This book takes a look at the dark side of human ingenuity, covering many of our scientific discoveries and inventions, and how these have in many cases introduced dangers or made life less pleasant for people. It starts with basic tool use, fire, and the invention of farming, and ends with the possibilities and perils of genetic engineering.
The author, Robert Winston, is a medical doctor specialising in fertility, and was a regular fixture on British science and medicine television shows in the early 2000s. Winston’s medical expertise makes many of the sections on medical advances especially interesting. His view is that medicine was almost useless as a way of curing disease until well into the twentieth century, despite having existed as a profession for thousands of years previously, and that many of the advances we have made have come about due to luck rather than scientific thinking.
The book has been written from a British perspective, and uses a few examples that will be more familiar to British readers than to those from other countries. Winston has some strong opinions about how the British National Health Service is run, which aren’t really on topic for this book. It felt like he just wanted to get some things off his chest, and these sections were the weakest of the book. He also takes a slightly strange tone during the section on climate change, where he seems to be making the point that climate science is complicated (which it is), but in doing so he gives a bit too much credence to the views of climate change sceptics. Given that climate change may turn out to be the worst effect of human ingenuity on the planet, this is a strange place in the book to start playing down the negative effects of our ingenuity! Human-caused climate change is even less in doubt now (in 2023) than it was in 2010 when the book was written, but even for 2010 it’s a bit strange. The old idea about “running out of oil” being a problem comes up in this book quite a lot too. In my view, our dependence on oil is bad mainly because burning it causes climate change. We need to leave it in the ground if we’re going to solve the problem of climate change, so running out isn’t something to worry about! On a positive note, the book covers some of the alternative energy sources that we will need to use in order to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels, and these (particularly wind and solar) have become cheaper and more widely used since the book was written.
Most examples in the book are thoughtful and well-chosen, and the book is very readable and entertaining. Winston doesn’t hide his opinions, and puts forward a fairly common-sense view of some of the negative aspects of human inventions. I would have liked him to delve a little more into the psychology of why some innovations, which may have seemed positive at first, turned out to bring about negative effects. What is it about human nature that causes us to exploit these inventions in ways that become harmful, and why do we often fail to take corrective action when things go wrong? What might we do in future to prevent such problems?
Focusing as it does on the negative side of progress, it can be a slightly depressing book to read, and it left me feeling a little bit negative about human nature. It covers lots of different areas, with the good and bad aspects of science and technology interwoven in a conversational style. As a result the book can feel a little bit unstructured. But I found a lot of thought-provoking examples in this book and enjoyed reading it.