Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science 1St Edition Edition

You just know that a book with a range of reviews from five stars to one has hit several nerves. This is a book about hitting nerves and I would strongly suggest that you set aside any review that pretends that it is "dull" or "off the point". Its transparently trying to distract attention, in the manner of a playground bully who pretends that it doesn't hurt when their tormentor turns round and finally hits them back. (You know who are and you are fooling no-one.)
This is a book about the driving spirit in science--the Galilean one--and why this is intrinsically tied up with upsetting people. Why? because the mix of evolved perceptions that could loosely be called "common sense" (e.g. respect for authority, tradition and intuition) are useless for doing science. Worse than that--they are systematically wrong. Telling people that these things are wrong gets up their noses. Doing this about sex and sexuality gets up their...well,...lets call its "noses" as this is a family show. And this book is not just about science--it's also about sex. Inconvenient sex. People who can't be conveniently sexually pigeon-holed, people who raise uncomfortable questions about the nature of human sexuality, people whose sexuality threatens others sense of personal identity, people who dare to apply scientific principles to the most intimate parts of human nature. Sex research, as the editor of the leading peer-reviewed journal in the field is fond of saying "is an outlaw discipline", and nowhere is that more clearly indicated than here. If Dreger hadn't been annoying people--she wouldn't have been doing her job. And the same goes for the people she documents. They need to be animated by the Galilean spirit--that spirit that allows people to take the threats, the lies and the pretended indifference, raise a middle finger and say "With regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them." A great series of detective stories, told in breathless style. Should be required reading on all history and philosophy of science courses (and now is so on mine)

I cannot remember the last time I not only enjoyed a recent book, but believed it to be important. This work is good for a general audience, but it should be of particular interest to anyone in medicine, the life sciences, the social sciences (especially anthropology), and/or who is involved with gender studies/queer advocacy (admittedly, your faithful reviewer here can check off most of the list, so maybe that's why I loved it so much).

Dreger eloquently shows how we must defend the use of evidence and facts to lead our pursuit of justice, and why we should never accept the claim that science and other forms of objective scholarship are just "other ways of knowing". If you really care about standing up for marginalized people (which involves protecting the rights of all of us, really), you need to pay attention to this book.

On a more personal note, it was refreshing to see her sticking up for, or even just finding empathy for, a lot of the scientists whose work has gotten them into hot water with activists, politicians, or scholarly rivals over the years, especially Nap Chagnon and Ed Wilson (both of whom I greatly respect). If you care about positive social change, and especially if you are an academic or an opinion-maker, you absolutely must read this.

Both my husband and I liked it. We are impressed by Ms Dregers work and dedication. She writes with both a sense of humor and
scientific insight. A very easy read, and now we are more informed on subjects we only had a vague bit of knowledge.
Well worth the time, and it's a great way to gain knowledge on a subject we didn't know enough about. We recommend it
to people who are interested in the human condition and mysteries.

Science is hard. It is of course hard because of the toil and frustration involved in eking out the occasional shred of truth from it. But it’s even harder because it asks us to give up some of our most cherished moral and social beliefs in the face of its unrelenting facts. Nowhere is this conflict more apparent than in the social sciences where the wall of faith and ingrained morality constantly runs up against the battering ram of scientific truths. And yet if we want to call ourselves an enlightened species we have to let ourselves be open to letting this wall be chipped and even broken down.

The obduracy of this wall is what lies at the center of Alice Dreger’s book. The title refers to Galileo who literally gave the church the middle finger in his search for the laws governing the heavens and the earth (as the photo below shows, the literal finger is astonishingly kept in well-preserved condition in a museum in Florence). The subtitle is “Heretics, Activists and the search for Justice in Science” and we may think that the age of scientific heretics who were burned at the stake passed with Galileo and Bruno. And yet as Dreger starkly reminds us through her own experience, heretics in science are still shunned and ostracized, thankfully not by being burnt at the stake but by being misrepresented, tarred and left out to wither. What is even more disturbing is that these heretics are often smeared by upholders of the same liberal establishment who claim to respect free inquiry and facts - and Dreger is as liberal as they come.

Dreger made her career studying the history of cruel mutilations and "corrective" surgeries done on intersex people. She found out that forcing men and women to inhabit one sex when their sexual identity was not clear was a fundamental violation of their freedom to choose. She gathered scores of supporters and friends among the intersex community, authored both scholarly papers and popular articles and toured the country giving talks and seminars. In doing all this Dreger should have been regarded as almost the stereotype of an enlightened, liberal feminist intellectual: tough, caring, and willing to dedicate her entire career to the cause of disenfranchised minorities.

And yet the truth is sadly more convoluted than we would expect. Dreger got into trouble when she championed a book by a researcher named Michael Bailey that put forth a controversial theory of why certain men choose to become females. This theory was not perfect but it was based on scores of interviews with intersex people. For some reason many members of the intersex community disagreed with it, which would have been fine and indicative of normal debate. But it's what happened next that was disturbing. Bailey was defamed in articles and newspapers, protestors picketed his house and university, demands were made to fire him and his family was threatened; it was an all too real incarnation of Twitter. The campaign against Bailey spilled over to Dreger and she became the target of similar attacks, which was astonishing given her longstanding support of minorities and the underprivileged. What was happening here was that preconceived notions of fairness and morality were causing people to behave in a distinctly immoral and distasteful manner.

Dreger documents other cases of the assault on freedom of speech, and it's these cases that make the book such a valuable document. Among the most prominent ones are the attacks on biologist E O Wilson by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin and the attacks on the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon by essentially the entire American Anthropological Association. Wilson was trying to put forth a new theory called sociobiology which said that social impulses and human behavior are governed by the same biological causes which govern the behavior of "lower" animals. Chagnon had spent his entire career among a South American tribe named the Yanomamo. His thesis - supported by meticulous observations and passionate intellectual inquiry - was that contrary to the idea of the "noble savage" which proclaims a peaceful, wholesome existence for native tribes which Europeans have corrupted, the Yanomamo practice some savage and violent rituals and can often be fierce warriors who kidnap women and keep them as slaves.

Both Wilson and Chagnon's work went against the morality of Gould, Lewontin and other anthropologists who refused to acknowledge that human behavior could have a biologically ordained and sometimes violent foundation. Their opponents carried on a carefully orchestrated smear campaign against them in talks and articles and turned many academics against them simply because they dared to state controversial facts and offer their own explanations. Wilson had a pitcher of water dumped on his head by activists while Chagnon had a journalist named Patrick Tierney write a sensationalist account in which he claimed that Chagnon had used the Yanomamo as guinea pigs for experiments with infectious pathogens. These were lies and were resoundingly proven as such, but not before the American Anthropological Association decided to set up a task force to condemn Chagnon and try him in absentia.

Not surprisingly, these attacks on Wilson and Chagnon came to nothing because of the essential rot of untruth at their core, but they exposed the shameful tactics that even supposedly liberal and intellectually open academics could indulge in simply because they disagreed with ideas and facts. Dreger had a chance to talk to both Wilson and Chagnon, and she found it hard to believe that especially Wilson - a famously mild-manner and dignified genteel Southern intellectual - could have been painted as almost a quasi-Nazi by other purported intellectuals.

Dreger's story itself has a sad coda and makes her point well: In 2015 she resigned from her position at Northwestern University because she published a controversial fact-based report of consensual sexual activity between nurses and patients. It did not matter that the study was true and raised some interesting questions about the social dynamic in hospitals; for the university faculty what mattered was that it was distasteful to their moral sensibilities.

The book ends with a call for intellectual freedom, and it's hard to overestimate how important this call is in the era of trial-by-Twitter, trigger warnings and campus protests that stifle freedom of speech under the guise of supporting fairness. Whether it's studies of psychological gender differences or racial differences, we continue to be besieged by those who call themselves the upholders of truth, but only as long as the truth pleases them. Dreger warns us that if we continue to ignore inconvenient facts simply because they run up against our ingrained sense of morality and notions of justice, not only will we fail to fathom the truth but we will also fail to be just. This is a trap that liberals especially should watch out for, since it is precisely their love of science and reason which can foster in them a false sense of objectivity and moral superiority and put on blinders. It is especially when we think that we cannot go wrong that we run the most risk of being wrong, and when liberals fall into this trap they ironically turn into staunch conservatives who don't want to know the truth. In Dreger's words, truth and justice go hand in hand. Ignoring truth dooms justice, and ignoring justice dooms the truth. It's a message we should all take to heart.

Favorite non fiction book! Seriously this book is so great!