Books like Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science — picked by fans

In this classic book, Kuhn introduces the idea of a "paradigm" and shows that real progress comes through paradigm shifts.

That hit me like a rock when I first read it. I love how in the second edition, Kuhn talks about the difficulties of deep change: "the problem is that the new paradigm is always worse than the old one." 

The new paradigm may be better in some way, but it is also sketchy, unformed, and it creates lots of new uncertainties. So, for somebody to shift to a new paradigm always requires a leap of faith!

Less about biology specifically and more about the general value of the scientific method and rationalism; I think that this book should be read by everyone. Never smug or condescending, Sagan and Druyan show how easily one can be misled by mystical thinking and illustrate the many dangers of credulity.

From cargo cults to baloney detectors, this book is a primer for life in the modern world and how to recognize and protect against disinformation and one’s own biases. I have more than once bought copies of this book for people who are overly enthused about crystals.

I learned from Gilovich the psychological mechanisms that drive us to believe things that aren’t true. We are pattern-recognizing machines, he tells us, designed to make sense of the data we perceive. But when that data is incomplete, ambiguous, or inconsistent, the mechanisms that normally yield correct inferences can lead us astray.

The book introduced me to time travel, hyperspace, superstitious rats, psychic horses, conspiracy theories, and UFOs. Watzlawick, a psychologist by trade, explores the many facets of communication: how it occurs, how it fails, and how we can be misled by it.

One of the first people to explore the psychology of conspiracy theories and disinformation, he alerts us to the perils and pitfalls of all sorts of communication—both verbal and nonverbal-- through amusing anecdotes and erudite examples.

If you value science, then you’ve probably puzzled over why other people don’t. Why won’t other people wear masks during a pandemic? Or buy genetically modified foods? Or vaccinate their children. Sinatra and Hofer provide answers by delving deep into the psychology of science denial. They explain the shortcuts we take when searching for scientific information, the misconceptions we hold about scientific knowledge, and the obstacles we face when changing our beliefs and attitudes about scientific topics. From their synthesis of empirical research to their consideration of real-life dilemmas, Sinatra and Hofer provide a compelling account of the public’s fraught relationship with science, as well as practical advice for improving it.

Zuckerman provides a comprehensive study of the American scientists who won Nobel prizes between 1907 and 1972.

The book provides a window into the personalities of the people doing Nobel prize-winning research, as well as the sort of environments in which they were socialized and educated. Nobel laureates have tended to study and work with other Laureates or future Laureates. She also discusses the impact that winning a Nobel prize has on scientists, and the effects of the prize are not wholly positive.

The book also demonstrates the potential power of sociological analyses. Zuckerman creatively combines interview data with quantitative analyses. I think Zuckerman’s books are a fantastic example of how to conduct empirical research in sociology and the social sciences more generally.

Once I finished reading Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it wasn’t long before I learned that he had followed it up with a collection of deeper analyses in the realm of the philosophy of science.

His sequel book took me deeper into the minds and conflicts of noted greats of science whose scientific contributions’ acceptance is now taken for granted by most. Yet, in their own day, they, too, often had to contend with the tension of science’s and scientists’ history of preferring what consensus had ordained as settled knowledge instead of welcoming new insights and discoveries.

Bookshelves groan under the weight of highly skilled science communicators, and through them those of us with no specialist knowledge can learn about evolution, quantum mechanics, neuroscience et al, and then bore people to death with our newfound knowledge. There is, however, a world of difference between the things science discovers and the stories we tell about these discoveries. I love this book because it makes the reader do the hard yards, thinking not just about the breathless new discoveries, but also the very nature of this knowledge, and hence its limits.

I savored this book sip by sip, wishing that each chapter would have lasted a little longer, a little longer. I felt a “healthy envy” for anyone lucky enough to have had a teacher like Klein in high school.

It’s impossible not to fall in love with the cosmos while reading his work. His ability to explain complex scientific concepts in an accessible and poetic manner is admirable.

Each chapter has given me an unforgettable early morning coffee, revealing at a pace the magic that science holds in every corner.

As a circular economy professional from Cambridge university, I pursue to cross that bridge between life sciences and organizational theory.

Capra and Luisi provide exactly that. Their synthesis of systems thinking, complexity theory, and living systems research gives us the conceptual foundation for understanding why organizations function best when mimicking natural characteristics.

I was especially moved by their argument that the mechanistic worldview dominating business for centuries is not just outdated but actively harmful. They show how living systems operate through networks of relationships rather than hierarchies, through emergence rather than control, through continuous adaptation rather than static structures.

Every time I work with an organization struggling with rigid hierarchies or siloed thinking, I draw on frameworks from this book. Their chapter on cognition and consciousness in living systems shifted how I think about organizational learning.

This is dense material, but they write with such clarity that complex concepts become… show more.