At the beginning of this school year, I loaned a copy of In the Minds of Men to one of my colleagues in the science department. It came back with an enthusiastic "every high school student should read this book." I thought then and there that I would order a copy for the library and write this review of the book. 

Does the modern theory of where we come from have its own origins? Has the theory of evolution itself undergone its own process of evolution? In the Minds of Men addresses these questions and, at the same time, accomplishes much more. It is a compelling argument for the unscientific nature of the theory of evolution and an account of the tendency of scientists to allow politics and personal philosophy to distort their objectivity. It is the best kind of history book, full of biography and fresh viewpoints of history. In this book the author brings up important and often neglected episodes such as Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798; an event which threw France into a period of Egyptomania and launched Napoleon Buonaparte's great ascent to power. Mr. Taylor masterfully tells the story of Jean-François Champollion, the man who cracked the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics from the Rosetta stone, with lots of great details about his personality and unusual talents, as well as his tragic end. In this book one gets a picture of the characters of the people who made science. Mr. Taylor exposes some of the less noble objectives of the Lunar Society (lunatics), that group of scientists including Joseph Priestly, James Watt and Benjamin Franklin that met on the nights of the full moon in Birmingham. What was their political agenda? Why was Benjamin Franklin so interested in them? This book answers those questions.

History is often accused of being dry...nothing but a list of names and dates to be memorized. In In the Minds of Men it becomes evident that history cannot be written or taught without a perspective. There is always a political or philosophical message that goes along with a history lesson. If history did not contain some statement about who we are, some assertion of what is right and what is wrong, nobody would want to teach it…and nobody would want to learn it. Using history we reconfirm our ideas, we justify our positions, we validate our politics. In fact, as Ian Taylor illustrates, science, history, religion and politics cannot be surgically separated as we have often attempted to do in our modern presentation of them.  

One thing that I particularly appreciate about In the Minds of Men is its treatment of many of the very important scientists whose names just dropped out of history with the iconization of Darwin and Einstein. William Thompson, James Clark Maxwell, Michael Faraday, Karl Gauss, Herman Von Helmholtz, all of whom were instrumental in the advancement of science and many of whom have made critical and world changing discoveries.

I believe this book is a critical book to read as we enter the biological century when science will largely be occupied with cloning, manipulation of DNA, cell culture and other biological endeavors. It states plainly the evil that human beings have been capable of in the name of science, including forced sterilization, measuring skulls to determine suitability for reproduction, placing the races in a hierarchy, attempting to exterminate certain peoples in order to improve the gene pool of humanity.

From time to time, it is important to swallow hard and face some of the scams and lies, the invented results of experiments, the artistic license in drawing “intermediates,” the unfair attempts to discredit or take the credit from conscientious scientists as well as the attempts to justify racism. In the Minds of Men brings back into the light the case of Samuel Morton, who, at the beginning of the civil war, 1861, collected over 1000 skulls and measured their cranial capacity using lead shot. In the name of science he categorized races and concluded that white people are superior in a blatant attempt to justify slavery from the halls of science (pages 262, 263). His results were reanalyzed in 1978 and found to be completely absurd and full of his own personal bias. If we don't look at these events and approach science with a healthy degree of skepticism, we give the scientists carte blanche. We allow scientists to do and say whatever they want, uncriticized, just because they pronounce the word science. This book contains several accounts of so-called science that were really a tragic and erroneous attempt to malign people.      

One of the ways we determine who we are is through history. If you are to face the ethical challenges of the future in science, I believe it is critical to have some idea of the history of scientific ideas and the reasons for the prominence of these ideas. Mr. Taylor's book is a good start. It is easy to read and contains page after page of precious information, which is normally edited out of history texts and science texts. It is one of the most valuable books I own…