Writers of the world: if you’re going to write about how all of science is wrong, at least have the decency to understand at least one of the specific topics you intend to write about.
Every fucking sentence in this book is wrong in some way.
She whines about memetics (which apparently says ideas are like alien insects that can be exterminated with the right pesticide), objectivity (apparently the fact that there are degrees of objectivity means that it’s an incoherent concept), social contracts (incompatible with fundamental human rights, in her mind), the “omnicompetence” of science (being the idea that science can answer any question; she doesn’t even make a case against this, but just repeats the definition a few times while waving her arms wildly (though she does reinvent NOMA yet again while doing so)), parsimony (I still don’t know what she thinks that word means), reductionism (her understanding of which is unplagued by such concepts as emergent complexity, and of course reductionists never see the value of high-level abstraction), behaviorism (which apparently says mind doesn’t do anything), sociobiology (which can’t discuss altruism because it’s not supposed to deal with motives), genes influencing behavior (without even having the decency of building a decent straw man out of genetic determinism), “scientific monoculture” (she doesn’t explicitly say “science is just one way of knowing”, but her arguments, such as they are, do boil down to it), memes again (even more confused than the first time; did you know that in spite of what Dawkins actually said, Dawkins defined memes as static entities?), reductionism again, free market economics (it’s social Darwinism, dontchaknow), the explanatory power of selection (apparently the fact that wrongheaded rules-lawyering is possible undermines the whole concept), and a host of other misunderstood topics (reductionism and memetics among them) too tedious to enumerate.
Her examples of science “done right” are far in between, but equally sad: the Gaia of Margulis and Sagan, and Paul Davies’ dipshitted blather on consciousness and religion.
Considering how obsessed this woman seems to be with Dawkins, she seems to have read very little of his work. If not for some intensely dishonest quotemines sprinkled throughout the book (though Dawkins is far from her only victim in that regard), I’d say all of her information comes from glancing at a blurb on the back cover of The Selfish Gene.
And considering that this book is supposed to be anti-establishment wank, it seems to rely on appeals to authority a bit too much. For instance, did you know Darwin said in the sixth edition of Origin that he didn’t think natural selection was the only driving force behind evolution? Mary Midgley does! Never mind that Darwin didn’t know about genes and so was understandably confused about genetic drift, clearly Dawkins and Dennett are so wrong even people a century-and-a-half ago disagree with them!
It’s not just the things she explicitly tackles that she’s ignorant about though; her digressions and off-the-cuff remarks indicate that she’s ignorant about topics ranging from basic history all the way to basic physics. It should be obvious by now that she’s also incapable of elementary-school-level reading comprehension, though apparently she can type (but not necessarily spell; she mixes British and American spellings (though to be fair, so do I)), if not actually construct a coherent argument. I really don’t know why any publisher would print her drivel, or why anyone with a high school education would read it and come away liking it, as at least six people seem to have done, judging from the cover. I can see how you could fall for the quotemining if you aren’t actually familiar at all with any of the work she discusses, but I find it hard to believe anyone unfamiliar with all of it (which would require both homeschooling and living under a rock) would actually pick up a book by a self-proclaimed “philosopher of science”.
The Myths We Live By is easily the worst book I have ever read. It beats out even Snow Crash. Compared to this, Gödel, Escher, Bach was a masterpiece worth reading. This is now the third book, after Paul Davies’ The Goldilocks Enigma and Paul Arden’s God Explained in a Taxi Ride, that I refuse to keep on my shelves. It’s an endless parade of straw men and painful (and hopefully deliberate) misinterpretation.
tl;dr: Mary Midgley doesn’t know shit about anything she writes about and is a profoundly unpleasant person. I find it hard to believe anyone could genuinely be that dense, so I would say she’s senile or otherwise feebleminded, insane or driven to deliberate misunderstanding (perhaps by lust for publicity or hatred of Dawkins), or a very elaborate troll.
Since I’m a very generous person when it comes to judging others, I’m going with senile.
I want my €20.15 back.
