The Hidden Half

August 24, 2020
British radio broadcaster Blastland (The Norm Chronicles) takes a wide-ranging look at the limitations to the human ability to understand the world through data. Challenging received wisdom across a broad swath of disciplines, he begins with biology, focusing on marmorkrebs, a recently discovered variety of crayfish who can reproduce asexually, via unfertilized embryo. The scientific assumption is that these animals’ offspring, if all raised under the same conditions, would be identical to each other, but that has not proved the case. Nature and nurture have their say, Blastland contends, but there is another, as yet unknown, group of factors with equal sway. Elsewhere, he observes that “nearly 90% of... peer-reviewed findings did not appear to stand up” and that “maybe 40% of continuing medical procedures are either useless or positively do harm.” Venturing outside the realm of science and medicine, Blastland comments on how few professional economists or political analysts accurately predicted, respectively, China’s post–Tiananmen Square rise or Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory. Calling for “uncertainty... to be reclaimed from the cynical to become a weapon of the responsible,” this excellent work makes a convincing appeal for intellectual humility in the face of the unknowable.