CHAPTER 2, PART 8  of 8

From Spin! How the News Media Misinform and Why Consumers Misunderstand, by Bob Conrad, Ph.D.

Now available at Amazon in paperback, Smashwords and for the Kindle. Get a free review copy by emailing me.

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Oversight, or not

Given the significant potential for misinformation by unknowledgeable gatekeepers, and the increasing inability to check facts, it would seem that, as with most other types of organizations, an external level of accountability over newsrooms would be beneficial.

Those of us who work in government are used to high levels of oversight to ensure accountability. It’s an imperfect system, one that can increase bureaucracy and inefficiencies. Yet imagine the outcry if government entities were to run themselves the same way newsrooms self-correct errors, if they do.

Granted, these two types of systems are radically different, and a comparison between government entities and newsrooms is unfair. At the same time, there’s something to be said for systems of accountability in which others exercise control over operations in order to ensure we are not, at the end of the day, kidding ourselves.

The absence of formal oversight over news media is both essential and problematic. The media need the right to be wrong in order to ultimately ensure a free press. The long-standing American history of the relatively free, uncensored press is practically set in stone and for good reason. The news must be free if in fact the public is to be informed. This freedom, though, also guarantees the right to be wrong.

This means that First Amendment freedoms come with a price. For the news media, freedom of the press means different things to different people. Many reporters assume such freedom automatically removes them from any role other than that of information disseminator – unless, of course, that role has managed to influence a policy change of some sort. Then the news role becomes something to be championed. (News outlets frequently boast of their own press awards, which almost always receive mention on their editorial pages and beyond, especially, for example, when a major policy change occurred or somebody ended up in jail, as a result of their reporting.)

Why reporters purposefully adopt such an unassuming stance is puzzling to those of us outside newsrooms, particularly if we are also on the receiving end of negative stories. An examination is therefore needed into what actually goes on in the journalist’s mind when he or she is reporting – and how audiences interpret news reports.

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Now available at Amazon in paperback, Smashwords and for the Kindle. Get a free review copy by emailing me.

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Chapter 2, part 7 of 8

Increased inaccuracies and mistrust

Despite the increasing influence of citizen journalists, mistrust of news continues to grow rapidly. The Pew Research Center (www.people-press.org) released in 2009 its annual report examining public evaluations of the news media. The subtitle of the Pew’s news release at the time: “Press accuracy rating hits two-decade low.”

Pew’s 2011 report had similar findings. Even though citizens view news organizations as more credible than government and business, “negative opinions about the performance of news organizations now equal or surpass all-time highs on nine of 12 core measures the Pew Research Center has been tracking since 1985.”

The reason for this new low is, in part, because reporters do not have adequate systems in place to ensure accuracy or fairness. Instead, it is up to bloggers, researchers and, sometimes, other media to analyze and report contextual errors, furthering the power of information shapers outside of the traditional newsroom.

Nothing illustrates this better than how the press report on complex information, such as scientific issues. Others are often left to correct serious errors or omissions committed within news reports about scientific issues. Research about the news media explains why these errors occur.

In 2000, two researchers from Texas A&M University conducted a study of 88 journalists from 62 of the largest U.S. newspapers. One of the study’s findings, by Tom Vestal and Gary Briers, was that journalists’ knowledge of biotechnology was lower than their perceived knowledge of the field. In short, the reporters and editors who participated believed they knew more about biotechnology than they actually did.

Other studies may explain why reporters have such views of their own knowledge. Agricultural communications research has delved into reporter accuracy about agricultural issues – from normal farm practices to biotechnology – to understand journalists’ knowledge and beliefs.

One study surveyed Arkansas newspaper editors. It found that they had no formal agricultural training or background, yet they were charged with determining if agricultural news was indeed newsworthy.

Another study found that negative newspaper coverage of Oklahoma swine production was written by reporters who did not have an agricultural background.

In another study, examining The Associated Press news between 1997-2000, found that less than one-half of the statements made in agricultural news articles contained sentences with verifiable facts.

Finally, in an analysis of organic food news media coverage, researchers found that news media generally frame organic agriculture positively. They wrote: “… the positive attitudes toward organic agriculture are already in place, even if they may be based on marginal scientific evidence.”

More recently, a CNN report glowingly covered a supposed clean-energy technology that had elsewhere been debunked, without any pretense of fact checking.

When reporters report on issues for which they have little knowledge, they often lack the awareness to ask the most important questions, and they tend to choose sources that may or may not have the necessary expertise about the topic being covered.

In addition, as newsrooms have been downsized, the ability for reporters and editors to take time to adequately fact-check stories has also diminished, especially when it comes to scientific or complex issues, including medicine, health, law and government policies.

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I am posting the introduction and first two chapters of my new book over the next few weeks.

The book is available for pre-order at Amazon. I am also giving away a limited number of advance, review copies to those willing to review it on Amazon, or on news sites or blogs, prior to the release date of Jan. 3, 2012. Just email me for details.

INTRODUCTION, PART 3

Now available at Amazon in paperback, Smashwords and for the Kindle. Get a free review copy by emailing me.

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In this book, I make the case that reporters and editors are the creators of “spin,” despite claims or assumptions of objectivity and fairness. News outlets, news magazines in particular, “long ago realized their job is to interpret the news, not to report it,” as one commenter on my blog explained. This perspective is used as justification for context revision, and to me, this is reason for concern. Interpretation can too often lead to misconstruing and even fabricating news, especially if the reporter does not adequately understand the issues on which he or she is reporting.

Journalists are meant to strive toward objectivity, but the process of news reporting – contrary to claims by many journalists – rather than being designed to enhance objectivity, is prone to bias. The previously mentioned he-said/she-said fallacy is one example. This book examines in detail many more.

Undoubtedly, one complaint this book will receive is going to be of the ad hominem variety: “Well, aren’t you a professional spin doctor?” Or the straw man question: “Why don’t you criticize spin by the likes of corporate PR defenders?” While such questions are irrelevant to the intention of this book, these points deserve to be addressed.

Public relations personnel are employed to promote and defend their clients and organizations. I believe PR professionals should also strive to be objective in their roles. By adopting a holistic view, and by candidly providing to clients and employers the perceptions people outside of the organization have of their company, public relations counselors can actually play a pre-emptive role for clients and employers. This perspective may help mitigate potentially negative press coverage and prevent or minimize crisis events.

That said, it is critical to note that PR has a defined role for an organization, so bias is inherent in that position. The distinction between news reporting and public relations advocacy (advocacy that is included in the Public Relations Society of America’s code of ethics) is obvious. When done ineptly, PR fiascoes tend to receive swift news coverage, frequently negative, to the point of regularity. Poorly conveyed and unethical PR imbroglios could fill multiple volumes.

What is much less obvious is how news reporters and editors spin news. That is what this book explores.

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How punk rock evolved as a subculture is a study not free from controversy. Punk, forever ingrained ideologically as anti-mainstream has, since its inception, been granted credibility by the very mainstream it takes strides to loathe. The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Ramones, easily the top punk bands of their day, were all on major record labels and achieved relatively high levels of commercial success.

It is, therefore, common for youngsters—usually those filled with angst and rebellion from circumstance, familial fallout, or just normal adolescent restlessness—to get a taste of punk from mainstream culture only to then gravitate toward the aggressive sounds of punk rock also predominant in underground, subcultural circles where, adherents maintain, the more authentic punk rock is found.

For many who make the effort to follow or participate in the underground punk scene, there is available a punk-based intellectualism that is grounded in the anti-authoritarian and Do-It-Yourself ethos offered by punk rock outside of the mainstream of music—punk or otherwise. The music, the message, and the social outlook offered by punk rock can be energizing, attractive, and cause for long term investment for many of punk’s adherents, who play in bands and produce their own magazines, records, and CDs.

The punk-influenced paths of many have led to different callings: politics, activism, education, and, for Dr. Greg Graffin, lead singer of the band Bad Religion, academia. But there has never been a strong, concerted effort to publicly link punk rock and science in the way that Graffin does with his book, co-written by Steve Olsen, Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God.

It’s about time. Graffin, reflecting on his growth as a person inspired by punk rock, details his parallel paths in life: one steeped in fronting Bad Religion, and the other in the academic world as a student, field worker, researcher, and ultimately, a part-time professor. Anarchy Evolution is a document, partly an autobiography, of Graffin’s interest in punk rock that also led to the pursuit of a doctorate in zoology from Cornell University.

Read the rest of this review at Skeptic.com.

I generally loathe the winter holidays; winter in general, in fact. I prefer with no exceptions 105-degree weather over any day with a temperature below 60. And winter in Reno is bizarrely unpredictable. We can have more than a foot of snow one day and be wearing shorts in 60-degree sun the next. In the middle of January.

I once drove through a blizzard on the I-80 pass from California to Reno in early June. The variation, and the climate’s associated winter sports, are not for me. One day, retirement pending, Deb and I (and the animals) will have a winter home further south. Hopefully that day will be tomorrow, or the next.

In the meantime, after a couple months of ultimately mind-numbing research journal reading – I just turned in my doctoral comp exam, part of my dissertation – I’m back on a reading kick.

Here’s my list that I hope will make it through January, when I have to pick up the journals full steam again.

• Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer. I recently completed Krakauer’s lesser known Under the Banner of Heaven, about the Mormon faith, its history and its offshoots. Krakauer, in typical journalistic fashion, takes – and creates – trails that perhaps wouldn’t be explored elsewhere with the result being both an emphasis on things otherwise ignored in the mainstream media, and the potential for misappropriating facts. Krakauer regularly enjoys controversy as a result of his books, and I fully expect this to be the case with Where Men Win Glory. I’m also partially intrigued by the notion that the government parades Tillman’s death as a PR stunt despite Tillman’s ominous forecast of exactly that being the case, should he die in combat.
• How to Relax Without Getting the Axe: A Survival Guide to the New Workplace by Stanley Bing. I read the previous iteration of this book just over a year ago and giggled myself silly at Bing’s wit and wisdom. Unlike Ferriss’ Four-Hour Workweek, Bing has practical – if not a little dangerous – advice on how to work as if you are retired. Plus he’s funny. Really funny. Supposedly this new version is rewritten with a recession economy in mind.
• What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell. I’m not sure what else can be said about Gladwell; he’s a non-fiction genius and possesses a rare trait among journalists – taking complex science and turning it into an exciting tale that forces you to rethink your very existence. I got this on audio for the commute, and I can’t wait.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. There are some days when I have to just kill people. That’s what the Xbox is for. Call of Duty 4 was stellar, but I haven’t touched my Xbox in months. Today that changes.

Enjoy your winter. I’ll be inside.

Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors

Outliers: The Story of Success is Gladwell’s latest and arguably his best. In Outliers, Gladwell takes a look at select anecdotes of what makes for success. An interesting conundrum is that Outliers is potentially a misnomer. It should really be called Success: The Story of Outliers.

Why? Statistically speaking, outliers are data that skew curves – they reside outside the normal bell curve which makes them special, and at times, a thorn in the side of researchers. Throw out an outlier and you might be labeled unethical. Keep it in, and your data may not accurately portray normal distributions.

Yet outliers are perfectly normal and to be expected. In essence, they are the aberrant data points, like rolling double sixes six times in a row with a pair of dice, which, while rare, will happen eventually – a bit like why so-called “cancer clusters” are more likely explained as statistically abnormalities than for alleged environmental causes. A more thorough look at outliers as phenomena is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which looks at the effects in life of outliers.

What Gladwell does is look at select outliers as personalities, such as Bill Gates, the Beatles, Jewish lawyers in New York and so on. His questions are: What makes them special, different and successful? In this way, his book is more about what makes for success rather than what makes for an outlier.

Nevertheless, Gladwell’s points remain. If you’ve read the rather cheesy book, The Luck Factor: The Four Essential Principles by Richard Wiseman, it’s as if Gladwell found a parallel track with Wiseman. Success, they both say, relates to circumstance, perseverance and, perhaps most importantly, seizing opportunities which may not appear as opportunities at the time they are presented. (Wiseman tells you why you should always take opportunities presented if you want to be more successful in life.)

Is it really that simple? Not really. It’s actually far more enigmatic, and Gladwell as expected treats the subject with a great deal of thought. He concludes with this:

“Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky – but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.”

Gladwell is always a recommended read. His evaluations and conclusions of collections of attractive anecdotes in Outliers may be shocking to some – why a generation of Jewish lawyers in New York are so successful, why the month you were born may determine your success as a hockey player — yet his treatment is always given considerable thought, which helps to put himself at the top of best-seller charts. Concluding with a chapter on his family history is particularly fitting considering Gladwell himself is an outlier.

Think again.

This book shows, in an uncompromising way, how people with the best of intentions to help others end up doing more harm than good. Specifically, Maren takes his first-hand experience, the anecdotes of others and the words and records of the organizations he criticizes, to show how international charity, aid organizations and the United Nations are less set up to help poor people than they are to further their own bureaucracies.

As an aid worker himself and later a correspondent, Maren examines 19 years of foreign aid in Kenya, Burkina, Faso, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, Ethiopia and the U.S., to show how foreign aid did far from improving situations in these countries; instead, these organizations made things worse, far worse.

Aid organizations, Maren concludes, end up epitomizing ethnocentric colonialism at the expense of the poor people they allege to help. Maren’s unforgiving research paints a picture the commercials of Sally Struthers are incapable of and stridently resistant to telling. Humanitarian intervention, as Maren pens it, is a destructive force preying on the guilt of those who appear to be better off — middle class, American consumers.

As Maren convincingly shows, however, the road to hell is paved with the illusions of modern civilization. The overt victims are evident while the less-obvious victims remain naïve and in denial. With any luck, The Road to Hell will change that.

CLARIFICATION (9/8/08): This is not to say that charity is, in and of itself, a bad thing. My wife and I donate to certain ’causes’ (and volunteer our time and services), and I wholeheartedly recommend micro-lending as a form of direct-to-lender ‘aid.’ The process of lending as Kiva.org does it has an incentive — payback — as its success. It’s not a handout. I can’t recommend Kiva enough, assuming they don’t recruit Sally Struthers as a spokesperson anytime soon.

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Cynthia Eller wields a cunning scythe. Bit by bit, she hacks away at the roots of goddess-oriented philosophy to reveal a landscape fraught with fantasy, imagination and gobbledygook. Gender studies has a new era upon it, one that must, if taken seriously, heed Eller’s accounting of the rise, and, should her book have any impact, demise of this seductive, female-dominated view of prehistory.

The goddess myth obviously serves a purpose. In the evolving social consciousness of civilized culture, portrayal of women in general leaves much to be desired. Simply, the female gender is clearly richer in different ways than men are, and women, because they biologically put their lives at risk in the reproductive process have a deeper kind of burden in serving life. But mainstream portrayals of women tend to disavow this organic aspect to femininity in favor of basically relegating them to being lesser than men. Patriarchy, in other words, is alive and well.

So the matriarchal projection into the prehistoric past is a perhaps all-too convenient redress for current grievances, Eller says, and thus, she takes to task the literature purporting a matriarchal dominated prehistory. New age fluff writers, archaeologists and anthropologists are treated to her critique, namely Marija Gimbutas, who dressed in different hats as both archaeologist and purveyor of distorted interpretations of the prehistoric past. Not surprisingly, according to Eller, the academic community never really took her seriously, not even enough to critique her work.

The same can’t be said for the pseudo-scientific feminist community, however, that unquestioningly buys and sells the goddess-worship trip through today. Backed by what appears to be scientific evidence, the goddess mentality emerged not so much through academic journals and professional conferences, but rather tellingly in new age bookstores and on bumper stickers. A result: reified notions of matriarchal prehistory, that, when examining the basic premises, seem to exist rightfully where they emerge: in fantasyland. Fundamentally, though, Eller takes to task the very idea that just because inequitable gender relations exist today, that doesn’t in and of itself mean that it wasn’t always this way.

Eller’s treatment raises new, important questions, but I found her conclusions closely bordering on the same close-mindedness of the matriarchalists she broadly paints. For some, I imagine to latch onto a fanciful notion of how things could have been might serve a vital and validating rationale. Sure, to keep grounded in that purpose is also equally important, as well as to refrain from dismissing critiques ad hominem, something Eller also criticizes. Nevertheless, most religions thrive under similar cultural myths reaffirming for many a healthy way to be in the world. I’m not saying this can’t be unhealthy — indeed, such worldviews continue to be very destructive — but I don’t think that creation myths, which appear in most cultures, are necessarily harmful. Indeed, such myths seem to characterize at least one aspect of our humanity, sourness and all.

A much broader and important task would be to examine the significance of the civilized worldview to see why it, as opposed to our more intrinsic tribal heritage, has flourished so uncontrollably at the expense and denial of our organic roots. Another book, perhaps?

By Harriet Hall, MD

Reprinted from this week’s eSkeptic.

Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam, by Pope Brock, is not only a rip-roaring good read, but it brings up serious issues about regulation of medical practice and prosecution of quackery. It tells the story of John R. Brinkley MD, who transplanted goat glands into people, and of Morris Fishbein MD, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, who tried to stop him.

An impotent patient supposedly told Brinkley, “Too bad I don’t have goat nuts.” So Brinkley gave him some.

The Charlatan

Brinkley was a colorful character whose very first job was a scam, selling a patent remedy. He went to medical school but never finished, eventually buying a diploma elsewhere for $100. A bigamist, drunkard, liar, and con man of incredible audacity, he built up an empire of quackery that made him filthy rich. Apart from his medical adventures, he practically invented modern political campaigning techniques, revolutionized advertising, and was almost single-handedly responsible for popularizing country music and the blues with his radio station.

An impotent patient supposedly told Brinkley, “Too bad I don’t have goat nuts.” So Brinkley gave him some. A few weeks later he went back for a refresher course in surgery (which he failed because of drunkenness and poor attendance). He began to feel that he was gifted and should not be bound by the “jealous sheep ethics” of the AMA.

In 1918 he founded a clinic in Milford Kansas whose main purpose was to rejuvenate men by surgically implanting goat testicles. Hormones hadn’t been isolated yet, and other medical men were experimenting with animal gland transplants, starting with Brown-Sequard, who “after a long and distinguished international career, wandered off the reservation in the late 1880s.” He injected himself with an emulsion of dog and guinea pig testicles and claimed he felt like a new man. Other doctors followed his lead with goat, ram, and monkey testicles. Steinach offered what was essentially a vasectomy, thinking it would make hormones flow back into the body. One American research program was canceled after the chimps escaped the lab on a Sunday morning and reassembled in a local church, interrupting worship services.

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Brinkley had an advantage over his rivals in his superior guile, marketing genius, and unbeatable chutzpah; and goats were an inspired choice of animal, because the goat’s appetite for sex was famous. His fame rose meteorically on the basis of testimonials, but his treatments were implausible, ineffective, and dangerous. At least 42 patients entered his hospital vertical and departed horizontal. Others survived surgery long enough to die at home, and others succumbed from using the quack remedies he sold via the radio. “[G]iven the Jurassic state of malpractice laws in Brinkley’s day” his medical license was a license to kill. His body count was higher than that of the worst serial killers. He advertised that his treatments worked wonders on 27 different ailments from emphysema to flatulence, with a 95% success rate. (It worked less well on “stupid types.”) He had a program called “Medical Question Box” on his own radio station. A patient would write in with symptoms, he would advise “remedy no. 20,” and both the inquirer and all the listeners with similar symptoms would buy his line of numbered quack remedies sold through a chain of participating drug stores with a 100% money-back guarantee. Nothing could stop him. When he lost his license to practice medicine in Kansas, he ran for governor. When his radio station was shut down, he moved it across the border to Mexico and set up the most powerful radio transmitter ever, to blast his message throughout North America.

There were rumors … that he bit a man’s ear off in drunken rampage and stole goats from neighboring farms when his own supply ran low. But he was idolized by tidal wave of grateful patients and staunch supporters. What finally led to his downfall was a libel lawsuit he filed against Morris Fishbein. He lost, and he made a fool of himself on the witness stand. One thing that came out in the trial was that the special Formula 1020 ( which he sent home with surgical patients for post-operative injections to “stimulate” the production of white blood cells) was nothing but colored water. The trial verdict, in 1939, branded him as a quack, and this unleashed a slew of other lawsuits by injured patients. The IRS pursued him for back taxes, and he ended up bankrupt in 1941, just months before his death.

Fighting Quackery Then

Brock says, “…quacks have flourished in all ages and cultures, for nothing shows reason the door like cures for things. Unlike most scams, which target greed, quackery fires deeper into Jungian universals: our fear of death, our craving for miracles. When we see night approaching, nearly all of us are rubes.”

Quacks were embraced in America due to a “perverse stream” of independence running back to Jacksonian democracy when education was despised and the common man exalted and when all but three states actually repealed licensing requirements. “Americans not only tolerated but demanded incompetence.” The AMA was founded in 1847 as a reaction to the free-for-all, but it “simply swapped one form of chaos for another” — licensing of everything from osteopathy to homeopathy, from chiropractic to “eclectic” medicine and herbalism.

In 1905 Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote an expose of patent medicines for Collier’s magazine. He named names: 264 companies and individuals. Within a year, one manufacturer of an alcohol-based remedy was told by the IRS to either put real medicine in his product or open a bar. Did you know ketchup started life as a patent medicine?

In response to the Collier’s expose, the AMA hired Arthur Cramp to head its Bureau of Investigation. He and Fishbein formed a quackbusting team that lasted over 20 years. The AMA was proactive and had its own lab to analyze quack remedies. Cramp created a poster for national distribution: Testimonials are Worthless. The JAMA ran a regular feature — a 2 page spread with a testimonial on one side with a picture of the person who gave it and the disease they were miraculously cured of; and on the facing page, the same person’s death certificate, cause of death: same disease.

Morris Fishbein only practiced medicine for one year before turning to journalism. He was famous for investigating a girl with an unexplained (and impossible) fever of 114 and finding the hot water bottle she was hiding. He was appalled by what Brinkley was up to — he called him a one man medical emergency. He vowed to put him out of business, and he tried for decades, but he was hamstrung. Cramp said, “There is nothing the medical profession can do except to warn the public against the thing.” Fishbein tried the AMA, FTC, BBB, articles excoriating Brinkley. Nothing put a dent in Brinkley’s success. In fact, the publicity helped him, because he could portray himself as the lone genius doctor being persecuted by the hidebound medical establishment. He could say they were only trying to protect their own monopoly on medical income. He could say Fishbein was on a personal vendetta. Despite a few setbacks, he continued to kill patients and get obscenely rich doing it. In a touch of hubris reminiscent of Greek tragedy, it was Brinkley himself who filed the lawsuit that ended his career.

Fighting Quackery Now

I wish Brinkley were just a historical curiosity; but there are Brinkleys out there today, and we haven’t gotten much better at stopping them. A recent Nightline featured a doctor who has treated 30,000 patients for a non-existent illness, using dangerous bogus treatments. Only now is there an investigation that threatens his license, but the hearing won’t be until December.

It’s difficult to get a state board to act against an MD, a chiropractor, or any other licensed health care provider on the basis of quackery. It gets the boards’ attention if a patient dies, or if injured patients file malpractice lawsuits. Sexual misconduct generally gets their attention, as does defrauding Medicare. But in general, the people on the boards are hesitant to criticize their peers. We need to do better.

The problem is, danger lurks on the borderlands of quackery. What we don’t want to do is stringently restrict doctors to approved practices so that they are unable to implement new treatments as they come along. Even if we stick to evidence-based guidelines, we have to leave room for clinical judgment. I don’t mean any vague “art” of medicine, but the judgment of how to apply the existing evidence to individual patients in everyday clinical practice. Doctors need leeway to prescribe medicines off-label when there is published evidence that hasn’t yet been translated into FDA approvals. If evidence-based medicine has nothing to offer, we need the option of judiciously trying something that we don’t have good evidence for but have reason to think might help. But where do you draw the line? The MD featured on Nightline says he is practicing legitimate, cutting edge medicine; and so did Brinkley.

There are whole areas of alternative medicine that most of us consider quackery, but political correctness and legal repercussions discourage even the use of that word. One man’s quackery is another man’s miracle cure; postmodernists and New Agers tell us science is only one of many ways of knowing. When scientific doctors try to suppress quackery, they are automatically accused of jealously trying to protect their guild from outsiders. If that is ever true, it certainly isn’t common. I don’t think financial concerns enter into the equation when MDs speak out against things like homeopathy or therapeutic touch.

Read Charlatan and enjoy; then think about today’s charlatans and weep.

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Shermer, chief evolutionist and resident skeptic at Skeptic Magazine, has long maintained the root of human behavior lies not only in our biology but in how our surroundings influence our actions. In this latest iteration, Shermer traces human evolution to explain why we are the way we are today. “If our species is about a hundred thousand years old, then 90 percent of our history has been spent in (a) state of relative economic simplicity,” he writes.

It’s true. The 1997 anthropological manifesto Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader On Hunter-Gatherer Economics And The Environmentdescribes in various essays how our hunter-gatherer ancestry got along in sustainable bands and tribes. Shermer, similar to these others before him, then extrapolates the “relative state of economic simplicity” into what we are today: consumer traders.

He cogently says that ”although we have legislated and educated … ancient trial rituals out of culture, their psychological underpinnings are still buried deep in our brains, waiting to be stirred into action.” Think gang skirmishes,  warfare, peaceful trade and peaceful exchange. Not all good, not all bad. Put simply: we are both good and evil. And we always have been.

This reality is in concordance with the dramatic cultural shift that occurred in our history–the adoption of large-scale agriculture as the primary means of subsistence, which eventually led us into the industrial revolution. “The attendant leap in food production and population that accompanied the shift to chiefdoms and states allowed for a division of labor to develop in both the economic and social spheres,” Shermer explains. The ramifications of these profound changes have been enormous.

Shermer excels in showing just how these changes manifest. He takes from the latest research developments in neuroscience, primatology, evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics and social psychology to explain how our modern ways–rooted in our hunter-gatherer psychology–are presented in behaviors such as stock market investing and making poor money decisions, such as creating credit card debt and gambling.

The Mind of the Market is a libertarian manifesto at heart, which will turn some away. Critics will have plenty to say about his end-of-book deductions, such as saying the path to freedom is through McDonald’s ownership in developing countries, or equating the free-market process to evolutionary processes. These are shallow representations of what he actually says, which is, ultimately: “Given our duel disposition to be both good and evil, and the power of the environment to elicit one or the other, we much choose freedom, then create the circumstances in which it can be realized, and then defend it once it is achieved.”

 The strength with The Mind of the Market is Shermer’s application of evolutionary and biological knowledge in explaining in depth why we are the way we are. Taking from multiple scientific disciplines and forming a reasoned argument is always bound to cause ripples. With Shermer at the helm, though, it’s always a great read.