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Author Michael Crichton discusses his reluctance to accept some of today’s pop science conclusions I share some of his unpopular truths. In high school, my best friend Bradley Minnaar, introduced me to his books: Andromeda Strain and Sphere. Later we read Jurassic Park before the movie was released.
Here’s a Summary of the Unpopular Truths:
Environmentalism is a religion: In a 2003 speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Chrichton outlines his views starting from his university study of anthropology. “I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form.”
Second-hand smoke does not cause Cancer: As a former smoker, I also have first hand experience of this issue. According to an article in Forbes magazine, “The article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute details a study of 76,000 women over more than a decade, which found the usual link between smoking and cancer. Lung cancer was 13 times more common in current smokers, and four times more common in former smokers, than in non-smokers.”
Global Warming is not a crisis (Charlie Rose): The headline in an 2008 obituary read: Michael Crichton, world’s most famous global warming denier, dies. In 2003 he gave a lecture at Caltech discussing this issue in depth under the humour title: Aliens Cause Global Warming.
Nobody can predict the future (Charlie Rose)