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msbethreads's review against another edition
5.0
A fun and interesting book. The topics are very short. It's great for when you're busy and don't' want to get involved in something deeper.
evertbooks's review against another edition
funny
informative
lighthearted
fast-paced
2.0
Some fun facts, but nothing really stuck with me. I disliked that sources for most facts and statements were missing.. also, the book was rather UK focused, which made certain sections irrelevant to me.
external_cyberbrain's review against another edition
4.0
Covers what we think we know and what the real truth is. A fun little book.
theladydoor's review against another edition
3.0
If only the world could be like the tv show QI, where one would be more appreciated for being "quite interesting," rather than for simply right. I have laughed and learned with Stephen Fry and Alan Davies for eight series of QI and jumped at the chance to read this book by QI producer John Lloyd.
While the facts in the book were indeed interesting, they lacked something without the characteristic quips and jokes of Fry and the rest of the panel. The edition I read had some memorable quotes from the show mixed in, but I would have preferred some more humor in the content of the info blocks. In addition, it seemed that many of the facts had been culled from the show itself, so I didn't really learn anything particularly new.
All in all though, this was an enjoyable and fast read, though not on par with the truly hilarious tv show.
While the facts in the book were indeed interesting, they lacked something without the characteristic quips and jokes of Fry and the rest of the panel. The edition I read had some memorable quotes from the show mixed in, but I would have preferred some more humor in the content of the info blocks. In addition, it seemed that many of the facts had been culled from the show itself, so I didn't really learn anything particularly new.
All in all though, this was an enjoyable and fast read, though not on par with the truly hilarious tv show.
1teachingnomad's review against another edition
3.0
Written with a certain tongue-in-cheek humour, this book has the lofty goal of attempting to cure a reader of their general ignorance of everyday facts. While many are interesting and some are quite shocking, there are two big problems I had with them. The first is that there is no evidence of any research or where the authors found their proof for their claims, which makes it difficult to believe all some of the more outrageous facts. The second is that in many "facts" the authors go on a severe tangent almost from the first sentence, almost as if the word count was more important that the ignorance they were trying to clear up.
Overall it was an entertaining read, great for short little periods of downtime, but I would be hesitant to use any of the facts provided by this book without some other supporting evidence.
Overall it was an entertaining read, great for short little periods of downtime, but I would be hesitant to use any of the facts provided by this book without some other supporting evidence.
sweetvireo's review against another edition
1.0
Before I start, let me say that I have a Master of Science degree in Paleontology, a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry, and a Bachelor of Science in Ecology & Evolution.
Some things wrong in this book:
1. [page 58] The three-toed sloth and the two-toed sloth are related to each other. Saying they are not means that the author has a misunderstanding of phylogenetics. They are sister taxa, meaning that they are more closely related to each other than they are to their next closest extant relative (anteaters). They are also more closely related to each other than to any other taxon. Therefore the two types of sloth are related. To say they are not just because their skeletal anatomy is different is grossly negligent [a side note: they say that the two-toed has 6 cervical (neck) vertebrae. It does, but only because three are fused together. Sloths are xenarthrans. This means they belong to a group of mammals that have weird fusions in their skeleton. Most xenarthrans have fused tibiae and fibulae, a heavily fused pelvis (called a synsacrum), and fused cervical vertebrae.]. A tinamou and a swan have different skeletal anatomy (the swan has many more vertebrae than the tinamou and there are different bones fused in the swan's pelvis compared to the tinamou) but I'm not sure who would say they aren't related. (Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1088784/pdf/PB011605.pdf; Figure 1: Bradypus (three-toed) and Choloepus (two-toed) are sister taxa)
2. [page 62] "Most other mammals" do not have baculi (penis bones). The authors state that whales and "most other mammals" have them.
Nope. Baculi are found in Primates (minus humans), Rodentia (mice, rats, squirrels, gophers, porcupines, beavers), Insectivora (shrews, moles, hedgehogs), Chiroptera (bats), Carnivora (dogs, cats, raccoons, weasels, mongooses, hyenas, bears, seals, walruses), and Lagamorphs (rabbits, hares, pikas; although this was discovered in 2014). The baculum is not found in Edentata (anteaters, sloths, armadillos), Pholidota (pangolins), Macroscelidae (elephant shrews), Scandentia (tree shrews), Dermoptera (colugos or flying lemurs), Artiodactyla (pigs, deer, cattle, goats, sheep, hippos, camels), Cetacea (whales, dolphins, porpoises), Tubulidentata (aardvark), Perissodactyla (horses, tapirs, rhinos), Hyracoidea (hyraxes, dassies), Sirenia (manatees, dugong, sea cows), and Proboscidea (elephants, mammoths, mastodons). There are several extinct clades of eutherian mammals that also lack baculi (Creodonta, Condylarthra, Desmostylia, and Embrythopoda).
Most eutherian (placental) mammals do not have baculi.
3. [page 63] Rhino horns do leave evidence of their existence on rhino skulls. Yes, there is no stub of bone protruding from the nasal bones on the skull, but the nasals have thickened, rough bone marking the base of the horn. This is an indication that some sort of soft tissue sits there.
4. [page 121] Humans did evolve from apes. This is another instance where the author does not have an understanding of phylogenetics. The sentence in question reads as such, "This creature [what humans evolved from] descended from squirrel-like tree-shrews, which in turn evolved from hedgehogs, and before that, starfish." HOLY MOTHER OF GOD. The fallacies in that sentence. That sentence implies that we know direct ancestry. In paleontology under the phylogenetics framework, it is not possible to know that one species directly led to another and so on. It is not possible to know that the population of fossil specimens you just found is the ancestral population that led to another species. There is nothing that differentiates that population from another found, say, 10 miles away as being the ancestral population.
Another sentence: "The latest comparison [the book was published in 2006] of genomes of humans and our closest relative, the chimpanzee, shows that we split much later than was previously assumed. This means we quite possibly interbred to produce unrecorded and now extinct hybrid species before the final separation 5.4 million years ago." A few things here. What is a "hybrid species"? I have three science degrees including a Masters in Paleontology. I have never heard of this. If it is different enough to be called a species, then call it such. Also, the authors clearly have not heard of ghost lineages. A ghost lineage exists when a divergence dating analysis puts the date of speciation (divergence) before the age of the oldest known fossils from either of the resulting lineages (species). The time between the divergence date and when the first fossils show up is the ghost lineage. Paleontologists might not find the fossils in this period of time for a number of reasons. The area where the fossils should be found may not have any sediments (rocks) dating from that time. Maybe they were deposited but then the environment changed and they were eroded away. Maybe they were never deposited in the first place: during the time in question, the environment was erosional rather than depositional. In erosional environments, nothing can fossilize. Fossilization can only happen in depositional environments where the dead can be quickly buried and stay covered. Another reason why we may not have found the fossils in the ghost lineage is that we may not have searched all of the sediment dating from that time. Which just means we need to go searching some more.
Another thing wrong in the last sentence I quoted: If the supposed "hybrid species" are unrecorded, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. You can't just go making them up if there is not evidence that they ever existed.
5. [page 127] Maybe its use is waning in the UK, but the Bunsen burner is going strong in the US. So to say that it has largely been replaced by the hot plate is false. As a biochemistry major in undergrad, I can assure you that there are some experiments in high school and college that can only be done with the heat of an open flame. In high school, I remember being tested multiple times on my ability to start a Bunsen burner and keep it going.
6. [page 149] The author states that because the Doberman pinscher was created as a breed in 35 years, this "flies in the face of the Darwinian evolution of species, a process thought to operate over thousands or even millions of years." 1) A Doberman is not a different species of animal than the animals that the breed was created from. All are dogs. The same species. 2) The process of Darwinian evolution of species takes a long time in nature, when it is not influenced by humans. The creation of dog breeds is an example of artificial evolution, in which the creation of new breeds or sometimes species is often accelerated. -Because of the blatant conflation of "breed" and "species", I am subtracting one star from my rating. Originally, I was going to give this book 2/5. Now it gets 1/5. If I could give it 0 stars, I would.
I really thought QI was better at science than this. These errors are disgraceful.
Additionally, I don't like that some of the facts are repeated. A question will be asked and in the answer, the authors will mention the answer to another question that is asked later. I also don't like how pedantic some of the questions are, as if they are written with the purpose of tricking you based on the wording.
I have to say that in the end, I regret reading this. As someone with three science degrees, I found that I already knew a third to a half of this book. Additionally, my view of QI and the books that spawn from it is much less favorable considering how horrible they were at explaining some aspects of science in this book. I understand that they are trying to explain complex subjects such that everyone could understand them. However, especially when it comes to anything having to do with evolution, they either didn't care, didn't understand themselves, intentionally got it wrong, or simplified it too much because all of their explanations in this field of science are wrong.
Some things wrong in this book:
1. [page 58] The three-toed sloth and the two-toed sloth are related to each other. Saying they are not means that the author has a misunderstanding of phylogenetics. They are sister taxa, meaning that they are more closely related to each other than they are to their next closest extant relative (anteaters). They are also more closely related to each other than to any other taxon. Therefore the two types of sloth are related. To say they are not just because their skeletal anatomy is different is grossly negligent [a side note: they say that the two-toed has 6 cervical (neck) vertebrae. It does, but only because three are fused together. Sloths are xenarthrans. This means they belong to a group of mammals that have weird fusions in their skeleton. Most xenarthrans have fused tibiae and fibulae, a heavily fused pelvis (called a synsacrum), and fused cervical vertebrae.]. A tinamou and a swan have different skeletal anatomy (the swan has many more vertebrae than the tinamou and there are different bones fused in the swan's pelvis compared to the tinamou) but I'm not sure who would say they aren't related. (Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1088784/pdf/PB011605.pdf; Figure 1: Bradypus (three-toed) and Choloepus (two-toed) are sister taxa)
2. [page 62] "Most other mammals" do not have baculi (penis bones). The authors state that whales and "most other mammals" have them.
Nope. Baculi are found in Primates (minus humans), Rodentia (mice, rats, squirrels, gophers, porcupines, beavers), Insectivora (shrews, moles, hedgehogs), Chiroptera (bats), Carnivora (dogs, cats, raccoons, weasels, mongooses, hyenas, bears, seals, walruses), and Lagamorphs (rabbits, hares, pikas; although this was discovered in 2014). The baculum is not found in Edentata (anteaters, sloths, armadillos), Pholidota (pangolins), Macroscelidae (elephant shrews), Scandentia (tree shrews), Dermoptera (colugos or flying lemurs), Artiodactyla (pigs, deer, cattle, goats, sheep, hippos, camels), Cetacea (whales, dolphins, porpoises), Tubulidentata (aardvark), Perissodactyla (horses, tapirs, rhinos), Hyracoidea (hyraxes, dassies), Sirenia (manatees, dugong, sea cows), and Proboscidea (elephants, mammoths, mastodons). There are several extinct clades of eutherian mammals that also lack baculi (Creodonta, Condylarthra, Desmostylia, and Embrythopoda).
Most eutherian (placental) mammals do not have baculi.
3. [page 63] Rhino horns do leave evidence of their existence on rhino skulls. Yes, there is no stub of bone protruding from the nasal bones on the skull, but the nasals have thickened, rough bone marking the base of the horn. This is an indication that some sort of soft tissue sits there.
4. [page 121] Humans did evolve from apes. This is another instance where the author does not have an understanding of phylogenetics. The sentence in question reads as such, "This creature [what humans evolved from] descended from squirrel-like tree-shrews, which in turn evolved from hedgehogs, and before that, starfish." HOLY MOTHER OF GOD. The fallacies in that sentence. That sentence implies that we know direct ancestry. In paleontology under the phylogenetics framework, it is not possible to know that one species directly led to another and so on. It is not possible to know that the population of fossil specimens you just found is the ancestral population that led to another species. There is nothing that differentiates that population from another found, say, 10 miles away as being the ancestral population.
Another sentence: "The latest comparison [the book was published in 2006] of genomes of humans and our closest relative, the chimpanzee, shows that we split much later than was previously assumed. This means we quite possibly interbred to produce unrecorded and now extinct hybrid species before the final separation 5.4 million years ago." A few things here. What is a "hybrid species"? I have three science degrees including a Masters in Paleontology. I have never heard of this. If it is different enough to be called a species, then call it such. Also, the authors clearly have not heard of ghost lineages. A ghost lineage exists when a divergence dating analysis puts the date of speciation (divergence) before the age of the oldest known fossils from either of the resulting lineages (species). The time between the divergence date and when the first fossils show up is the ghost lineage. Paleontologists might not find the fossils in this period of time for a number of reasons. The area where the fossils should be found may not have any sediments (rocks) dating from that time. Maybe they were deposited but then the environment changed and they were eroded away. Maybe they were never deposited in the first place: during the time in question, the environment was erosional rather than depositional. In erosional environments, nothing can fossilize. Fossilization can only happen in depositional environments where the dead can be quickly buried and stay covered. Another reason why we may not have found the fossils in the ghost lineage is that we may not have searched all of the sediment dating from that time. Which just means we need to go searching some more.
Another thing wrong in the last sentence I quoted: If the supposed "hybrid species" are unrecorded, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. You can't just go making them up if there is not evidence that they ever existed.
5. [page 127] Maybe its use is waning in the UK, but the Bunsen burner is going strong in the US. So to say that it has largely been replaced by the hot plate is false. As a biochemistry major in undergrad, I can assure you that there are some experiments in high school and college that can only be done with the heat of an open flame. In high school, I remember being tested multiple times on my ability to start a Bunsen burner and keep it going.
6. [page 149] The author states that because the Doberman pinscher was created as a breed in 35 years, this "flies in the face of the Darwinian evolution of species, a process thought to operate over thousands or even millions of years." 1) A Doberman is not a different species of animal than the animals that the breed was created from. All are dogs. The same species. 2) The process of Darwinian evolution of species takes a long time in nature, when it is not influenced by humans. The creation of dog breeds is an example of artificial evolution, in which the creation of new breeds or sometimes species is often accelerated. -Because of the blatant conflation of "breed" and "species", I am subtracting one star from my rating. Originally, I was going to give this book 2/5. Now it gets 1/5. If I could give it 0 stars, I would.
I really thought QI was better at science than this. These errors are disgraceful.
Additionally, I don't like that some of the facts are repeated. A question will be asked and in the answer, the authors will mention the answer to another question that is asked later. I also don't like how pedantic some of the questions are, as if they are written with the purpose of tricking you based on the wording.
I have to say that in the end, I regret reading this. As someone with three science degrees, I found that I already knew a third to a half of this book. Additionally, my view of QI and the books that spawn from it is much less favorable considering how horrible they were at explaining some aspects of science in this book. I understand that they are trying to explain complex subjects such that everyone could understand them. However, especially when it comes to anything having to do with evolution, they either didn't care, didn't understand themselves, intentionally got it wrong, or simplified it too much because all of their explanations in this field of science are wrong.
catsobvi's review against another edition
2.0
This book did have a lot of interesting bits of information in it, but I don’t feel like it succeeded in its goal. We were to learn the truth about so many things about which we have been misinformed. I didn’t find that I actually had the incorrect knowledge on most of this. I think a lot of what they did was argue semantics or just phrase things in tricky ways. For instance, we were properly informed about the highest v. tallest mountain, so Everest would not have been the answer they were looking for. Tricked ya! It might be the highest but it’s not the tallest! Yes, ok, didn’t we actually learn that in like 8th grade or somewhere thereabout? Or how about there are actually only 46 states and 4 commonwealths. Really? I mean, this has almost no bearing on anything, so who but those who want to trick people with these questions actually cares?
There were a few questions that relied on only 1 study to contradict what people commonly believe on a topic, or what other studies have concluded. An example of this would be the question on how much sleep people actually need. Why should I believe this study over other studies?
I’m also dubious as to the accuracy of many of their answers. Some of the questions didn’t even have real answers, they just threw around commonly held theories such as on the origins of the Hokey-Pokey. Or word origins, we know how easy those can be to track. Wasn’t the point to discount the common myths and provide us with truth?
I had a major issue with the fact that they had a book filled with information purporting to be corrections to common misconceptions, but there was no bibliography or footnotes or anything to tell us where they got most of this information. Guess what? I can contradict most commonly held beliefs by looking for information on the Most Reliable and All-Knowing Internet. So why should I believe any of this if they don’t even tell us where they found their super special knowledge?
I know this book was meant to be fun, and a lot of it was, but there are just some standards that should always be met when you want someone to accept as truth the information you are sharing. Otherwise, all you’re doing is adding to the common misconceptions.
There were a few questions that relied on only 1 study to contradict what people commonly believe on a topic, or what other studies have concluded. An example of this would be the question on how much sleep people actually need. Why should I believe this study over other studies?
I’m also dubious as to the accuracy of many of their answers. Some of the questions didn’t even have real answers, they just threw around commonly held theories such as on the origins of the Hokey-Pokey. Or word origins, we know how easy those can be to track. Wasn’t the point to discount the common myths and provide us with truth?
I had a major issue with the fact that they had a book filled with information purporting to be corrections to common misconceptions, but there was no bibliography or footnotes or anything to tell us where they got most of this information. Guess what? I can contradict most commonly held beliefs by looking for information on the Most Reliable and All-Knowing Internet. So why should I believe any of this if they don’t even tell us where they found their super special knowledge?
I know this book was meant to be fun, and a lot of it was, but there are just some standards that should always be met when you want someone to accept as truth the information you are sharing. Otherwise, all you’re doing is adding to the common misconceptions.