Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim
By Ziauddin Sardar
Granta Publications, £8.99 (pbk), ISBN 1-86207-755-X

I confess I had never heard of Ziauddin Sardar, who has published over forty books and a vast amount of journalism, and has been active in many social enterprises. He is the British-educated son of Pakistani immigrants, born in 1951. He writes with both passion and clarity, and I found the book fascinating. It is the story of his search and struggle, constantly thwarted, for what he sees as the true values of Islam, and their practical implementation. The story is one of incessant travel, both physical and intellectual, and of his interactions with a host of scholars, thinkers, and activists, of all shades of opinion. I take the account to be essentially veracious, with (perhaps) a little literary license when it comes to detailed conversations. What interested me was, first, getting a view of Islam in the modern world from the inside. Islam is still, perhaps, seen by some as monolithic, and often now as extremist. In fact it is, and always has been, highly variegated, driven by factions, and (especially now) in an intellectual, political and spiritual turmoil. It is sometimes said that Islam is in need of a Reformation. Sardar rejects this, arguing that it has already had several. But then so did Christianity before Luther. And the second thing I find interesting is the impression I get of a (in some ways) mediaeval world. The Islam Sardar inhabits seems much like the Christendom of Bede or Chaucer. There is incessant debate about the true meaning of the Qur’an, the revealed word of God, and how to implement it. But there is no hint that the word might not be true at all. Sardar, at least in this book, encounters no non-Muslims, and Islam is accepted like night and day. There is an outside world, but it is intrinsically less civilized and potentially, often actually, hostile. He ends, in the midst of the disasters of the 21st century, with yet another journey:“Paradise awaits”. One might dare to suggest that what is needed is not a Reformation but an Enlightenment.

John Radford

The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology
Michael Gard & Jan Wright
Routledge, £22.99, ISBN 0415 31896-3

Concern about obesity is nothing new: even Hippocrates saw it as a disease. According to Gard and Wright, scientific understanding has made little real progress since, with current research a mass of contradictions, assumptions and moral bias. Media hype about an ‘epidemic’ has added to the confusion, playing on public fears about the risks of modern life. Methods of measuring obesity are inconsistent, research is flawed, conflicting ‘evidence’ abounds, and even the World Health Organization acknowledges the difficulty of evaluating health consequences of obesity.
This is a deliberately controversial book, challenging the idea that diet/exercise are directly related to weight or that TV/computer use in children has any proven link with obesity, for example. It quite rightly points out (repeatedly) that moral censure permeates research (fat = lazy, gluttonous, weak-willed), that there are socio-economic and political factors involved and that every society since the Ancient Greeks sees itself in decline from some supposed Golden Age. However, these are fairly obvious, unoriginal ideas. The book is highly repetitive, sometimes contradicts itself and is in places as over-generalising as those it criticises. The socio-economic theory is not sufficiently expanded either. It does not propose any new theories, preferring to attack or repeat the obvious.
The authors believe science has failed miserably and should be abandoned: “the ability to think beyond science is a great untapped resource” because “there are some domains of life where scientific knowledge is crucial and it is probably right that scientists have the final word. Overweight and obesity do not constitute one of those domains… The reason why the ‘obesity epidemic’ has come about could not be less important”.
After 200 strident pages, the flaccid solution is that we should either “get over body weight all together” or “leave the model of body as machine behind”. Despite the weight of evidence presented, some may find the conclusion that obesity is a moral and ideological issue, not a scientific matter, unsubstantiated, unoriginal and woolly. This is a missed opportunity to make some highly valid points.

Tessa Kendall

The Science of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”
by Michael Hanlon
Palgrave Macmillan, £16.99, ISBN 1403945772

I approached this book with trepidation, not being a Guide fan. I heard none of the radio programmes, have read none of the books, and haven’t seen the film, though I saw some of the television series. But the title is misleading: it isn’t about the Guide, contains little about it, and you don’t need to be a fan to understand it. It is an excellent discussion of many topics raised by the Guide by the Science Editor of the Daily Mail, previously noted for debunking ‘alternative medicine’.
Hanlon leads us on a lively romp through aliens (where are they? – Roswell is “barely even worth a mention”, but he gives the solution to Rendlesham, with apt comment on people’s tendency to see what they expect to see); arguments for the existence of God; the end of the universe; the big bang; time travel; machine translation; teleportation; other worlds; and the interesting fact that if you Google ‘answer to life, the universe and everything’, you get 42 (I tried it and it’s true). The best parts are, first, Hanlon’s withering scorn for the “drivel” (a good example of his robust style) that conscious machines are around the corner. When the film 2001: A Space Odyssey was made in the mid-1960s, it was indeed seriously predicted that we would be talking to computers in a way almost indistinguishable from a conversation with a real person by, well, 2001. As you’ve probably noticed, it didn’t happen, and still hasn’t. (Another example of his style is the wonderful sentence: “Buses occupy a parallel universe that almost but never quite coincides with your own.”) Second, his discussion of people’s misunderstanding of the laws of chance, with surveys showing that people think that vanishingly tiny risks like nuclear power and air and rail travel are more significant than truly risky activities like riding a bicycle, driving and smoking (driving to the airport is vastly more dangerous than the flight). Drive your children to school and you will protect them from assault, abduction etc. But the chances of a child dying in a motor accident are at least 100 times greater than of being murdered by a stranger, so in driving your children to school you are actually exposing them to far greater danger than if they walked.
This is an excellent book exploring fundamentally serious matters in a most entertaining way. Rather a shame that many people will ignore it because they think it’s about the Guide!

Ray Ward

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