unite relativity and quantum mechanics, unite the fundamental forces, and which posits the existence of multiple universes co-existing in different dimensions. It’s heady stuff, of course, and Kaku does his best to explain it all in terms familiar to the lay reader. What do the fundamental equations of string theory look like? There’s plenty of discussion of collapsing dimensions, sets of equations from one theory emerging as special cases of other theories and so on, but there’s no sign of these mysterious equations ever appearing in the text. Instead the author makes numerous references to popular fiction, particularly science fiction, and to metaphors that the average reader might easily grasp. At times these metaphors seem to be stretched a little too far, but they are clearly designed to appeal to a wider audience. There’s a fairly liberal use of religious/spiritual language, with many references to God and other mythologies. Quantum physics is already part of the tool-set of the more sophisticated mystics, charlatans and pseudo-scientists, and they will find plenty more to grab here. Given some of the implications of the latest string theories, it would be strange if the book were anything but mind-blowing. However, interesting as the subject is, the writing just doesn’t inspire, and the constant use of religious imagery is frankly distracting. It’s a shame, as there’s an interesting book buried in here; a more ruthless edit and clearer focus on the core subject would have helped immensely.

Pan Pantziarka