As the role of science and technology in everyday life grows more pervasive and more complex, it becomes more difficult for a scientifically "illiterate" public to make informed judgments. Zimmerman takes on a range of falsifiers, disinformation specialists, and charlatans to provide the background needed to evaluate environmental and other issues that are in the news and affecting our lives. His topics include scientific illiteracy from "creation science" to graphology; the role of government in the scientific process; claims about pesticides and additives in food; global environmental problems; and the myth of the technological fix. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
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As the role of science and technology in everyday life grows both more pervasive and more complex, it has become ever more difficult for a scientifically "illiterate" public to make informed judgments. In Science, Nonscience, and Nonsense, Michael Zimmerman takes on a wide range of falsifiers, disinformation specialists, and charlatans to provide readers with the scientific background necessary to evaluate environmental and other current issues that increasingly may be a matter of life and death.Zimmerman begins by showing just what science is - and how the criteria of skepticism and falsifiability distinguish it from pseudoscience and mysticism. He offers intelligent, entertaining, and sometimes scathing analyses of bad science - from lottery "systems" and creationism to graphologists and homeopaths, from food and product safety scams to outright scientific fraud. In each case he shows exactly what to watch for - how the most outrageously false claims often contain a grain of truth, and how valid scientific findings may be distorted or selectively quoted to serve the ends of government, business, or special interest groups.
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