My publisher will match every pledge to send a Geek Manifesto to MPs

In The Geek Manifesto, I wrote about how skeptics had begun to use a website called Pledgebank.com to assemble a critical mass of people to complain about quacks making unsupported claims. I was delighted when Dave Watts decided to use the same tool for another campaign — to send a copy of the book to all 650 MPs.

I’m equally delighted that my publisher, Transworld Books, has today decided to support the campaign by agreeing to match every individual pledge that’s made. So if 325 people make the pledge, we’ll be able to send a Geek Manifesto to every MP in the House of Commons.

My editor, Susanna Wadeson, explains:

“We thought we should up the ante. If our MPs read just one book this year it should be this one.”

The book’s selling for £9.87 on Amazon, so by agreeing to spend a tenner — and spreading the word — you’ll ensure that a copy lands on the desk of two MPs once we’ve collected enough pledges.

At the time of writing, 168 people have pledged (including me and several other geeks you might have heard of — Simon Singh, Adam Rutherford, Helen Arney). So we’re more than halfway there — another 157 pledges needed. Please do pass on to anyone you think might share the book’s sentiments, and think it worth sharing them in turn with our elected representatives.

You can pledge to send a book here.

An interesting set of Geek Manifesto reviews

Several reviews of the book have hit the papers and the blogs today.

James Wilsdon, in the Financial Times, concludes:

The Geek Manifesto is the most compelling, engaging and entertaining account I’ve read of the relationship between science and politics. Henderson ends with a rallying cry for a political culture “that appreciates the power of science as a problem-solving tool and that seeks to exploit its methods of inquiry to resolve the great questions of the day”. Geek or non-geek, this is a manifesto we should all feel able to endorse.

He also makes a few very reasonable points of criticism, chiefly around the book’s concentration on UK politics rather than international dimensions, and the scope there could have been for covering the history and sociology of science and politics in greater breadth.

Both would indeed have added greater breadth to the book, and it would have been nice to cover them more exhaustively. To do so, however, would likely have added a year or more to the writing and publishing timeline, and my editor and I felt it was more important to produce a contemporary, focused book quickly, so as to capture a moment.

The Geek Manifesto on GM crops

On Sunday, an anti-GM crop group called Take the Flour Back is planning a “day of mass decontamination” at the site of a trial of GM wheat run by Rothamsted Research — a public sector agricultural research organisation. The aim of the protest is simple: it’s to tear up the crop.

The event has the support of the Green Party, and one of its most prominent politicians — Jenny Jones, the Green candidate for London Mayor — is planning to attend. It’s going ahead despite a plea from the scientists behind the trial, which I blogged about a couple of weeks ago.

Tom Chivers at the Telegraph has written a great post about the “anti-science zealotry” of these Green protestors. I explore many of the same themes in The Geek Manifesto, and I’ve had permission from my publisher to post the relevant extract in full here.

The whole question of being pro- or anti-GM food is in many ways a bad one. The better question is what crop, with what modification, for what purpose, made by whom? The Rothamsted trial, I think, passes all these tests. That the protestors, backed by mainstream Green politicians, don’t even bother to ask these more nuanced questions speaks volumes about their attitude to science.

Here’s the extract. It follows a section on nuclear power — another technology to which many Greens are implacably opposed, despite its potential to play a part in containing climate change — so please excuse any cross-references. There are full references in the back of the book, and I’ll try to find time to go through and add some hyperlinks to this as soon as I get the chance.

Genetically modified politics

Another part of the green package, to which all proper environmentalists are supposed to subscribe, is opposition to the genetic modification of crops. Like nuclear power, GM food is taken by the main green NGOs and political groupings to be an intrinsic evil, rather than as a neutral technology that can potentially be deployed for both good and bad ends. Interfering with genes is seen as meddling with nature – a freakish and dangerous pursuit that cannot possibly result in anything good. This is taken to be bad for the environment, and bad for human health to boot.

The argument that GM food is unsafe to eat can easily be dismissed. There is nothing in the process of genetic engineering that ought in theory to make crops any riskier than conventionally bred new varieties, and this has been borne out by experience. GM foods have been eaten by hundreds of millions of consumers in the United States for close to two decades now, without a single documented adverse consequence. A UK government review in 2003 found nothing to suggest that eating GM produce would have harmful effects, and nothing has changed since then.

An interestingly critical review

The Geek Manifesto was always written “on the understanding that not all geeks will agree”. And now it’s been published, that disagreement is starting to come through.

To which I say brilliant. If the book provokes plenty of constructive thinking about engagement between science and politics, it will have achieved one of my goals — even, perhaps especially, if different views from my own come to the fore.

John Whitfield’s review in Research Fortnight is a great example of the sort of criticism I welcome. As he notes up front:

“Geeks like to pick things apart… However much geeky readers might agree with it, they are going to get as much pleasure from quibbling with it.”

Whitfield, while welcoming much of the book’s focus on evidence-based policy, has two particular quibbles. He asks whether there isn’t tension between the idea that science is a way of thinking, and the idea that people who care about science could do more to campaign for its place in politics and society. And he asks whether geekier politics would actually be any better, noting that “attempts to make government more scientific often end up making it less democratic.”

Let’s send the Geek Manifesto to every MP…

In the book, I cover the way skeptics such as Simon Perry have used an online tool called Pledgebank to aid their campaigning — in Simon’s case, against dodgy claims made by alternative medicine practitioners. The idea is that you agree to so something, if a certain number of people agree to commit to doing the same.

A few days ago, a reader of this blog called Dave Watts suggested in a comment here that every MP should be sent a copy of the Geek Manifesto. He’s now set up a Pledgebank page to enlist 649 others to join him…

It’s a great idea. I’ve signed up. Do support it!

Twitter’s reaction to the Geek Manifesto launch: a Storify

The reaction on Twitter to the launch of the Geek Manifesto last weekend was pretty amazing. Here are some of my favourite tweets collected into a storify…

[View the story “The Geek Manifesto launch” on Storify]

The Geek Manifesto: media roundup

Some great coverage for The Geek Manifesto in the media this week. Here are a few highlights, plus links to a couple of pieces by me.

David Aaronovitch gave the book, and the ideas behind it, a fantastic write-up in his Times comment column on Thursday: Enough placebo politics, vote for the geeks. There’s a paywall’s but it’s worth it.

A choice quote:

The geeks represent, for me, one of the most encouraging recent developments in British public life. In towns and cities up and down the country, groups are being formed of scientists and others who meet (often in a pub) and discuss ideas, policy, books and campaigns. Broadly, the impulse is to bring the scientific method to bear on national debates — a method that has been lacking.

Equally impressive is Martin Robbins in the Guardian: Geeks, rise!

A choice quote:

What I desperately want is a move toward an evidence-based culture in politics. Politicians are free to say: “I think people on drugs should be punished because drugs are immoral.” That’s a moral call, albeit a rather stupid one in my opinion. What they shouldn’t do is say: “I want to reduce drug use, and sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to achieve that.” That’s not at moral call, it’s a factual statement; as such it should be evidence-based, or else the person making it should shut the hell up.

Martin also did a long podcast interview with me for the Guardian and Strange Quarks.

My Guardian piece expressing “grave reservations” about the Science for the Future coffin protest against EPSRC funding policies

Gordon Brown and cystic fibrosis, Tony Blair and MMR

Rebekah Brooks’s appearance at the Leveson inquiry on Friday has renewed attention on The Sun’s decision, under her editorship, to reveal that Gordon Brown’s son Fraser has cystic fibrosis.

It was, I felt at the time and continue to feel today, a pretty inexcusable story to publish, irrespective of how it was sourced. It’s impossible to see how disclosing details of this boy’s health could possibly have been in the public interest. It ought to have remained private — as the press has righly done on other occasions where health information about children of leading politicians has become widely known on Fleet Street.

There’s a distinction to be made here, though, with another episode I cover in The Geek Manifesto. I’m talking, of course, about the Blairs’ refusal to answer questions about whether their son Leo had had the MMR vaccine.

An Office for Scientific Responsibility?

One of the ideas for improving political use of science and evidence that I suggest in the book is the creation of an Office for Scientific Responsibility. This would work rather like the Office for Budget Responsibility set up by George Osborne in 2010: it wouldn’t constrain ministers’ executive decisions directly, but if a policy is claimed as evidence-based, it would audit that evidence afterwards.

The aim is to make ministers think twice before claiming an evidence base that doesn’t exist. Evidence abuse needs to carry a political cost.

I’ve written a Comment is Free piece about this for the Guardian. There’s also a (mostly) thoughtful comment thread below.

Published!

I came up with the idea for The Geek Manifesto in summer 2010. I wrote the proposal that autumn, and signed my contract with Transworld (Bantam Press) just before Christmas.

I wrote the book in the first nine months of last year (punctuated by the arrival of my daughter Anna), delivered the manuscript at the end of September, and got my first proofs early this year.

It’s now been published! And on the day after the Government finally committed to a Libel Reform Bill in the Queen’s Speech…

Here’s Anna investigating…