London Science Book Club 5

Tonight was the latest meeting of the London Science Book Club, and our pick was Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear by Canada-based journalist, Dan Gardner. It's essentially a book about the way we misuse and misinterpret statistics, in areas as broad as breast cancer occurrence and fears around nuclear power. It's full of wonderful snatches of research, particularly by the psychologists Kahneman and Tversky, who ran some famous experiments trying to understand why and how people make errors. And it will make you think very differently about the stats you hear about in the news. One funny example I read recently, proving how easy it is for people to blind us with numbers is this: When Elvis Presley died in 1977, there were 37 Elvis impersonators in the world. By 1993, there were 48,000. So extrapolating, every 3rd person will be an Elvis impersonator by 2010. This is ridiculous of course, yet it's the kind of thing that happens in news reports all the time.

Risk also happens to be well-written and beautifully researched, if a little more focused on examples than human stories. The only thing missing, a couple of us noted, was some deeper explanation of why humans behave so irrationally when it comes to some fears. Having read Antonio Damasio's book Descartes' Error in our first book club, we were all aware of the neuroscience of behaviour and how it has shaped our understanding of what it means to be human - with all our faults. Is there something about odds that we just can't seem to grasp? Are we just a bit thick, or is there more at play?

In all though, a big thumbs up for Risk! We really enjoyed it.

Also, some good news for new members: Owing to work and family commitments, we have had a couple of people drop out of our small club. So if you're based near London and would be willing to get together with us once every two months over a good non-fiction science book, then please send me an email or a tweet (contact details available here).