Rosio Pavoris

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, could have been a reasonably interesting book, if only it hadn’t been written by a moron.
It purports to present a general overview of the state of our knowledge of the world around us, but it… doesn’t.

Bryson just jumped into a few specific fields, but it’s painfully obvious he doesn’t have a science background, and he doesn’t have any way to tell unimportant details and junk science from the real stuff. The former wouldn’t be that much of a problem, but the latter is absolutely fatal.
I’m not sure if Bryson thought he could do this because he was motivated by a genuine thirst for knowledge, or if he was just assuming that anything a scientist could do, he should be able to understand fully with ease (that is, this refusal to believe that some people are just smarter than others, which is characteristic of many, many stupid people), but somewhere along the way I think he realised he just didn’t understand what he was talking about, so he turned to human interest stories and sensationalistic catastrophism.

Don’t get me wrong—I like reading about people. Most works on popular science do tend to overlook scientists are human too, and just ignore the combination of situations that led up to important discoveries. In his eagerness to provide this “novel” view of things, though, Bryson is far too willing to just pull things out of his ass.

Still, that doesn’t annoy me nearly as much as his aforementioned catastrophism.
Maybe he felt the general public kicks on fear. Maybe he was right. Either way, after the first section, the entire book just collapses into a pile of FUD: asteroids are going to kill us all and there’s nothing we can do about it, Yellowstone is going to kill us all and there’s nothing we can do about it, disease is going to kill us all and there’s nothing we can do about it, we almost never existed thousands of times over, &c.
All of it is empty bullshit designed to grab people’s attention without having to bother with facts.

Because obviously, facts aren’t his strong point. He perpetuates some embarrassingly obvious myths (like the medieval flowing glass one, and one particularly painful creationist quotemine), and gets some easily-checked facts spectacularly wrong (including the definition of hominid, and a particularly bad one where he called the Spanish flu the worst epidemic in recorded history).
His chapter on climatology seems to be designed to feed global warming denialism, and the bit on human evolution seems designed to bolster supporters of special creation (or, at the very least, multiregionalists).

Even if you’re willing to put up with that, it’s painfully obvious that Bryson just doesn’t understand how science works.
Fully half of the book is devoted to “failings of science” (unafraid to invent some along the way), emphasising how little we know and how often we’ve “changed our minds”. We could use some books to point out limitations in our current knowledge, but Bryson seems to be attacking the very idea of scientific knowledge itself, again simply to get attention.
It’s more than pathetic: it’s harmful.

Bill Bryson probably did more harm to the cause of science with this one book than a thousand earnest creationists ever could.
The fact that it was so popular and got such good reviews indicates just how insidious its effects will turn out to be.

Bryson deserves as many public ridiculings as there are atoms in the period at the end of this sentence: over nine thousand.

(I’m not even tagging this as anything science-related.)