I recently read a book called Fabulous Science which makes some pretty bold claims as to the honesty of certain highly thought of scientists (Darwin, Mendel, Milliken, Pasteur etc.)
I like this book. Whilst the rest of the world can continue to imagine that Pasteur was a great scientist, I am now safely assured that he was nothing other than a hack who let his religious convictions guide how he reported his results 
Are there any other good books for contrarian know-it-alls?
You might like either Kicking the Sacred Cow or Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions by James P. Hogan, which are both collections of articles and essays about flaws he sees in various aspects of modern science… a fair bit of it’s on his website, if you want a taste of it first.
You might enjoy CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity. It disassembles and debunks preconceptions and misconceptions about faith — in particular the Christian faith.
Have we ever dissected Mere Christianity here? I seem to recall it having some pretty blatant logical failings.
I’d also recommend Lies My Teach Told Me, by James Loewen – although it’s not free, itself, of errors or unsupported statements. That’s the problem with “debunking” books – sometimes they need a little debunking themselves.
Sorry; make that Lies My Teacher Told Me.
Yeah. I’m only interested in books that actually stand up to real scrutiny. Fabulous Science is backed by solid research.
Probably not in this forum. But since you bring it up, I’d just point out that whether there were any fallacies at all is still controversial. I just thought it was a good book for a contrarian. It was for me, anyway, and I’m a contrarian.
If science is your main interest, there’s a book that’s by a contrarian for contrarians — Anything Goes by David Stove. He rips all four of the biggies: Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend.
Perhaps Matthew Sweet’s Inventing the Victorians?
Maybe Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals.
Now that I think of it, there’s this guy by the name of Cecil Adams whose works you might want to check out…
Already read it.
Thanks for the recommendations.
If you’re interested in people who aren’t scientists, you could worse than Them: Men who stare at goats which is a series of interviews with various nutjobs (KKK leaders, UFO weirdos, religious fanatics etc.). The strange thing is that the weirder the whackjob is supposed to be, the more more normal they come across in a sympathtic interview. Plus, it’s very well written and very funny.
You seem to be confusing two different Jon Ronson books. The Amazon page you link to is for a book called Them: Adventures with Extremists. There is a different book by Ron Jonson called The Men Who Stare at Goats (no “Them:” in front).
From the stuff I’ve read on his website, he doesn’t seem to have a very good grasp of the science at all but does have a very persuasive style. Several of his claims have are out and out false and he doesn’t delve into the refutation of his “contrarian” theories at all. That he is endorsing Velikovskys World’s in Collision theory as a credible alternative cinches the deal.
The problem is that, in general, the mainstream consensus is pretty good. For sure there are many instances of the mainstream getting it wrong by ignoring evidence it should have considered but there are also many MORE cases of the mainstream being right and alternative theories having deep flaws which makes them impossible to be right. For someone who is not a deep expert in the field, it can be very difficult to distinguish between the two which makes the entire process of writing a “contrarian” book a process of finding needles in a haystack.
Unless the author is a master of every field in question, it’s highly unlikely that he’s going to get it right.
Actually, wikipedia has a fairly good summary about him.
You could also go to this web site.
Dominic Mulligan writes:
> Yeah. I’m only interested in books that actually stand up to real scrutiny.
> Fabulous Science is backed by solid research.
Now you’re asking far too much. A book is contrarian because some people disagree with it. If Fabulous Science is generally accepted as being accurate, then it’s not really contrarian. You’re going to have to accept that people are going to be suggesting books that are controversial.
Well, I didn’t check to see whether other people thought there were fallacies; I just happened to notice that, in fact, there were.
Since we’ve mentioned books like Worlds in Collision, should we consider “crackpot” to be a subset of “contrarian”? I guess we’d have to. I plowed through a seriously contrarian book about Stonehenge once, to find that the author’s conclusion was that the structure was a launchpad for alien atomic rockets. That was some years ago, and I don’t think “mainstream” thinking has quite come around to his point of view yet.