The Best American Science Writing 2006 by Atul Gawande
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Money and politics taint everything"
(A pearl of wisdom)

About a year ago I reviewed here on Goodreads The Best American Science Writing 2005 , a marginally recommended read that includes unquestionable jewels such as Frank Wilczek's essay Whence the Force of F = ma or Small Silences by Edward Hoagland, a wonderfully lyrical piece about the beauty of nature. Here I am reviewing the next issue in the set, which presents the presumably best science essays from 2006. I like this set better, because not only does it contain fewer "meh" pieces, but mainly because it conveys a powerful and very scary message about the many ways science is manipulated.

Three essays in particular show the mechanisms of manipulation. The best essay of the set, The Tangle by Jonathan Weiner, is about attempts to solve the mystery of a neurological "disease that once afflicted people living on Guam." An outsider in the field, a botanist, developed a hypothesis that the illness was a result of the Guam Chamorros eating bats that fed on cycad seeds. The hypothesis, likely because of its simplicity, brought its author instant fame. However, it also resulted in government-supplied research money disappearing from other research projects on related topics, which in turn caused many other researchers to work on debunking the cycad-bat hypothesis. As of the essay's writing date, they have largely succeeded.

Neil Swidey's essay What Makes People Gay? is almost equally fascinating. It presents the research on connection between genetics and sex orientation, but what really stands out is the clear illustration of the role of advocacy groups in influencing the flow of research money and even in determining which research projects should be condemned before any work has been done. Money and politics are at their ugliest again!

Politics, and specifically the politics of race, is also the backdrop of Jack Hitt's Mighty White of You, an essay that reflects on the theory about pre-Clovis people in North America. The abstract of the article states it bluntly:

"...these new theories have less to do with science than with a distressing and not-so-subtle racism."

What I probably like the most about the three essays is that their authors do not take sides in the argument (first two are more neutral than the third one). Science should not take any sides. One of the basic tenets of science is cultivating doubt. Expressing doubts about currently prevailing societal beliefs and attitudes should be an important goal of science.

Briefly about three other essays that I like a lot. H. Allen Orr's Devolution, about the so-called "intelligent design" theories nicely debunks the arguments used by the debunkers of theory of evolution. Paul Bloom's Is God an Accident? posits that religion may be a natural result of the way humans perceive the world. The author talks about the dualism inherent in human understanding of ourselves and our world, and it immediately reminded me of Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading

Finally, the essay that could have easily been the best in the entire collection, Richard Preston's Climbing the Redwoods about the world of redwood canopy, the mysterious world over thirty stories above ground. But the author completely spoils the fascinating topic by focusing on climbing the tallest trees and by his utterly insane fetish for numbers, especially big numbers. What a waste!

Three stars.

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