Maybe I’m missing the point here. Maybe popular-science books, which are commercial enterprises, don’t need to be 100 per cent rigorously accurate, resistant to every nit-picking criticism. Maybe writing easy-to-digest treatments of scientific findings, even if they’re a little on the simplified side, is beneficial overall, since it promotes science and makes it relevant to people’s lives. And wouldn’t we rather that such books were being written by people who at least nod at the evidence? There’s some merit in this kind of argument, but it’s bad news in the long run. Letting the facts slide
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