Karl Sabbagh

Recommended to me by a botanist friend, this is about more than plants. I would recommend this to anyone who looks to science for definitive truth.
The majority of the book is devoted to his search for the real facts about a questionable report of a species in an unexpected location. The presence of plants is used by other scientific disciplines, e.g. to indicate climate changes, and archeological dating.
A non-botanist need not worry about not understanding specialized terms. Sabbagh admits he didn't know how to tell most plants apart, and describes his impression of the sedges in question as "stalks of grass with little blobby clusters of seeds at the top." (p.98) What he knew how to do was to analyze the events and relationships to come up with a likely explanation.
Part of his research was to go beyond the botanical coverup to understand why a respected scientist would make up results. He came across C.P. Snow's book "The Affair", which dealt with alleged fraud at a Cambridge College. That led him to do more research for scientists who were out to prove their theory, or their new technique, that they passionately believed was right. Sabbagh provides 3 such instances, selected from many more he found in his research: biofeedback, the structure of auxin (a plant hormone), and fossil finds which would change our theory of earth's development. I was quite interested in the question of biofeedback because that is an alternative health technique that I've considered using. And while Sabbagh doesn't say it has been proven as completely ineffective, he did find reports that a particular application was based on rigged data.

Why is this important now? Our society has recently facing a number of crises which need sound science to help us determine how to proceed: Covid transmission and treatment, how much climate change is affected by human/social actions, and (surprisingly, still) some school districts are want creationism taught instead of evolution. There are people invested in their theories (which should really be called hypotheses) on opposing sides of these topics. Scientists sometimes have vested interest (i.e. financial rewards) for promoting and 'proving' they are right. And us non-citizens have to sort through the popular media hyperbole to try to determine what we need to do. Chapter 8 presents some indicators to look for in evaluating the veracity of scientific reports; e.g. they will get a respected scientist to identify a specimen and then use them as a reference to prove their finding even tho the scientist was not confirming the location of the find. This book also reveals the hesitancy of professionals in exposing fraud.
This book was first recommended to me about 15 years ago. I delayed reading it because I thought it had to do with British colonial sugar cane plantations. How wrong I was! Don't make my mistake. Give your brain some training in analytical thinking by reading this book instead of listening to more slanted rants.… (plus d'informations)

I finished reading this and then looked up the author and it turns out he's a convicted paedophile. Uh-oh. Oh well.

I actually got this a long time ago when I was interested in doing a maths degree. That didn't work out in the end (long story short) but I kept the book because I found this subject interesting from a layman's perspective. I think the author did a good job of explaining it in layman's terms. But he seems a bit enamoured by this one mathematician that the maths community doesn't take seriously... and then prints an excerpt of the supposed proof that this guy came up with in an appendix at the end of the book, which is impenetrable to a layman. So there's a bit of a jump there between knowing nothing and knowing everything that he doesn't really bridge properly.… (plus d'informations)

from book: Karl Sabbagh's Palestinian father became famous throughout the Arab world by broadcasting for the BBC Arabic Service during the Second World War. When the war ended, Isa Khalil Sabbagh covered the fateful events of 1947-8 and later became an adviser in the American State Department. In "Palestine", Sabbagh delves back centuries in an attempt to come to terms with his family's - and his people's - turbulent past. It is a panoramic survey of the political and religious barriers that have undermined the pursuit of lasting peace.… (plus d'informations)