2009 Vol 99.pdf (2.45mb) - Primate Society of Great Britain

1
EDITORIAL
I have a confession to make – I’m addicted to popular science books. I find
it hard to pass a Waterstone’s without whipping out my credit card (and
loyalty card!) for yet another paperback on primates, evolution,
palaeontology, evolutionary psychology, etc. After all, the book that
effectively started primatology, On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection (C. Darwin, 1859, John Murray, London), was a popular
science tome. Sadly, not all of the recent titles live up to this illustrious
precursor.
I recently had the bad luck to shell out proper folding money for the
paperback edition of Terence Kealey’s Sex, Science & Profits (2009,
Vintage, London). It promised so much; the subtitle is ‘How People
Evolved to Make Money’. I had always thought that evolutionary
economics had great potential – there could be loads of recent research on
biological markets and complex systems such as networks that could inform
such a work. Instead, it turned out to be an exemplar of a worrying trend –
the tendency for authors to take a fairly transparent polemic and ‘sex it up’
(in this case, literally) with a bit of evolution. The central theme of the book
gradually emerges: public funding of science is bad. It is effectively a profree-market
tirade claiming that we slow down the ‘progress’ of civilization
(or his favourite surrogate, technological innovation) by using tax revenues
to pay for research, with some cherry-picked bits of the (mostly older and
often popular) literature sprinkled in to provide a scientific gloss. It doesn’t
wash, for a multitude of reasons, but even the ‘science-y’ bits fall down; his
quoting of S. J. Gould conflates punctuated equilibria with spandrels, and
the attached footnote cites a 1980s book chapter on eighteenth century US
technology! ∗
On the other hand, I also picked up the paperback of Ben Goldacre’s
wonderful Bad Science (2009, Harper Perennial, London). Here is an
engaging, entertaining work full of really good analyses of really bad
science and science reporting. Rather than try to use science as a
justification for a particular point of view, a position that Kealey shares with
the eugenics advocates he censures, Goldacre gives the reader the benefit of
the doubt in terms of being able to understand the concepts involved in the
original research (including statistics), and provides some careful, readable
explanations of the scientific enterprise. His examples show how it can all
go wrong, and be massively misunderstood by a public (and journalists) not
familiar with the process, but he cites enough truly worthy works to
convince the reader that it doesn’t have to be so always. And it’s
∗ To be scrupulously honest, the correct source is listed, as well, but all of
the endnotes for this chapter are listed in seemingly random order.