Radical Science Reading List

Anarchist Arborist
3 min readMar 23, 2022

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

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

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.

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Anarchist Arborist

I'm an anarchist, just starting out writing these things.