Customer Reviews

Science: Good Bad and Bogus

5 star:		(5)
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3 star:		(1)
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Gardner has never pulled his punches when it comes to claims of ESP, paranormal abilities, spoon-bending and the like. This book collects 38 pieces he wrote over thirty years, half book reviews and half articles. All of them attack, and in most cases dismember, pseudoscience and its claims.

The book reviews are acid and make interesting reading, but the articles are the meat of the book, because here is where Gardner assembles fully coherent arguments not just to demolish a foolish book, but to show in detail how someone like Uri Geller fools people. It becomes abundantly clear as you read this book that any competent magician (Gardner is one) can duplicate any of the feats of ESP or spoon-bending cited. It's sad, but not surprising, that this never makes the headlines the way Geller's original claims did back in the seventies.

In addition to pieces on modern figures, some less well-known than Geller, Gardner also writes about figures such as Conan Doyle, who was a passionate believer in spiritualism; and Freud, who had a long and very close friendship with a numerologist. There is a short piece on Einstein, who is often cited by parapsychologists as an establishment figure who nevertheless believed in ESP. Gardner comprehensively demolishes the basis for this citation, quoting letters from Einstein showing that he had no such belief, and was in fact very sceptical.

The only reason I haven't given the book five stars is that its very nature as an anthology prevents it from really achieving coherence. It's an excellent addition to the sceptic's armoury, though, and I strongly recommend it, along with another of Gardner's along similar lines: "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science".

I first read this book almost twenty years ago and even though some of the events and principals have faded into oblivion, the basic theme has not. While there are some negative consequences of science, in many ways they are secondary to the enormous benefits. The number of ways in which the scientific approach has benefited our lives are clearly too numerous to mention. And yet, there are those who, largely for personal gain, choose to ignore it when it is advantageous to do so. When that advantage is financial, we can at least understand them, even while we consider them despicable. The saddest of all are the ignorant masses who fall victim to the nonsense that the charlatans dispense.
In this book, Gardner primarily takes on the purveyors of pseudoscientific nonsense rather than the followers, debunking ESP, UFOs and other views that fly in the face of mountains of scientific data that has been painstakingly accumulated and repeatedly verified. There are simple, effective counter arguments against most of the areas of pseudoscience, and Gardner quite effectively makes them, at times properly separating the arguments when they need to be separated. For example, the idea of life after death and mediums communicating with the dead are two separate issues. One can expose the false medium without proving that there is no life after death. It would be so simple for any departed spirit to send a special message that would be conclusive proof that they were alive, and yet no medium has ever managed to do it. The best that is offered is a general "all is good here" style of drivel, which means nothing.
My favorites in these stories are always those that invoke the giant conspiracy explanation of events. Especially hilarious are the proponents of UFOs who firmly believe that the U.S. government has conspired for over fifty years to hide information about crashed alien space ships. I am the first to admit that governments lie to the people, but to believe that such a secret could be kept for so long is ridiculous.
The entire scientific world owes a debt to Martin Gardner for his courage in taking on those who are either very gullible or who are willing to prey on the gullible, all in the name of pseudoscience. To me, the wonders of science dwarf the petty "accomplishments" of the crackpots and sleazeballs he writes about in this book. Much of it is human nature at its' worst.

A classic compendium from the skeptic of skeptics, Martin Gardner. Though the book is now a little dated, the articles and essays on the dubious psychic "research" conducted by Targ and Puthoff are classic examples of why people believe in bizarre things simply because they want them to be true. This should be required reading for high-school and college students.

Remember how in the 1960s and 1970s "human potential" was such a big deal, and people were digging around in psychic phenomena and roll-your-own religion, and then Uri Geller got busted on the Tonight Show and it all went away overnight?

Oh, wait, that didn't happen, did it? Hm. Well, you ought to read this then.

Published in 1981 as "human potential" gave way to "New Age", this is one of Martin Gardner's classic essay collections, a four-fifths-century update on the high weirdness that infected pop culture over the previous twenty years. It's a sequel of sorts to Fads and Fallacies, Gardner's seminal 1952 work that laid the grounds for future skeptical writing, and includes the original 1951 essay "Hermit Scientists" that led to the creation of the latter book. From there, SGBB covers widely varied grounds, not only the aforementioned psychic phenomena (in which a great many of the leading lights of paranormal research such as Rhine, Puthoff, Targ, Sarfatti, and others, are revealed as disturbingly credulous for experienced scientists), but magic, Sherlock Holmes, televangelists of the 1970s, Steven Spielberg (Gardner's review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind was incredibly negative and foresaw many future reviewers' complaints about Spielberg's perceived superficiality), and abuses of astrophysics and quantum mechanics that were directly ancestral to the handwaves of Deepak Chopra and others who invoke "quantum" as a thought-stopping cliche. Gardner, who has long held that knowledge of magic is critical to evaluating claims of the paranormal, provides some interesting hints of the world of magic (a longtime hobby of Gardner's) as background to many of the paranormal items, and extensive discussions of how honest researchers can produce bad science permeate the book.

Gardner has always taken the position that mockery is better than detailed refutation when the patently ridiculous is discussed, and does not at any point spare the snark. He gives many references for the reader experienced in periodical searches, and provides (as he did in "Fads and Fallacies") postscripts to update the subject matter to the time of publication, as well as rebuttals by many of the subjects of his essays (often followed up with counter-rebuttals from himself or others). Almost half the book is book reviews, many of which include extensive background stories relevant to the books.

This book remains in print almost three decades later, and with good reason -- much of the material it criticizes remains as strong as ever, within a culture that increasingly demands of its members more and more credulity for fear of being labeled as intolerant. Gardner's message, over his nearly 60 years of writing, has consistently been to remind people that evidence overrides everything -- be open-minded, but not so much that your brain falls out. If you must navigate today's woo, you must also know about yesterday's, and there is no better book than this for the woo of the '60s and '70s.

Gardner, in his usual fine style, tackles biorhythms, ESP, quantum theory, black holes, faith healing, and much more. The collection also includes letters from readers and the author's replies, which make the book especially intriguing. A large collection of fascinating topics.

There is little I can add to the excellent comments already presented here. The only thing that could have improved this volume would have been a bibliography.

What I liked about Martin Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science", first published in 1952, was that it transported me back to the early 50s, when Scientology and the U.F.O. craze were just beginning and chiropractory was still considered quackery. Who would have thought that these trends would grow so popular?

With "Science: Good, Bad and Bogus", first published in 1981, I was tranported back to the 60s and 70s when the big trend in pseudoscience was ESP and PSI. I can remember watching television shows about ESP when I was a kid in the 70s, but the essays in this book really make the subject come alive. Many of them were first published in magazines and come with postscripts in which various authors respond to Gardner's criticisms and he responds to their's.

From all the hoopla over ESP in the 70s, you would think that it would have continued to gain in popularity, but you don't hear much about it anymore. Instead, the focus has once again shifted to the occult and afterlife, with charlatans like Jonathan Edwards rehashing the same mentalist tricks perfected in the 19th century. One thing remains constant: people are gullable.

A while ago I read Michael Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things", which should have been titled "The Weird Things People Believe". He doesn't really answer the question of why people believe weird things, so I'm still left wondering what drives us to embrace nonsense.

As with nearly all of Gardner's books, this one is a classic. Informative and fun(ny); what more could you want?

Martin Gardner
Science: Good, Bad, & Bogus

(Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1981) 408 pages

A collection of essays, many of which originally appeared in
the New York Review of Books, on a wide variety
of irrational and anti-scientific beliefs including:
parapsychology; biorhythms; astrology; Velikovsky; UFOs; ESP;
magic; psychic key bending; communication with the dead; faith healing;
Scientology; reading by touch; Lysenko and Soviet 'science'; & talking apes.
Because these were separate articles, there is some repetition.
And the book lacks the coherence and systematic organization
of James Randi's Flim-Flam!

Find Randi's book and others like it on the parapsychology bibliography:
Search the Internet for: "OCCULTISM AND SCIENCE".

James Leonard Park, skeptic.

What is it that supporters of psuedo-sciences say to doubters? Usually they say, "Keep and open mind", as if all there is to overcome is prejudice. Mr. Gardner doesn't just dismiss their claims out of hand, he actually investigates the subject and explains exactly why the allegations are so suspect.

This isn't the kind of book most people would want to read in one sitting. But it is a good reference to have on hand if you need to debunk some bunk.