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Mark Henderson – THE GEEK MANIFESTO : Why Science Matters
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THE GEEK MANIFESTO : Why Science Matters

Mark Henderson
BRAND NEW, HARDCOVER
Mark Henderson
BRAND NEW, HARDCOVER

RM28.00

Why And How We Need To Entrench Scientific Thinking More Deeply Into Public Life

ISBN 9780593068236
Book Condition BRAND NEW
Format HARDCOVER
Publisher Bantam Press
Publication Date 15/09/2012
Pages 336
Weight 0.62 kg
Dimension 24 × 16 × 3 cm
Availability: 2 in stock

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★★ THE GEEKS ARE COMING AND OUR WORLD NEEDS THEM ★★
 
Whether we want to improve education or cut crime, to enhance public health or to generate clean energy, science is critical. Yet politics and public life too often occupy a science-free zone.
 
Britain’s leading science journalist makes an agenda-setting argument that science matters to every aspect of politics with a rallying call to all geeks, wannabe geeks, and secret geeks to join together in a new force our leaders cannot ignore.

There has never been a better time to be a geek (or a nerd, or a dork). What was once an insult used to marginalize those curious people (in either sense of the word) and their obsessive interest in science has increasingly become a badge of honor. And we should be crying out for them.
 
☞ England is a country where only one of 650 MPs has worked as a research scientist,

☞ the government’s drug adviser was sacked for making a decision based on scientific fact rather than public opinion.

☞ A writer can be forced into court for telling the scientific truth,

☞ The media would rather sell papers by scaremongering over MMR vaccines and GM crops than report the less sensational facts.

☞ The NHS spends taxpsyers’ money on sugar pills it knows won’t work.

☞ A mother was convicted of murdering her children because the ‘experts’ couldn’t do maths.

Isn’t it time we took action?
 
It makes a relatively simple point: science suffers at the hands of politicians because few politicians know much about it, and — this is the key point — we let them. Whether one wants to improve education, cut crime, enhance public health, or generate clean energy, science and its experimental method is critical. We need the experimental methods of science – the best tool humanity has yet developed for working out what works.
 
It’s time to stop the nonsense! Yet from the way we’re governed to the news we’re fed by the media we’re let down by a lack of understanding and respect for its insights and evidence. In The Geek Manifesto Mark Henderson explains why and how we need to entrench scientific thinking more deeply into every aspect of our society.
 
The Geek Manifesto explains what needs to happen to entrench scientific thinking more deeply into politics and society; and how those who are concerned can turn their frustrated outrage into positive action that our country’s leaders cannot ignore. A new movement is gathering. Let’s turn it into a force our leaders cannot ignore.
 
In this agenda-setting book, Mark Henderson builds a powerful case that science should be much more central than it is to government and the wider national conversation. It isn’t only that scientific understanding is passed over as decisions are made; the experimental methods of science aren’t applied to evaluating policy either.
 
Politicians, Henderson argues, pay lip service to science for a very simple reason: they know they can get away with it. And that will change only when people who care about science get politically active. It’s time to mobilise the geeks. Something is stirring among those curious kids who always preferred sci-fi to celebrity magazines.
 
As the success of Brian Cox and Ben Goldacre shows, geeks have stopped apologising for an obsession with asking how and why, and are starting to stand up for it instead. The Geek Manifesto shows how people with a love of science can get political, to create a force our leaders can no longer afford to ignore. The geeks are coming. Every countries need us.
 
This important book is a call for rational thinkers to claim for science the primacy that it deserves, and to fight against the dismal scientific ignorance of the political class, against the BS claims of pseudo-science, and against the rearguard obscurantist action of religious zealots.
 
Contributors include Ben Goldacre, Simon Singh, Robin Ince, Evan Harris, Tim Harford, Brian Cox, and Sir Paul Nurse.The World needs a New Enlightenment.
 
It is all very easy for some trendy post-modernism to assume a skeptical and relativist approach to the enormous scientific and technical progress that human kind has delivered in the last two centuries, and easy for some armchair philosophers to dispute the merits of the scientific method.
 
But, regardless of all the problems currently facing human kind, let’s call spade a spade, and make it clear that Enlightenment has worked.
 
That science works, and that it is the only truly reliable investigative method for the advancement of human condition and knowledge acquisition. That rational thinking works. That secular, democratic, liberal progressive societies deliver progress. That progress itself can be achieved. That the solution to current problems is not looking backwards, but forward.
 
But science and rational thinking have all to fight an uphill battle against the still widespread ignorance of too many individuals, and against some undeniable weaknesses of human nature. Religious-inspired magical thinking, tribalism, sectarian thinking, over-simplistic slogan-based thinking and dumb nationalism as personified by the likes of Trump, are all intellectual illnesses into which it is unfortunately too easy to fall, for too many, especially when not armed with a proper educational background.
 
We might have thought that, given the evident importance of science as a foundation stone for growth, many politicians would have been alert to, and informed about, the main benefits and features of scientific thinking, but sadly this is not the case.
 
Actually, too many politicians often indulge, whenever they try to layer a thin veneer of scientific justification onto their policies, in practices of evidence-shopping, evidence-massaging, pseudo-scientific claims, reliance on fringe-science, and disingenuous misunderstanding of the open and provisional nature of science.
 
Henderson urges geeks to mobilise into a political force “that punches its weight” in the fight for evidence-based policy. The Geek Manifesto should be required reading for all those who question the value and importance of science.
 
﹉﹉﹉﹉﹉﹉﹉﹉﹉﹉﹉﹉﹉﹉﹉﹉
Review From The Guardian : by Nick Cohen
 
Britain’s scientific illiteracy is a cause for despair, but Mark Henderson offers answers
 
In 2009, I went to the Penderel’s Oak pub near London’s high court to address a meeting in defence of Simon Singh. The evening was gloomy and so was my mood. Anyone familiar with public speaking will know that even if a British audience agrees with you, it does so in a spirit of weary resignation.
 
Other countries have revolutionaries. We have grumblers. “It’s a bad business, but what can we do?” should be our nation’s motto. But not at the Penderel’s Oak. The audience was composed of bloggers and scientists from the “skeptic” movement (always spelt with “k”).
 
Mr Justice Eady, a judge who is not at ease with the freedoms of open societies, to put the case against him mildly, had infuriated them by allowing chiropractic therapists to sue Singh for saying that their “alternative remedies” were bogus and on occasion dangerous.
 
In the lawyers’ kleptocracy that is modern Britain, the action might have cost the science writer £1m. Something must be done, they roared, and they did it. Emboldened by their support, Singh fought for his right to warn about dangers to public health and won.
 
The skeptics used their net skills to track down chiropractic therapists who were falsely implying that they could cure childhood ailments. By the time they had finished, the authorities were investigating one in four of Britain’s back-bashers. Supposedly feeble nerds launched a movement for libel reform and made it the most dynamic free speech campaign since the battle to overturn the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
 
In short, they turned the defence of the scientific method into a novel and welcome political force. British skepticism has its entertainers – Dara O’Briain, Tim Minchin, Robin Ince and Dave Gorman – who are not just comics, but persuasive proponents of Enlightenment values.
 
It has a star in Brian Cox and a hero in Simon Singh. Now it has a political programme, The Geek Manifesto by Mark Henderson, a former science editor of the Times. I do not mean to disparage him when I say that he has produced a pamphlet rather than a book that will last. His writing is urgent and for today.
 
He warns that our scientific illiteracy hobbles our chances of finding economic recovery and policy-making that rises above the calamitous. Of Britain’s 650 MPs, only one is a research scientist – 158 have a background in business, 90 were political advisers and 86 lawyers. I could take a cheap shot on the lines of: “Is it any wonder we are so misgoverned?”, but journalists have no right to adopt a superior tone.
 
The British media, including supposedly serious newspapers and broadcasters, have propagated every variety of pseudo-science. Their excuse for airing the outlandish view that, say, MMR jabs cause autism is that they are seeking “balance,” as if there is a middle way between the tested and the spurious; as if you can announce: “Some people say two plus two equals four, others that it equals five.

The truth as ever lies somewhere in between, so let us say it is four and a half.” Henderson is close to despair when he examines the number of students studying science in England and Wales. There are so few of them we do not have enough graduates to supply qualified maths, physics and chemistry teachers to inspire the next generation.
 
We are stuck in permanent intellectual decline and I would, if I could, force every politician in the land to read this book and act on Henderson’s conclusion that we need to abolish A-levels and introduce a baccalaureate system that would compel sixth formers to take at least one science subject.
 
What would happen then is a question Henderson does not pose. He says that to ask where a culture that respected science would lead is to miss the point.
 
Science is about means, not ends. If we wanted to improve public life, we would insist that the state pilot-tested policies before implementing them. What policies the testing would lead to is not his foremost concern. Yet Henderson is not quite as detached as he seems. Like any other political campaigner, he has enemies to confront.
 
He is infuriated that Britain’s rulers plaster the country with warnings about threats to health and safety, but allow alternative health practitioners to peddle quack remedies that do not tell the patient they cannot work.
 
He admonishes the greens for their superstitious refusal to allow GM food and nuclear power, and the greens’ cousins among the climate-change deniers, who cannot accept restrictions on carbon fuels that affront their prejudices. But he will not touch religion, the greatest source of evidence-denying quackery in the world. Nor in my experience – I am a patron of Westminster Skeptics – does the wider skeptic movement.
 
Women may have their rights denied because of medieval doctrines, divinely ordained homophobes and racists may indoctrinate the credulous, but the majority of skeptics remain in our timid liberal consensus – as frightened of religion as the Victorians were of sex.
 
Henderson begins by quoting Bertrand Russell’s optimistic view that “a habit of basing convictions on evidence… would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which this world is suffering”. I am sure that the dogged old atheist would find much to admire in The Geek Manifesto. But he might also detect a faint whiff of intellectual cowardice.

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About the Author :
 
Mark Henderson, the Science editor of The Times, is an award-winning journalist who has covered science for The Times since 2000, building a reputation as one of the UK’s most respected and best connected journalists in the field. As well as covering science news he is a regular contributor to comment pages and played a pivotal role in founding their science supplement, Eureka, for which he writes features and a regular column about science and politics.
 
Freelance writing includes recent work for the British Medical Journal, Prospect, and the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary program.
He is an accomplished broadcaster for TV and radio, whose recent appearances include BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC4’s “Dinner with Portillo,” BBC Breakfast, Sky News, LBC, and BBC R4’s “Material World.” He is also a regular panelist at the Royal Institution, the Wellcome Collection, and the Cheltenham Science Festival.
 
In 2011 Mark Henderson was awarded the European Cancer Reporter Prize and the Royal Statistical Society Prize for statistical excellence in journalism.

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