Gareth and Rhodri are father and son and, as might only be expected, argue a lot. Well, we argue with lots of people, but arguments between us are a bit different. We don’t worry much about what we might say to each other.

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Gareth is interested in (amongst other things) the neurobiology of social behaviour, Rhodri is a social scientist working on how science develops: how its findings spread and influence opinion, how its ideas come to be accepted or rejected by particular communities, and how those communities grow, fragment, and decline over time.

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Gareth and Rhodri have attempted to resolve some of the arguments between them in The Matter of Facts, published by MIT Press in May 2020. That book takes an affectionate but not uncritical look at science. Scientists are professional persuaders, in the business of persuading others of the importance of what they do. To that end, they adopt a menagerie of strategies to convince funders, editors, the public and their peers and sometimes they even convince themselves. The book looks at how these strategies can distort the evidence, and this blog aims to extend its arguments.