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Wolpert draws on the entire history of science, from Thales of Miletus to Watson and Crick, from the study of eugenics to the discovery of the double helix. The result is a scientist's view of the culture of science, authoritative, informed, and mercifully accessible to those who find cohabiting with this culture a puzzling experience.
A scathing indictment of American modern-day culture examines the current disdain for logic and evidence fostered by the mass media, religious fundamentalism, poor public education, a lack of fair-minded intellectuals, and a lazy, credulous public, condemning our addiction to infotainment, from TV to the Web, and assessing its repercussions for the country as a whole. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.
Science is undergoing an identity crisis! A renown psychologist and biologist diagnoses our age of wishful, magical thinking and blasts out a clarion call for a return to reason and the search for objective knowledge and truth. Fans of Matt Ridley and Nicholas Wade will adore this trenchant meditation and call to action. Science is in trouble. Real questions in desperate need of answers—especially those surrounding ethnicity, gender, climate change, and almost anything related to ‘health and safety’—are swiftly buckling to the fiery societal demands of what ought to be rather than what is. These foregone conclusions may be comforting, but each capitulation to modernity’s whims threatens the integrity of scientific inquiry. Can true, fact-based discovery be redeemed? In Science in an Age of Unreason, legendary professor of psychology and biology, John Staddon, unveils the identity crisis afflicting today’s scientific community, and provides an actionable path to recovery. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Staddon answers pressing questions, including: Is science, especially the science of evolution, a religion? Can ethics be derived from science at all? How sound is social science, particularly surrounding today’s most controversial topics? How can passions be separated from facts? Informed by decades of expertise, Science in an Age of Unreason is a clarion call to rebirth academia as a beacon of reason and truth in a society demanding its unconditional submission.
This book simultaneously provides multiple analyses of critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century while showcasing the scholarship of this new generation of critical scholar-educators. Needless to say, the writers herein represent just a small subset of a much larger movement for critical transformation and a more humane, less Eurocentric, less paternalistic, less homophobic, less patriarchical, less exploitative, and less violent world. This volume highlights the finding that rigorous critical pedagogical approaches to education, while still marginalized in many contexts, are being used in increasingly more classrooms for the benefit of student learning, contributing, however indirectly, to the larger struggle against the barbarism of industrial, neoliberal, militarized destructiveness. The challenge for critical pedagogy in the twenty-first century, from this point of view, includes contributing to the manifestation of a truly global critical pedagogy that is epistemologically democratic and against human suffering and capitalist exploitation. These rigorous, democratic, critical standards for measuring the value of our scholarship, including this volume of essays, should be the same that we use to critique and transform the larger society in which we live and work.
Reading by Starlight explores the characteristics in the writing, marketing and reception of science fiction which distinguish it as a genre. Damien Broderick explores the postmodern self-referentiality of the sci-fi narrative, its intricate coded language and discursive `encyclopaedia'. He shows how, for perfect understanding, sci-fi readers must learn the codes of these imaginary worlds and vocabularies, all the time picking up references to texts by other writers. Reading by Starlight includes close readings of paradigmatic cyberpunk texts and writings by SF novelists and theorists including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Patrick Parrinder, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Varley, Roger Zelazny, William Gibson, Fredric Jameson and Samuel R. Delaney.
UNREASON: Exploring Pseudoscience, Conspiracies, and Extraordinary Claims is a collection of forty-five of the best articles the legendary Skeptical Inquirer magazine has published in the past decade. Featuring articles from writers including Neil deGrasse Tyson on the process of science, Richard Dawkins on the standards of truth, Elizabeth Loftus on memory, Steven Pinker on the notion of progress, and many others covering topics from the politicization of science to the frightening rise of misinformation, each entry in this collection brings scientific examination to bear in order to ferret out the facts and misconceptions behind popular claims. All of the articles within are interesting and readable. Yet they are also quite diverse. Some articles reinforce and complement each other; others (as happens in science) may voice disagreements or differing perspectives. But they all have one thing in common: a respect for evidence—a demand for the best, most well-tested, most scientifically reliable information. Readers will learn: Why and how conspiracy rumors start, spread, and readily gain believers How to stay afloat in a sea of disinformation and survive the age of misinformation Why and how we form beliefs and adhere to them so powerfully How and why memory is fallible—and what we can do about it How pseudoexperiments mislead the public about science Unreason will arm readers with scientific knowledge to curb the misinformation and misconceptions that increasingly threaten our civil discourse. Even further, these essays present a way for us to be better citizens, equipped to deal with the winds of misinformation and disinformation swirling about us and better able to look ahead to a world where science and reason—indeed just good old common sense—can prevail.
This book places Freud’s theory of the reality principle in relation to both everyday experience and global issues of the 21st century and illustrates how it may be practically applied. Arguing against more critical recent accounts of Freud’s science, the author seeks to show how one might apply the scientific method to everyday life. It demonstrates how Freud contributes to a better understanding of reason and how this in turn can be used to unravel the role of unreason in both politics and personal relationships. Including critical examinations of topics such as Narcissism, Victimhood and Empathy, this engaging reappraisal of Freud’s relevance to contemporary life offers fresh insights for psychology, psychoanalysis and cultural theory; as well as practical guidance for a general reader.
In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno warned that industrial society turns reason into rationalization, and Polanyi warned of the dangers of the self-regulating market, but today, argues Stiegler, this regression of reason has led to societies dominated by unreason, stupidity and madness. However, philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century abandoned the critique of political economy, and poststructuralism left its heirs helpless and disarmed in face of the reign of stupidity and an economic crisis of global proportions. New theories and concepts are required today to think through these issues. The thinkers of poststructuralism Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida must be re-read, as must the sources of their thought, Hegel and Marx. But we must also take account of Naomi Klein's critique of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School and her account of the 'shock doctrine'. In fact, argues Stiegler, a permanent 'state of shock' has prevailed since the beginning of the industrial revolution, intensified by the creative destruction brought about by the consumerist model. The result has been a capitalism that destroys desire and reason and in which every institution is undermined, above all those institutions that are the products par excellence of the Enlightenment the education system and universities. Through a powerful critique of thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Stiegler develops new conceptual weapons to fight this destruction. He argues that schools and universities must themselves be transformed: new educational institutions must be developed both to take account of the dangers of digitization and the internet and to enable us to take advantage of the new opportunities they make available.
The relationships between science and religion are about to enter a new phase in our contemporary world, as scientific knowledge has become increasingly relevant in ordinary life, beyond the institutional public spaces where it traditionally developed. The purpose of this volume is to analyze the relationships, possible articulations and contradictions between religion and science as forms of life: ways of engaging human experience that originate in particular social and cultural formations. Contributions expound on this theoretical and ethnographic research into different manifestations of scientific and religious cultures in the contemporary world.