Simon LeVayCritiques

This is a good overview of what science currently has to say about the biological underpinnings of sexual orientation. The author himself is gay, which lends more credence to his apparently even-handed review of the evidence for various theories behind the development of sexual orientation. Although there is not single line of evidence that unequivocally explains the biological roots of secual orientation, it is quite clear that sexual orientation is primarily biologically determined to a great extent, but that the complexity involved is great enough that there may be more than on way that sexual orientation gets determined. LeVay does conclude that the primary factor is probably the quantities and timing of testosterone levels during fetal development that are the primary factors, with the potential varying response of the fetus to the presence of testosterone.

The one gripe I did have with this book is that although a few intersex conditions such as adrenal hyperplasia and CAIS are brought up to provide evidence for the underlying role of hormones during development, LeVay never uses the term intersex in reference to these conditions. I do not know whether this is because he thinks using the term intersex might add complications, or that he somehow does not consider intersex to be a valid condition. It seems like in a book of this nature, a clear mention of intersex is needed, which left me disappointed.

Fascinating, super educational, and very easy to read for such a science-y book!

From The Book Wheel:

When I first picked up this book I immediately went to Goodreads to see what other people thought. One of the biggest complaints is that it was too “sciency” or technical, which baffled me because it’s about science going wrong. That’s right – science. Of course it is going to have some scientific jargon! A chapter about hurricanes would be incomplete without a mention of the Coriolis effect, so I didn’t factor these complaints into my decision to read it. But while most of the scientific sections were about things I learned in high school, there were parts of the book that were really heavy on the technical terms. To be fair, they were necessary to understanding how and why things went wrong, but I did find myself skimming over the chapters about engineering and chemistry.

Not that that detracted from the book whatsoever. In the end, morbid curiosity and extremely approachable writing by Simon LeVay propelled me through the book. If you had asked me a week ago whether I thought human experiments were actually happening with catastrophic implications, I would have said no. Between the FDA, the review boards, and the internet, there couldn’t possibly be genetic testing that resulted in an ear bone growing in someone’s brain or blatantly ignoring FDA regulations, right?

Wrong. Dead wrong.

For the full review, including the Top 5 Lessons I learned,click here.

Twelve stories of spectacular mistakes (or, in one case, a particularly bizarre and egregious bit of fraud) in various fields of applied science, most of which resulted in lost lives. Specifically, the stories of: a experimental treatment for Parkinson's disease that had a truly grotesque effect on the patient's brain, a devastating hurricane about which meteorologists failed to warn the public, a group of vulcanologists killed on a field trip to an active volcano they should have had reason to be suspicious of, a study "proving" harmful effects of the drug ecstasy on the brain that turned out to be testing the wrong drug, a dam built in a geologically unsuitable area, a gene therapy trial that resulted in a young man's death, a nuclear reactor explosion that may or may not have been accidental, a release of anthrax spores from a Soviet biological research facility, an innocent teenager convicted of rape by sloppy DNA analysis, the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter due to a failure to convert to metric units, an unethical study from the 1930s designed to see if speech disorders could be induced in children, and the announcement by a group of prestigious nuclear chemists that they'd discovered a new element that turned out not to exist.

I found these stories fascinating, if often horrifying, and in most of them there's some interesting element of scientific mystery as people try to figure out afterwards exactly what went wrong. LeVay's prose is not fancy, but it gets the job done, and he's very good about remaining objective, providing everyone's point of view, and making it clear when there are disagreements about what really happened. In each case, he personally interviewed as many of the people involved as possible, to let them tell their side of things. I also like the fact that he didn't necessarily go for the most obvious and familiar examples. The only incidents I'd heard of before were the nuclear meltdown, which I just read about for the first time a few years ago and immediately exclaimed, "Why the hell haven't I heard about this before?!", and the Mars Climate Orbiter fiasco, which I think most people have heard about but few know the details of.

It should be noted that this book definitely isn't an attempt to slam science or scientists. The author himself is a neuroscientist and has great respect for science as a human endeavor. I don't think that there really is any great moral here, other than that all humans are fallible and scientists are no exception. Which is probably something that's worth pointing out occasionally.

This is a necessary book, which comes at an important time.

Back in 1991, LeVay made one of the key scientific breakthroughs in understanding the dynamics of sexal orientation. Since then, he's devoted much time and energy to informing the public discourse around matters of sexuality.

This book aims to play a role in that discourse—to make sure we recognise the limits of our knowledge, and the limits of science itself. And to make sure that what we do know for sure, is interpreted properly.

He writes with both detail and clarity. He makes the science accessible to the lay reader, but doesn't dumb it down.

LeVay doesn't shy away from a key fact which may be uncomfortable to some; that, on average, aspects of the gay brain and gay behaviour tend to conform to the opposite gender. There is some basis, it seems, in stereotypes.

But stereotypes only go so far. Lurking in the book is a cruial, and much more interesting observation. While sexual orientation—especially male sexual orientation—tends to be fixed, behaviour and personality are not. There's a wide variation in the statistics LeVay quotes. Gay men are as different from each other, as they are from their straight counterparts.

And whether the mechanism is genetic, congentital, neo-natal or psychodynamic, no single theory can explain why a particular man or woman becomes gay.

LeVay emphasises the importance of this fact. It would seem that there are many ways to become gay, and they produce a wide array of gay sexualities. This science reflects the subjective experience of most gay men and women.

But, alas, in its fetish for finding a single "cause" for homosexuality, science has not addressed this point. In fact, science has only begun to scratch the surface.

When covering the science, LeVay repeatedly has to qualify his remarks; many of the studies he cites have not been replicated, or confirmed, or followed up. Even his own ground-breaking work was a small study; published, it seems, as a by product of other investigations. The science of same-sex attraction, LeVay reminds us, has a long way to go.

When Science Goes Wrong could more properly be titled When Scientists Go Wrong. Simon LeVay relates twelve stories where scientists royally screwed up. One ignored his own safety: a vulcanologist enters a volcano crater just before it erupts. Some ignored subject safety and ethics: a doctor conducts unauthorized experiments on the brain, speech pathologists try to induce stuttering, gene therapists ignore their own experimental protocols. Some are likely mistakes: a nuclear reactor goes critical, mislabeled bottles result in a drug being labeled as unsafe, a mission to Mars crashes, a dam collapses, a mistaken forecast leaves Englad unprepared for bad weather. Some are outright fraud: a nuclear chemist fakes data to indicate discovery of elements, forensic scientists convict the wrong person. One is both evil and accidental: anthrax for Soviet biological weapons is accidentally released.

(Full review at my blog)

Review by Jason Lush

Really should have been called "When Humans with College Educations To Really Stupid Things", but I guess that wouldn't be sensational enough.

When Science Goes Wrong is informative and engaging, but I believe it may have been rushed to press to capitalize on some event. The book covers twelve events in recent history in which seemingly smart people committed decidedly careless or outright stupid deeds, always at the cost of others.

Each of the twelve stories are factual and informative, but every one of them is jam-packed with worthless fluff and personal anecdotes that distract from the point. My advice is read the first three and last three pages of each chapter and you'll get all the relevant information you need.

Fun overview of some of science's mishaps of the 20th Century. My personal favorite was the guy with hair growing in his brain.

Very good textbook on sexuality. As my professor characterized it: "the most often borrowed textbook in any dorm."