Scientific journals are much less likely to deem negative results worth publishing, which places researchers under immense pressure to find links between phenomena at the risk of these links being spurious....It is far more useful to know that a drug doesn't work, for example, than to be presented with incorrect assertions that it does." Within the case studies there are some examples of human misjudgement but there is scant evidence of the evolutionary underpinnings that led to the logical error (i.e. the vestigial manifestation of the titular ‘ape’). There is some speculation here and there but little in the way of clinical evidence. As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.

Full disclosure: I am friends with the author and have worked with him and am aware of his talent as a cancer researcher and science writer.

Table of Contents

Some predominant logical errors and fallacies: strawmen, tautologies, causal fallacies and cognitive dissonance. The Dunning-Kruger effect. Why did revolutionary China consider the sparrow an 'animal of capitalism' - and what happened when they tried to wipe them out? With a cast of murderous popes, snake-oil salesmen and superstitious pigeons, find out why flawed logic puts us all at risk, and how critical thinking can save the world. Trusted sources are needed now, more than ever. Science has certainly has had its failings in the past. One only needs to think about Eugenics, or claims that an examination of people’s faces or brain scans can tell if someone is going to be a criminal or not, and of course history is littered with unethical experiments on people. It turns out that insects, rather than grain, were the sparrows’ staple diet. Within a year, grain harvests were devastated by exploding swarms of locusts. Over the next three years, between 15 and 45 million Chinese people had starved to death as a result of the ensuing famine.

With a cast of murderous popes,snake-oil salesmen and superstitious pigeons, find out why flawed logic puts us all at risk, and how critical thinking can save the world. Sometimes his anecdotes were perhaps too abbreviated. There were a few times when I thought more could be said than he did say (although no doubt he was aiming for brevity). This was particularly the case when he gives the number of Chernobyl caused deaths as 43. His point is quite right (the number of deaths is much lower than people think, and many more people die from pretty much every other means of generation), but he fails to mention the estimates that excess deaths caused by the disaster are expected to reach 4,000. Because these are cancer deaths, many of them have not happened yet, but as people get older, if they die of cancer it *may* be the result of Chernobyl, and although we cannot say for any one person if this was so, the expected number of excess deaths will probably be in the region of 4,000. Still much safer than coal based generation, and many other means of electrical generation - but not immaterial.Humans are great believers in superstition. How is that so? That is another area discussed in the book. Humans have a strong urge to connect two unrelated phenomena, and if they are close enough, the tendency to believe one is the cause of the other, is especially strong. Another very fascinating chapter is, ‘The Memory Remains’. Do we know how often we fool ourselves? How do we do that? Memory is the culprit. Our memories deteriorate and alter over time and it can reach points in which we not only recall things that never happened, or had happened to someone else. We need to examine our memories critically, and demand proof as exacting as we demand of the testimony of others.

The other way the author seeks to make this an enjoyable and readable work is to include many anecdotes illustrating his points. These are especially powerful when they are anecdotes based on his own experience. For instance, the section on anti vaccine activists and the HPV vaccine contains a very powerful and emotional story of Laura Brennan's fight against the anti-vaxers before she died last year - because she had not had the HPV vaccine. Throughout the book, Dr Grimes encourages the reader to form their beliefs and views of the world when the claims made about it have first been subjected to some critical thought. The whole book is geared towards helping the reader achieve this and not to be misled by the ubiquity of misinformation in today's information age. We may not have to save the planet from nuclear annihilation, of course, but our ability to think critically has never been more important . In a world where fake news , mistrust of experts , prejudice and ignorance all too often hold sway, we can all too easily be misled over issues such as vaccinations , climate change or conspiracy theories . We live in an era where access to all the knowledge in the world is at our fingertips, yet that also means misinformation and falsehoods can spread further and faster than ever before.

Why did revolutionary China consider the sparrow an 'animal of capitalism' - and what happened when they tried to wipe them out? With a cast of murderous popes, snake-oil salesmen and superstitious pigeons, find out why flawed logic puts us all at risk, and how critical thinking can save the world. The book cites a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler assembled by American authorities, during the Second World War, that should have resonance today. Hitler’s primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. Sounds familiar?