Bad Ideas? An Arresting History of Our Inventions

We don’t want an incinerator near us for fear of being ‘dandruffed’ with falling dioxins and we don’t want to hear about an incinerator burning for decades in the middle of Vienna. We feel safe getting into a car but can’t convince ourselves air travel is much safer.

Robert Winston wants to change all that. “The key to successful living in a society dominated by advancing technology,” he says, “lies in better public engagement with science and technology ... People from all sections of the community have a responsibility to learn and understand more about science in order that, in democratic societies at least, they will have a more powerful say in how science is used.”

All of which might lead you to suppose that Professor Winston’s new book will be read only by the dutiful. That assumption might be deepened by the knowledge that Winston is professor of science and society, and emeritus professor of fertility studies, at Imperial College, London. He is one of the great science populists, regarding it as a subject not just for the elite, but for the people.

To that end, he has presented several TV series, including Your Life in their Hands, Human Instinct, and A Child Against All Odds. Perhaps in consequence of his TV work, Winston has an instinct for grabbing the reader by the short and curlies, early and often.

In Bad Ideas? he explores the downside of countless developments in science, going back to pre-history. “Nearly all the wonderful technological advances that have enabled us to live in difficult and dangerous environments also have their threatening or negative aspects — hardly ever fully recognised at the time of their development,” he writes.

His thesis includes points of quantum shift in human activity, such as the move from hunter-gathering to farming, usually regarded as a major step forward. This shift happened — as did other human innovations — simultaneously in several different, unconnected parts of the world. Winston finds it odd that we have seen farming as any kind of progress, given the archaeological evidence of the damage it did, and does, to the human form. He instances work done at Britain’s National History Museum into ancient bones, demonstrating clear evidence of deformities of the foot, caused by an unusual form of arthritis. Examination of contemporary murals of people grinding corn established the cause.

“Two workers would sit on opposite sides of a saddle-quern — that is, two heavy, round stones, one on top of the other — arduously pushing the upper stone back and forth to grind the corn. These stones are massive and the grinders’ backs would have been under immense strain, while their toes were bent under the feet for hours at a time to provide extra purchase,” Winston writes, going on to point out that it wasn’t just the corn-grinders who suffered as a result of the move from hunting and gathering. Other archaeological studies show rows of abscesses along the roots of teeth, indicating that contaminants in the ground grain caused considerable disability, not to mention pain.

Some of the negatives instanced are not directly consequent on scientific development, but on the opportunities such development presented to crooks and knaves, like the 19th century entrepreneurs who bulked up products they sold with whatever would raise their profit levels. Today’s fans of green tea, for example, will be more grateful for the existence of state food safety bodies, when they read about the merchant who decided to meet an earlier vogue for green tea by adding verdigris (copper rust) to ordinary tea leaves.

The innovation that changed minds, as well as daily living, was, of course, printing. The first bibles printed would have cost the equivalent of three years’ earnings on the part of the average worker at the time.

Thirty years after the invention of printing, 250 European towns had printing presses, which had collectively produced 27,000 editions. Knowledge no longer resided in people’s heads or in handcrafted manuscripts. It was cheap and transportable. That created enormous threats, particularly to those who didn’t want ideas transmitted to a wider audience. From the outset, Winston, himself a Jew, says that Jews, who from the earliest times prized literacy, have suffered at the hands of those wishing to burn their books.

Professor Richard Dawkins recently experienced a modern version of the enmity unleashed by a new communications technology, when he suggested, on his website for atheists, a few changes.

Within hours, the website carried descriptions of the professor as “a suppurating rat’s rectum” and evincing a desire to “ram a fistful of nails down (his) throat.”

“There must be something rotten in the internet culture” was Dawkins’ stunned comment on this electronic vitriol. “There’s something wrong with people who can resort to such over-the-top language.”

Robert Winston would agree with him, suggesting that the electronic age may foster a kind of human cruelty that is psychological and emotional rather than physical (and that’s not considering the cruelty to style delivered by texting).

Bad Ideas? is a consistently entertaining roller-coaster through the history of agriculture, literacy, fertility and other aspects of medicine, and a rake of other topics. It is written with an unpretentious enthusiasm that educates without overtly teaching — and, given the widespread applicability of Winston Churchill’s observation that he loved to learn but hated to be taught — that enthusiasm should push it onto the bestseller lists. Which, in turn, will introduce a wide range of readers to the thought-provoking scientist’s manifesto at the end of this book, where Winston stresses the communicative responsibilities of those developing tomorrow’s big ideas, good or bad.