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Kicking the Sacred Cow
The best-selling author of The Proteus Operation and Endgame Enigma offers an inside look at some of the key controversies in modern science, providing a fact-filled, meticulously researched study of Darwinism, global warming, the Big Bang, relativity, AIDS, and many other important topics.
- GenresScienceNonfiction
400 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
3 people are currently reading
91 people want to read
About the author
James P. Hogan
115 books271 followersJames Patrick Hogan was a British science fiction author.
Hogan was was raised in the Portobello Road area on the west side of London. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he worked various odd jobs until, after receiving a scholarship, he began a five-year program at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough covering the practical and theoretical sides of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. He first married at the age of twenty, and he has had three other subsequent marriages and fathered six children.
Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, travelling around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell. In the 1970s he joined the Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston, Massachusetts to run its sales training program. He published his first novel, Inherit the Stars, in the same year to win an office bet. He quit DEC in 1979 and began writing full time, moving to Orlando, Florida, for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They then moved to Sonora, California.
Hogan's style of science fiction is usually hard science fiction. In his earlier works he conveyed a sense of what science and scientists were about. His philosophical view on how science should be done comes through in many of his novels; theories should be formulated based on empirical research, not the other way around. If a theory does not match the facts, it is theory that should be discarded, not the facts. This is very evident in the Giants series, which begins with the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human body on the Moon. This discovery leads to a series of investigations, and as facts are discovered, theories on how the astronaut's body arrived on the Moon 50,000 years ago are elaborated, discarded, and replaced.
Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian themes, often promoting the idea that new technological advances render certain social conventions obsolete. For example, the effectively limitless availability of energy that would result from the development of controlled nuclear fusion would make it unnecessary to limit access to energy resources. In essence, energy would become free. This melding of scientific and social speculation is clearly present in the novel Voyage from Yesteryear (strongly influenced by Eric Frank Russell's famous story "And Then There Were None"), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, with a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government. The story uses many elements of civil disobedience.
James Hogan died unexpectedly from a heart attack at his home in Ireland.
Hogan was was raised in the Portobello Road area on the west side of London. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he worked various odd jobs until, after receiving a scholarship, he began a five-year program at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough covering the practical and theoretical sides of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. He first married at the age of twenty, and he has had three other subsequent marriages and fathered six children.
Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, travelling around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell. In the 1970s he joined the Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston, Massachusetts to run its sales training program. He published his first novel, Inherit the Stars, in the same year to win an office bet. He quit DEC in 1979 and began writing full time, moving to Orlando, Florida, for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They then moved to Sonora, California.
Hogan's style of science fiction is usually hard science fiction. In his earlier works he conveyed a sense of what science and scientists were about. His philosophical view on how science should be done comes through in many of his novels; theories should be formulated based on empirical research, not the other way around. If a theory does not match the facts, it is theory that should be discarded, not the facts. This is very evident in the Giants series, which begins with the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human body on the Moon. This discovery leads to a series of investigations, and as facts are discovered, theories on how the astronaut's body arrived on the Moon 50,000 years ago are elaborated, discarded, and replaced.
Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian themes, often promoting the idea that new technological advances render certain social conventions obsolete. For example, the effectively limitless availability of energy that would result from the development of controlled nuclear fusion would make it unnecessary to limit access to energy resources. In essence, energy would become free. This melding of scientific and social speculation is clearly present in the novel Voyage from Yesteryear (strongly influenced by Eric Frank Russell's famous story "And Then There Were None"), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, with a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government. The story uses many elements of civil disobedience.
James Hogan died unexpectedly from a heart attack at his home in Ireland.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 8, 2014
Thought-provoking? Definitely. And that's a good thing. Accurate? That's another story. Unfortunately it didn't take much digging to find that at least some of the information provided here was presented in a rather disingenuous manner. That throws the whole book into question as to its veracity. And with a book like this, that doesn't bode well.
Read it for the sake of kicking around alternative ideas and reminding yourself that there are always other possibilities even to things we currently take for granted, and to remind yourself that science has often found itself to be wrong in the past and thus much of what we think is correct today probably isn't. But don't buy everything here as 100% accurate no matter how many footnotes might be attached.
Read it for the sake of kicking around alternative ideas and reminding yourself that there are always other possibilities even to things we currently take for granted, and to remind yourself that science has often found itself to be wrong in the past and thus much of what we think is correct today probably isn't. But don't buy everything here as 100% accurate no matter how many footnotes might be attached.
January 3, 2018
I think this book is actually worse than bad: it's dangerously irresponsible. It's serious tinfoil hat territory, and rather mean-spirited besides. Like all conspiracy theories, it conveniently places itself beyond rational discourse by preemptively calling into question the trustworthiness of any other sources of information.
However, I do enjoy a good conspiracy theory, and the chapter on Velikovsky / catastrophism is especially fascinating.
The rest of the book delves into such enlightening topics as "what if global warming is a scam?", "what if radiation, DDT and asbestos are actually good for you?", "what if HIV isn't a real thing?" and "Einstein and Darwin were both wrong, probably."
It would be amusing if it wasn't so depressing... I mean, here's someone who is clearly intelligent and capable of some critical thinking, ultimately going down this weird path of "intelligent design" and anti-intellectualism. I mean, there's a healthy amount of skepticism and then there's... whatever this is, which is overcompensating in the other direction so far that you're basically Timecube. And yeah, I love Timecube, but I would really be afraid that someone would pick this book up and take it seriously, because it's so much nicer and cleaner and easier to believe in this narrative where you don't have to worry about global warming or pesticides or things like that.
I actually put this book in the recycling bin instead of taking it to the Little Free Library, is how strongly I feel that no one else should ever read it, probably.
However, I do enjoy a good conspiracy theory, and the chapter on Velikovsky / catastrophism is especially fascinating.
The rest of the book delves into such enlightening topics as "what if global warming is a scam?", "what if radiation, DDT and asbestos are actually good for you?", "what if HIV isn't a real thing?" and "Einstein and Darwin were both wrong, probably."
It would be amusing if it wasn't so depressing... I mean, here's someone who is clearly intelligent and capable of some critical thinking, ultimately going down this weird path of "intelligent design" and anti-intellectualism. I mean, there's a healthy amount of skepticism and then there's... whatever this is, which is overcompensating in the other direction so far that you're basically Timecube. And yeah, I love Timecube, but I would really be afraid that someone would pick this book up and take it seriously, because it's so much nicer and cleaner and easier to believe in this narrative where you don't have to worry about global warming or pesticides or things like that.
I actually put this book in the recycling bin instead of taking it to the Little Free Library, is how strongly I feel that no one else should ever read it, probably.
June 14, 2015
this was a sad read. I'd have to agree with the fan concensus that mr. hogan appears to have been afflicted by "the brain eater". that which renders an intelligent persons brain a pile of kook mush.
January 29, 2014
In writing some other blogs and realized just how much this book has changed my thinking. While I was reading it I didn't think of it as a great book that would probably change my thinking and that I needed to pay careful attention to like Nibley's "The Prophetic Book of Mormon".
I got the book in a webscription bundle. I'd like James P. Hogan books before, but this one didn't seem like it was going to be that great of a book but I decided to read it anyway. That's the way it was with webscriptions/baen book. I generally like the books and found authors that I'd probably never have found. So I read it and I'm glad I did. James Hogan was an engineer. He told someone that he thought he could write a science fiction book as good as one that he'd read. Someone challenged him to do it and he did. Apparently the first book he ever wrote was published. He siad that he was agnostic. One day he picked up a book about Creationism mainly to read it and mock it. However, he read it and found he agreed with it. He said that he started believing in Intellegent Design (ID). In fact he said that in his early novels he accepted evolution as a fact and his novels reflected that. After he accepted ID he started writing about Earthlings meeting other inhabited planets and being so much alike that they could interbreed. He pointed out once that those who claim that claim to believe in ID is just another name for Christian Creationism don't know what they're talke about. Mr. Hogan believed in ID and he was agnostic and didn't believe in the Bilbe. He said that he knew of other people who believed in ID who were other faiths and didn't believe the Biblical account of Creation. I now think that most people who make the argument against ID as being another form of Creationism are just making a weak argument against a philosophy that they know nothing about.
I read this book and parts of it I already knew enough to agree with and knew what he was talking about like Evolution, and the AIDS epidemic. One part I'd heard about and discounted which was about Immanuel Velikovsky, and the only reason I'd discounted him was because I'd read briefly about him on the internet after someone at church had asked me what I thought about him, and because all the "experts" thought he was nuts I'd decided he was as well. I don't know that I agree with everything that he's written but I now think there might be something to his ideas. One this I'd always thought made no sense was about the red shift of light. I don't know why but it just never really rang right to me, and the explanation about red shift in this book made much more sense, and the treatment of Halton Alp is a tragedy. I'd always thought "Silent Spring" was a good book and DDT was bad, but the travesty of millions of Aficans dieing needlessly because of some sky is falling alarmist book makes me very sad. I'd never heard of the electrical universe before either. Pretty much everything in the book turns out to be right and has really altered my thinking quite profoundly.
I've recently listened to some lectures that talk about the history of science, and the philosophy of science, and it turns out that there are many more reasons that science is not the greatest thing since sliced bread, but in thinking about those ideas in those lectures I realized that they sort of reinforced what I learned in this book. I decided that I was going to go back and read it again once I realized just how influential it had been to me.
I got the book in a webscription bundle. I'd like James P. Hogan books before, but this one didn't seem like it was going to be that great of a book but I decided to read it anyway. That's the way it was with webscriptions/baen book. I generally like the books and found authors that I'd probably never have found. So I read it and I'm glad I did. James Hogan was an engineer. He told someone that he thought he could write a science fiction book as good as one that he'd read. Someone challenged him to do it and he did. Apparently the first book he ever wrote was published. He siad that he was agnostic. One day he picked up a book about Creationism mainly to read it and mock it. However, he read it and found he agreed with it. He said that he started believing in Intellegent Design (ID). In fact he said that in his early novels he accepted evolution as a fact and his novels reflected that. After he accepted ID he started writing about Earthlings meeting other inhabited planets and being so much alike that they could interbreed. He pointed out once that those who claim that claim to believe in ID is just another name for Christian Creationism don't know what they're talke about. Mr. Hogan believed in ID and he was agnostic and didn't believe in the Bilbe. He said that he knew of other people who believed in ID who were other faiths and didn't believe the Biblical account of Creation. I now think that most people who make the argument against ID as being another form of Creationism are just making a weak argument against a philosophy that they know nothing about.
I read this book and parts of it I already knew enough to agree with and knew what he was talking about like Evolution, and the AIDS epidemic. One part I'd heard about and discounted which was about Immanuel Velikovsky, and the only reason I'd discounted him was because I'd read briefly about him on the internet after someone at church had asked me what I thought about him, and because all the "experts" thought he was nuts I'd decided he was as well. I don't know that I agree with everything that he's written but I now think there might be something to his ideas. One this I'd always thought made no sense was about the red shift of light. I don't know why but it just never really rang right to me, and the explanation about red shift in this book made much more sense, and the treatment of Halton Alp is a tragedy. I'd always thought "Silent Spring" was a good book and DDT was bad, but the travesty of millions of Aficans dieing needlessly because of some sky is falling alarmist book makes me very sad. I'd never heard of the electrical universe before either. Pretty much everything in the book turns out to be right and has really altered my thinking quite profoundly.
I've recently listened to some lectures that talk about the history of science, and the philosophy of science, and it turns out that there are many more reasons that science is not the greatest thing since sliced bread, but in thinking about those ideas in those lectures I realized that they sort of reinforced what I learned in this book. I decided that I was going to go back and read it again once I realized just how influential it had been to me.
August 8, 2011
this is a great book for challenging conventional thinking and has some great alternative takes on things "everyone knows"
May 14, 2015
I can understand writing a chapter advocating for creationism and a chapter advocating for Velikovski's ideas, but a chapter denying that the HIV virus causes AIDS? What's the point?
HOGAAAAN!
HOGAAAAN!
May 7, 2018
Whist Hogan is on the money with most of his criticisms of mainstream science there are a couple of areas where he has gone somewhat awry. The first is with respect to DDT. Rather than being another "CFC-like" fallacy, i.e. the invention of a problem that doesn't exist, DDT is really more of a HIV-style (or rather HPV-style) fallacy, where a serious disease with man-made causes is being blamed on a natural cause. That disease is polio which was falsely blamed on a virus in order to avoid a massive compensation payout to families poisoned by DDT (and to sell a useless "polio" vaccine). The idea that DDT is some kind of panacea could not be further from the truth. Sure, the manufacturers of DDT had to push a reason for withdrawing it's use, i.e. the bird reproduction problem, but only because the reality was far worse and could cost them billions if it became accepted wisdom.
The 2nd area he went astray is in his belief that evidence against neo-darwinism is evidence against evolution (or at least macroevolution) in general. It isn't. It is evidence in favour of the Gouldian view of evolution, i.e. punctuated equilibrium, along with a speedy, directed evolution following global catastrophes rather than relying on entirely random mutations. Btw, when I say directed, I don't mean by a higher intelligence, I mean by the information that an individual animal has gained through it's life, for example, an animal having to switch from a mostly insect-based diet to a plant-based one will end up with more chunky-jawed offspring not only because they happened upon that mutation and found it beneficial but rather that the strain of chewing that these animals experienced was useful information that the species used to better itself (not consciously of course), i.e. whilst there is still an element of randomness, it is confined between some goal posts that can be moved around by an animal's life experience. The neo-darwinistic view of random mutations being king is actually suggesting that nature is terribly inefficient and throws away such useful information (the strain of chewing) that could benefit it's descendants. The premature rejection of Lamarkism is the problem here. Btw, the diet change example I used above was the result of an experiment in which iguanas were moved from one island to another and where their morphology was found to have changed after just a few generations. Sure, that isn't macro-evolution but there is certainly evidence of that too. We have pulled plenty of whales with vestigal legs out of the ocean, i.e. legs that belie the animal's ancestral land-based lifestyle, and that are never found in sharks (no land-based ancestry). Life has evolved drastically in short spaces of time and randomness had very little to do with it (except maybe in the timing of the catastrophes that initiated it).
In my reading of many books critical of mainstream scientific theories I have learnt that no one is ever right about everything but that doesn't mean the author should be rejected outright. Apart from the two areas I had a bone to pick with above, the rest of the book is, as I said, pretty much on-the-money and so the book is certainly worth reading and I would recommend reading further into these topics by reading books specifically tailored to them.
The 2nd area he went astray is in his belief that evidence against neo-darwinism is evidence against evolution (or at least macroevolution) in general. It isn't. It is evidence in favour of the Gouldian view of evolution, i.e. punctuated equilibrium, along with a speedy, directed evolution following global catastrophes rather than relying on entirely random mutations. Btw, when I say directed, I don't mean by a higher intelligence, I mean by the information that an individual animal has gained through it's life, for example, an animal having to switch from a mostly insect-based diet to a plant-based one will end up with more chunky-jawed offspring not only because they happened upon that mutation and found it beneficial but rather that the strain of chewing that these animals experienced was useful information that the species used to better itself (not consciously of course), i.e. whilst there is still an element of randomness, it is confined between some goal posts that can be moved around by an animal's life experience. The neo-darwinistic view of random mutations being king is actually suggesting that nature is terribly inefficient and throws away such useful information (the strain of chewing) that could benefit it's descendants. The premature rejection of Lamarkism is the problem here. Btw, the diet change example I used above was the result of an experiment in which iguanas were moved from one island to another and where their morphology was found to have changed after just a few generations. Sure, that isn't macro-evolution but there is certainly evidence of that too. We have pulled plenty of whales with vestigal legs out of the ocean, i.e. legs that belie the animal's ancestral land-based lifestyle, and that are never found in sharks (no land-based ancestry). Life has evolved drastically in short spaces of time and randomness had very little to do with it (except maybe in the timing of the catastrophes that initiated it).
In my reading of many books critical of mainstream scientific theories I have learnt that no one is ever right about everything but that doesn't mean the author should be rejected outright. Apart from the two areas I had a bone to pick with above, the rest of the book is, as I said, pretty much on-the-money and so the book is certainly worth reading and I would recommend reading further into these topics by reading books specifically tailored to them.
June 2, 2021
In this absolutely brilliant work, James P. Hogan exposes the perils of dogmas and closed thinking to the scientific method. Hogan pulls no punches showcasing the glaring logical contradictions of biased researchers, of non-scientific claims pushed as scientific fact, and how serious scientific inquiry has been hijacked by ideologues bent on pushing agendas at the cost of legitimate research. From "Global Warming" to "Uniformitarianism vs Catastrophism," Hogan does an incredible job of outlining the facts while exposing the frauds. The chapter "Catastrophe of Ethics" concerning the controversy of the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky highlights these dogmatic elites at their absolute worst, poisoning a scientific symposium with the clear intent to discredit a fellow researcher, rather than honestly address his theories. The person who can read this chapter alone and not be disgusted with what they learn would hardly qualify as a critical thinker. A MUST READ for any budding scientific researcher.
February 20, 2018
Interesting in places, ridiculous in others. I liked the Velikovsky chapter, not so much the evolution parts.
September 30, 2018
I refer to this as the most interesting book I've ever read. On ANY subject. Ever.
Hogan takes what you think you know, and suggests that for every settled certainty, there exists another (somewhat) plausible explanation for the phenomenon with even more explanatory power. And he demonstrates this in field after field.
Incredibly entertaining, and he includes footnotes for his evidence. He shows how politics disrupts scientific research, how personalities and animosities interfere with truth seeking, and how what you think may be settled science may not be quite so settled.
I highly recommend this book.
Hogan takes what you think you know, and suggests that for every settled certainty, there exists another (somewhat) plausible explanation for the phenomenon with even more explanatory power. And he demonstrates this in field after field.
Incredibly entertaining, and he includes footnotes for his evidence. He shows how politics disrupts scientific research, how personalities and animosities interfere with truth seeking, and how what you think may be settled science may not be quite so settled.
I highly recommend this book.
April 10, 2025
A really fun book about the suffocating orthodoxy of... science?
My favorite chapter was the one about Immanuel Velikovsky whose Worlds in Collision and other sensational works are almost universally dismissed as the ravings of a crackpot.
Like Michael Crichton, Hogan is not persuaded by the HIV theory of AIDS.
If you've ever been troubled by a sense that science seems to be stuck or to have taken a wrong turn somewhere, you will enjoy this book.
My favorite chapter was the one about Immanuel Velikovsky whose Worlds in Collision and other sensational works are almost universally dismissed as the ravings of a crackpot.
Like Michael Crichton, Hogan is not persuaded by the HIV theory of AIDS.
If you've ever been troubled by a sense that science seems to be stuck or to have taken a wrong turn somewhere, you will enjoy this book.
August 31, 2016
Better than the 3/5 review indicates. About half the book consists of interesting and insightful criticisms of conventional wisdom. Highly recommended and informative. The other half consists of flawed or mistaken attacks on conventional wisdom - attacks that still serve as valuable practice in critical thinking for the reader. The challenge to the reader is to figure out which is which.
April 10, 2013
Nice and weird! Hogan's style in this book, is combative - and no surprises there - every subject he writes about is controversial. Happily, he backs everything up with numbing acres of fact - some of it beyond me (he was an engineer!)
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews