This is hopefully to be the first of many entries in my online reading log. This is the most recent book I’ve finished; there are others I’ve read lately and would like to add to the log sooner or later.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, by Tom Bethell, is well worth the reading. It introduces some much-needed scepticism to a reader who blindly takes many of today’s popular scientific theories for granted.

The author starts by expressing concern that journalists, who are happy to criticise politicians, are all too submissive to scientific opinion. Throughout the book we see how politics can pollute science, particularly when it’s government-funded. We are shown that the “smart money” of private investors just hasn’t been poured into certain scientific endeavours that have been promising and claiming breakthroughs for decades, but still don’t seem to have gotten anywhere.

Some chapters were on issues I’d never been particularly interested in or known much about, and it was illuminating to become aware of hidden controversies that it would seem many politicians and scientists would prefer we remained blissfully ignorant of.

The chapters were great crash courses on the significant shortcomings of various scientific theories. The Introduction and Conclusion served as crash courses in an extreme-right way of looking at science and funding. Therein is, of course, something of which to be wary: such an unbalanced and anti-left book could well be very misleading. However, even with a very sceptical eye, some of the insights into how the scientific community shuns those who dare to question questionable theories and offer alternatives, and some of the examples of misinformation that is widely used to support modern science, are very shocking.

The book made me realise I was given a very one-sided education on certain issues at school, one such issue being the Kyoto Protocol. Being given a list of benefits without a single mention of negative aspects and controversies is like being taught history from a single viewpoint without any regard for the necessity to understand that true history encompasses differing viewpoints. Being taught a questionable scientific theory as scientific fact is like being indoctrinated with the propaganda of a political régime, seeing its corrupt history through rose-tinted glasses.

The book’s front cover says “Liberals have hijacked science for long enough. It’s time to set the record straight.” Even if this book goes too far in some issues – and I’m not trying to imply that it does – I think it would be foolish to outright dismiss everything it says, and I think it would be right to say that the science I was taught here in New Zealand, like that taught elsewhere in the world, had a strong political bias to the left.

I find that when I start reading up on issues like those covered in this book, I start to see what was once unquestionable in my mind as a popular opinion that isn’t necessarily based on the facts and the truth at all.

Sometimes when reading material like this I find myself instinctively not believing a point. That should set alarm bells ringing, because more often than not the deeply held opinion is based on popular opinion, not facts, and once the author goes about building an argument my puny opinion can’t stand up to it. When you read about all sorts of issues, the unpopular way of looking at them tends to make the most sense.

Perhaps it would be unwise to completely swing around to the radical version of science offered in the book, but there’s certainly no harm in reading up on the other side of these issues so that we can be in a better position to understand the likelihood of a certain theory being correct, instead of regurgitating spoon-fed science as fact.

Conservatives will find themselves nodding their heads, and liberals will find themselves instinctively disagreeing. Anyone with a bit of common sense will see the irony, or perhaps even hypocrisy, when such a political book criticises politics, but if you get beyond this and evaluate the individual arguments by their own merits then you’ll have had a mind-opening and worthwhile experience.

So, since this book reveals some shocking insights into science today, and since it provides a much-needed, fuller understanding of some popular scientific theories by presenting an argument against them, I would heartily recommend it to anyone.