Ruse - Fake science: exposing the Lefts skewed statistics, fuzzy facts, and dodgy data

Praise for

Fake Science

Have you ever noticed how selectively science is worshipped by the Left? Liberals love to use science as an argument-ender for every question under the sun. But they dont like scientifically modified food, for some reason. And they really dont like what science has to say about gender. Or sexuality. Or demographics. For some reason, the Left only seems to be interested in science when it tells other people how to live their lives. Fake Science is a smart, encyclopedic collection of all the ways the Left professes to love science while rejecting actual, you know, science.

Jonathan Last, senior writer at The Weekly Standard and author of What to Expect When No Ones Expecting

With verve and vivid examples, Austin Ruse dissects the Science Bluster, a dance of two steps. First progressives call their politics science. Then, in step two, they dismiss real science as politics. Its no wonder the Left keeps tripping over itself.

William Briggs, Ph.D., adjunct professor of statistical science at Cornell University and author of Uncertainty: The Soul of Modeling, Probability & Statistics

If his pen were a scalpel, Austin Ruse would be a brain surgeon. In Fake Science, he exposes the lobotomy the progressive Left has attempted to perform on Americas brain. One of the most courageous and cogent writers today, Ruse demonstrates how thoughtless one would need to be to accept the unreality proffered by the forces of unreason. To use another medical analogy, he lances the boils of pseudosciencetransgenderism, born that way homosexuality, abortion, global warming, and others. Each of these has, in fact, become its own religion, which is why its adherents cleave to it against all the facts of real science. You will be entertained and enlightened by Ruses demolition of these false gods.

Robert R. Reilly, author of Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything and The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

For decades, the Left has claimed the mantle of science, and accused conservatives of being anti-science. But in most of the big debates about science that rise to the level of public debate, the Left has taken the side of bad politics rather than good science. Whether the subject is climate, sex, life-saving technology, and even human nature itself, many on the Left invoke the name of science but reject its substance. Austin Ruse does a masterful job of exposing this hypocrisy. He offers a delightfully readable survey of todays science wars and defends real science from its detractors.

Jay Richards, Ph.D., executive editor of The Stream and author of the New York Times bestseller Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before Its Too Late

Copyright 2017 by Austin Ruse

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First e-book edition 2017: ISBN 978-1-62157-614-3

Originally published in hardcover, 2017:

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For my wife, Cathy, and our children, Lucy and Gianna-Marie

CONTENTS

Table of Contents

T his is not a book of science. You will find no quarks here, no third law of thermodynamics, no E = mc2.

This is a book about fake science.

Theres real science, and then theres science, or what passes for it these days. And theres a big difference.

Real science is about data that can be measured, about facts and biological processes that can be established by observation and experiment, about results that can be replicated. Science has enormous credibility in our society. And for very good reason. Over the past couple of centuries, sciencereal hard scienceearned its well-deserved reputation by exploding harmful myths, discovering life-saving medicines, and enabling the invention of hitherto undreamt-of technologies. Real science has cured epidemic diseases, given us cars and airplanes and computers and cell phones, taken us to the moon, and, perhaps most significantly, allowed the Earth to house seven billion peoplethe vast majority of whom would quickly starve to death if modern scientific advances were reversedin a state of health and prosperity undreamed of by our ancestors.

But that reputation has been hijacked by a cause thats anything but scientific. Science is now a cover for the leftist agenda.

The Democrats are the party of scienceeven as they refuse to acknowledge basic biological facts. Late-breaking news: A man isnt really a woman just because he identifies as female. Unborn babies are living human beings.

If we object to wrecking the world economy to cure the supposedly planet-destroying threat of global warming, were told that the science is settledthough there is hardly any less scientific statement than that. Science is about free inquiry, which is the very opposite of conformity to an existing consensus.

Which in any case is always changingfor the activists convenience. The sea level is going to rise twenty feet and everyone will starve because of catastrophic global warming. But when those disasters fail to materialize, no, wait, its not warming at all, its climate change.

And when the real, hard science actually is settled, its ignored, even if that means that people suffer and die unnecessarily. Rice genetically modified to produce beta-carotene could have saved the visionand in some cases the livesof literally millions of poor people across the globe if the anti-food activists on the Left hadnt kept it off the market for more than twenty-five years.

Humilitythe willingness to submit your opinion to the real facts of the matter, wherever they may leadis the hallmark of real science. But the purveyors of leftist pseudoscience are anything but humble. No matter how often their predictions fail to pan out, how often they reverse their advice, or what obvious facts contradict their theories, theyre never deterred. They go on making absurd, unscientific assertions and issuing new recommendations with absolute assurance, all on the authority of science. Being wrongeven laughably wrongdoesnt even slow them down.

The reputation of real science has been stolen by its evil twin, a fake science thats really just an ideology and a narrative. That ideology is simply masquerading in the credibility that rightfully belongs to real science. As David Burge ( on Twitter) has pointed out, this is the standard modus operandi of the Left: