Michael Blastland

В 1990-х годах в зоомагазинах Германии появились необычные мраморные рачки. Их главной особенностью был партеногенез (однополое размножение), в результате которого на свет появлялись идентичные клоны единственного родителя. Рачки стали подарком для биологов: те show more рассчитывали, что обрели много дешевых идентичных особей для экспериментов. Однако их ждал сюрприз: даже в лабораторных условиях клоны вырастали разными по размеру, окраске и повадкам. Какой-то неизвестный фактор, помимо генетики и окружающей среды, воздействовал на их развитие. У науки до сих пор нет ответа. Автор книги обнаружил, что и во многих других случаях из науки и жизни есть переменные, существенно влияющие на исход запланированного. Эта полная парадоксальных примеров книга перетрясет вашу картину мира. show less

Michael Blastland is upset that everything is not neat and tidy. That there is no guarantee of symmetry. That economies are not predictable. That genetics does not describe nearly everything about life. In his The Hidden Half, he examines a multitude of disciplines and events to show we must be missing half of what is going on, because we can’t explain them otherwise. We exist on half the knowledge we need, without knowing what we don’t know.

The book is a fast-reading and delightful show more collection of failures, peppered with behavioral science, which is always entertaining.

When people who have written down a position one way are interviewed as if they had chosen the opposite stance, they actively defend the position they did not take as if it were always their own. Politicians are famous for being absolutely certain of the rightness of their position one day, yet take the precise opposite position another. Every year, only one economist is correct about the performance of the economy. Every model is wrong. Nothing, it seems, is predictable.

He begins with a startling enigma, at least to scientists. The marmorkrebs is a newly discovered kind of crawfish that flourishes in the German aquarium industry. Its unique feature is that the females can lay eggs that will hatch without input from males (parthenogenesis). All you need is a female, who can lay thousands of eggs and produce thousands of offspring with DNA identical to hers. Perfect clones, in theory. And yet, the offspring come in all shapes and sizes, and variable colorings. How is this possible when their DNA is identical? Blastland says nobody knows. No answer satisfies, and it all points out that we clearly do not understand genetics after all. If more proof were needed, he points to the past decade of breakthroughs in genetic research, which have resulted in essentially nothing. Identifying genes has not changed medicine or lives anything like the predictions had it, because that is only part of the story. And we don’t know what the rest of the story is.

Man has an insatiable need to put everything in its proper place. He needs to know things are organized, measurable, consistent and predictable. And they just aren’t. But that stops no discipline working on those assumptions and making those kinds of claims. Studies in peer-reviewed journals attest to the constant flow of new, absolutely proven ideas that are just plain wrong. Some cannot be replicated. Many are just the survivors; the journals don’t publish all the contradictory failure articles. So they aren’t cited in other papers. The result is undisputed discoveries that are worthless. We see them daily, particularly in biology, genetics and medicine. As easy to disprove as they were to prove, they are soon forgotten when they prove useless.

Medicine comes in for a particular beating in The Hidden Half.

Blastland deconstructs studies to show how useless they, drugs and tests really are. He shows that 90% of drug study results are not replicable, even by the original researchers. In one specific example of pointless tests, he takes on dementia in over 65s, where a test long considered reliable can pinpoint four positive cases in 100 tests. Unfortunately, there are six cases per hundred, so it misses two of them, or one third. Far worse, it also labels 23 additional cases as positive – falsely. This means the test claims a total of 27 positives when we know there are only six. The result: nearly two dozen people suffer the stress and anxiety of becoming demented without every becoming demented. So with breast cancer and numerous other examples where failure stops no one from taking these tests. Or doctors from requiring them.

Even in detective work, we have no clue as to the right answer. It’s a lot of guesswork and assumptions that are all but completely unreliable. He gives the example motorcycle thefts in Germany, which dropped unexpectedly from 150,000 to 45,000. All kinds of theories were put forward in economics, sociology, crime rates, employment trends and so on. The truth turned out to be, of all things, helmet laws. Germany mandated helmets for motorcyclists, which kneecapped the casual theft of motorcycles. Helmets were on no one’s top ten list of causes.

There is a lot on mice. Mice used in experiments have proven to be frustrating for those keen on definitive findings. The same batch of mice, bred to have identical properties, put in identical labs, with identical conditions and food, but in geographically different facilities, have produced different results in identical tests run on them. What is it we don’t know? We don’t know. But no one can rely on test results; that much is certain.

My own favorite story of lab mice concerns the researchers. A study wanted to determine if mice could hide their pain. Researchers injected chemicals into mice legs which gave them a great deal of pain. They found that when female humans handled them, the mice grimaced freely. But when males handled them, they braced themselves and hid their suffering, putting on a brave face. They wouldn’t allow themselves to show weakness before men. This even worked when a male’s used t-shirt was left by the cage. The experiment showed two things, neither of which has to do with muse pain. The results of mice studies are colored by the sex of the researchers and are therefore unreliable. And every mouse test going back a century is invalid because it did not take into account the sex of the researchers who examined them daily if not hourly. Our unintended arrogance in announcing results of such experiments is typical of the hidden half Blastland talks about, even if he doesn’t explicitly cite this one phenomenon.

At bottom, Blastland is saying we are nowhere near as far along as we claim and like to believe. We need a little more humility and a lot less hubris. He quotes Gustave Flaubert, hundreds of years ago: “The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity.” We need to accept the imperfection, not of the universe, but of our knowledge of it. That would change the whole frustration index of continual failures in science.

Meanwhile, back at the marmorkrebs, the crawfish Blastland says have stymied all the experts, it instantly occurred to me while reading the prologue that there is an obvious answer. At least to me. The fact that no males participate in the reproductive cycle means the DNA of the newborns is deficient and therefore unstable. This will produce unpredictably different, if not deformed offspring, with uncertain futures. Parthenogenesis among crawfish is unnatural, and Darwin would posit that situation could not last. Defective chromosomes missing the male input will see to it the subspecies of genetically identical females does not continue. But what do I know. I’m no biochemistry researcher. I just review books.

David Wineberg show less

This pre-Crash somewhat polemic introduction to the use and misuse of statistics in public policy and the media comes from the creators of the estimable and corrective Radio 4 Programme More or Less.

Since it was published, More or Less has been a rational thorn in the side of Government officials, campaigning NGOS and tabloid editors who misuse data knowing or unknowingly for their own purposes.

The book is a primer on or perhaps manifesto for sensible thinking about what numbers can and show more cannot do and we should worry if, eight years on, the basic lessons have not been learned by Government.

Every day shows us that the Press and the almost sociopathic NGOs have not learned any lessons at all. At least the two people authoring this book were standing up for intellectual integrity in 2007.

Unfortunately the book is written as if it was a leisurely radio broadcast, conversationally steering an unsatisfactory line between populism and the scientific method.

I wanted tighter editing and a less easy-going style with the space saved given over to more examples of public policy error and campaigning manipulation.

In the end, the style, like radio, makes the narrative a little forgettable. It does not stick in the mind as a set of techniques for critiquing public policy. Those techniques are what we really want.

Perhaps I am being unfair because a polemic may have been required in the dying days of the manipulative political culture constructed by New Labour. We have since moved on -though not as far as we could.

More or Less has, since then, created a very substantial body of work. It has developed a significant and educated listenership so perhaps it might not need to be written in quite this way today.

What struck me, however, was that the authors seemed terribly reluctant to stick the knife into the carcase of our political culture very deep. It was as if they did not want to burn their bridges.

What is needed now is something more brutal than this book. We need an investigation not of our ignorance but of the will to manipulate ignorance and the wider failure to educate us out of ignorance.

My reading of this book is not that people are stupid but that they are human, overwhelmed by data. They should be able to trust those they elect, give money to or who supply their information. They cannot.

The problem is only partly a matter of better education (in which the authors play their part). It is equally an issue of politics.

The public should not have to become statisticians to protect itself. The emphasis on us protecting ourselves is the wrong one - it is the elite, Government, NGO and media, that have to be brought to account.

Every time a Government or NGO or corporation or newspaper manipulates data to sell something - a policy, a cause, a product or a story - they should be called out. This book pulled its punches. show less

Leaving aside the fact that the authors of this book sound like a location from Doctor Who ("I stared across the barren waste of the Dilnot Blastland"), reading it is a great experience. The premise is simple, but effective. All the time we are bombarded with numbers, with statistics, that we tend to take as gospel. But both the numbers themselves and the way they are used should always be subject to a little light questioning.

The authors point out how easy it is to bamboozled by very large show more numbers, that can be checked out with only a few moments thought. Often what is required is to put the numbers into terms we can better understand. For example, if you heard that £3.12 billion was being spent on the UK population, it sounds an immense amount. But as the authors point out, when you take around 60 million people in the UK and 52 weeks in a year, this amounts to spending £1 a week on each person - not quite as dramatic as it seems.

I've found myself being a little bit more thoughtful about the headline figures I see in the media since reading the book. The same day I saw a newspaper headline telling how some serious crime was up 50% - a huge increase. But when you looked at the actual numbers, there were only 20 more cases. Tragedies, each one, for the people involved, but still a very unlikely occurrence, blown out of proportion by the power of percentages.

Averages, too, come in for a good deal of stick. After all, the average person has less than 2 feet (think about it), so should we change the way we sell shoes in pairs? Probably not.

Very readable, always informative and often entertaining, this is a book that every politician, civil servant and ... well, everyone... should read. It is unashamedly UK-based in its examples, which I guess explains why there isn't a US edition - but that shouldn't put anyone off. The message is universal. show less