Radical Science Reading List

24 Mar 2022 - Anarchist Arborist

This is perhaps an excessively bare-bones reading list. I would like more suggestions and corrections. This is a work in progress again, so hopefully it will develop positively in the days to follow. I also plan on this having more general science in it too. We’ll see.

TO AVOID

• Michio Kaku
• Neil Degrass Tyson
• Steven Pinker
• Anyone who calls themselves involved in “human biodiversity.” (they’re just racists.)
• Sabine Hossenfelder
• Jared Diamond

Anthropology/Sociology

• The Use and Abuse of Biology by Marshall Sahlins
• The Woman who never evolved by Sandra Hrdy
• The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power by Mark Neocleous
• On The Phenomenology of Giant Puppets by David Graeber
• Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Biology

• The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment by Richard Lewontin
• “The Apportionment of Human Diversity” by Richard Lewontin
• Biology as Ideology by Richard Lewontin
• “The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme” by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin
• Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould

Psychology

• The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon
• Liberated Parents, Liberated Children: Your Guide to a Happier Family by Adele Faber, Elaine Mazlish
• Neurodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Brain Differences by Thomas Armstrong
• The Authoritarian Personality by T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford, Peter E. Gordon
• Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker
• Doctering the Mind by Richard P. Bentall
• The therapy industry: the irresistible rise of the talking cure, and why it doesn’t work by Paul Moloney
• Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness: Law and the Behavioral Sciences in Conflict by Patricia Erickson, Steven K. Erickson
• Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
• Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
• We’ve had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy & the World’s getting Worse by James Hillman, Michael Ventura

Contributions to debates

• The Science and Politics of IQ by Leon Kamin
• Not in our Genes by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin
• Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology edited by Steven Rose and Hillary Rose
• Evolution, Gender and Rape edited by Cheryl Brown Travis
• The Bell Curve Debate edited by Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman
• The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea by Robert Wald Sussman
• Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature by Philip Kitchner
• The Bell Curve by Shaun

Feminist Science

• Sexing the body by Anne Fausto-Stirling
• Myths of Gender by Anne Fausto-Stirling
• Primate Visions by Donna Haraway
• Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories on Women by Ruth Bleier
• Feminist Approaches to Science by Ruth Bleier

Science Studies

• Labratory Life by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar
• Science in Action by Bruno Latour
• On the modern cult of the factish gods by Bruno Latour

History

• The Science and Politics of Racial Research by W. H. Tucker
• The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund by W. H. Tucker
• The Intelligence Controversy: A Guide to the Debates by W. H. Tucker
• The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science, and Ideology by W. H. Tucker
• Race, Racism and Psychology by Graham Richards
• The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
• Kropotkin was no Crackpot by Stephen Jay Gould

Youtube Channels

• Sci-Show
• PBS Spacetime or other PBS shows of the same kind.
• 3blue1brown

Podcasts

• Srsly Wrong — especially their episode Why IQ is Bullshit
• If Books Could Kill (mostly for debunking bad popsci.)

Important Background

• Against Method by Paul Feyerabend
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
• English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States by Rosina Lippi-Green
• Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Pyotr Kropotkin
• Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes by Lakatos

Other Authors

• J.B.S. Haldane
• J.D. Bernal

Thanks to Lobo for help with the psychology section.