''Tom Bethell is a senior editor at American Spectator, "media fellow" at the Hoover Institution, and purveyor of just about every brand of wingnut pseudoscience you can name.
His ultimate anti-science manifesto is the Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (PIGS), a book-length exudation promoting intelligent design, AIDS denial, stem cell myths, anti-environmentalism (mostly concentrating on global warming denial, the classic DDT and Rachel Carson canards, the crank version of radiation hormesis, and claiming that endangered species aren't really endangered), and cancer quackery. The book is exceptional in that one could easily use the thing as a whole as well as each individual chapter to play some form of crank bingo or a skeptical drinking game (if you really hate your liver). Many classic rhetorical gambits make an appearance: Science was wrong before, the Galileo gambit, the Evil Liberal Science Conspiracy, "suppression" of crankery "innovative" and "politically incorrect" ideas, science as a secular religion, the Gish Gallop, etc. The unifying theme is Bethell's conspiratorial perspective in which the scientific establishment is constantly sidelining "politically incorrect" dissent in order for scientists to prop up liberal ideology and make off with mountains of grant money.
Each topic covered also includes all the relevant greatest hits. On evolution, for example, all the old chestnuts are there: No transitional fossils, irreducible complexity, microevolution not macroevolution, Karl Popper's declaration of the theory as unfalsifiable, etc. If ye shall know them by their citations, it's predictable fare; Bethell's "qualified experts" include the usual suspects at the Discovery Institute (Dembski, Behe, and Wells), Peter Duesberg, S. Fred Singer, Steve McIntyre, Michael Crichton, Roy Spencer, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Petr Beckmann. *catches breath*
Another hit and run job that is heavy in ad hominem and completely lacking in refutation. If he's a crackpot, refutation should be easy, yet no attempt is even made. Cary Mullis, the discoverer of polymerase chain reaction (DNA) and a Nobel Laureate, is (or was) also skeptical of the claim that HIV causes AIDS. Of course, that skepticism is decades old and the science may have improved the arguments for the HIV-causes AIDs lobby, but it doesn't mean Bethell's earlier skepticism about HIV-AIDS causation was wrong nor is it any evidence whatsoever that he is wrong about evolution. Another example of a staunch defender of Neo-Darwinism responding with logical fallacies rather than arguments.
