In 1826, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was founded in London, with the aim of counteracting the spurious and politically radical output of the so-called pauper presses, and to disseminate useful knowledge among the middle and working classes.
This is not one of the facts included in Never Mind the B#ll*cks, Here’s the Science, but it undertakes a similar mission. The book is a celebration of scientific fact in an era characterised by nebulous subjectivity. In it, immunologist and chair of biochemistry at Trinity College Dublin, Prof Luke O’Neill, attempts to refocus the reader on what we might objectively know, and how that knowledge could be used for good.
The book brings to mind Hans Rosling’s international bestseller Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World - and Why Things are better Than You Think. Never Mind the B#ll*cks is a lively, entertaining read that looks through a scientific lens at some of the biggest questions faced by humanity, and similarly to Rosling, ultimately suggests through presenting empirical data that the trajectory of human progress is generally in the ascendant, and that things are more hopeful than they seem.
To O’Neill’s credit, he certainly does not shirk the intimidating questions, while looking honestly at the scientific theory and data. “Why don’t you just cheer up?” looks at the science of depression, and all that we still don’t know about it. “What makes you think you’ve control over your life?” looks at the endlessly complex question of free will, while other chapters cover issues as ambitious and disparate as addiction, race, the environment, drug legalisation and euthanasia.
On the latter, O’Neill writes of his father’s request, after a stroke, that O’Neill kill him using chemicals to which he had access at his lab. He asks “should I, out of sympathy and love, have bumped him off? That would have been murder. But what if the law had allowed me to help him die? How would that have worked and would I have had the guts to do it?”
Anyone who appreciates science as a form of empiricism or who enjoys a repository of facts will find Never Mind the B#ll*cks a rich and enjoyable cornucopia of information, and O’Neill presents it in a hearteningly jocose, approachable tone that will have you wanting to befriend him.
You will learn (if you didn’t know already) that St Expeditus can be credited as the patron saint of procrastination andthat Lady Mary Wortley Montagu advocated smallpox inoculation before Edward Jenner’s famous work. This book will provide endless entertainment to your uncle – we all have him – who thinks that uttering streams of factual information at a party is an acceptable substitute for a personality.
The title page opens with a vintage-style cartoon of a strongman in his underpants, with the caption “Win the admiration of your friends”, and indeed you can use the book to look clever. It will also be a joy to anyone who wants a popular, entry-level text on scientific approaches to a broad variety of life’s more interesting questions.
Where the book falters is in the lack of epistemic humility inherent in its project. “Hopefully, you will achieve enlightenment through science,” O’Neill muses in its introduction. The project of the book is ultimately to look at the problems it addresses empirically, through the lens of science, and to suggest that consequently science is the means by which we might ultimately solve them. However, data requires interpretation, and that interpretation in turn can be utilised to influence government policy or human behaviour. That data is interpreted by people, and as a consequence, not exactly infallible.
Dr Walter J Freeman performed thousands of lobotomies during the 1940s and 1950s, ostensibly to render “difficult”, intellectually disabled and mentally unwell people more docile and malleable in the claim that they were happier that way, and his barbarity was supported by the science of the time. Human knowledge, and scientific knowledge has been imperfect at every stage of its history, and while we reap the wonderful benefits of scientific progress, that reality does bear remembering.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant was interested in the dichotomy between empiricism, or what we might know through experience and sensory data, and reason, or what we might know through “thinking about thinking”, or what we consider “critical thinking”, which gives rise to concepts such as morality.
Kant came from a tradition that placed reason ahead of empiricism, while the civilisation in which we now live operates on the opposing presumption that science dictates reason. This creates a consequentialist morality, prioritising outcomes to dictate that the best action is the one with the best or most effective outcome for the maximum number of people.
Never Mind the B#ll*cks looks at two integral questions about knowledge – what do we know? and how might we use this knowledge, but it neglects to ask how we know what we know.
It is this which empowers Never Mind the B#ll*cks to examine a question such as “Why are new medicines so expensive and who should bear the cost?” despite the fact that this isn’t really a scientific question at all and certainly requires much more than scientific data to answer.
Never Mind the B#ll*cks looks at two integral questions about knowledge – “what do we know?” and “how might we use this knowledge”, but it neglects to ask how we know what we know. This would veer into epistemology – the philosophical exploration of what constitutes knowledge. For this reason, it interprets an increase in knowledge (concurrent with an increase in available information) as progress, and in many ways, it may be.
However, as we know from our uncle’s recitation at the party, knowing something does not mean understanding it, and with the increase in good or true information has come an equal onslaught of specious and “fake” information. This is precisely the b#ll*cks that O’Neill’s book seeks to cut through.
The book leaves its reader well informed and thoroughly entertained, but ultimately misses an opportunity to help equip them to understand how to tell good information from bad for themselves.
Never Mind the B#ll*cks, Here's the Science by Prof Luke O'Neill (Gill Books, €24.99) is available from October 2nd
