Book Review-Ignorance How it Drives Science

This book came onto my radar when I was reading Warren Burger’s book A More Beautiful Question. Burger referenced this book. As I was curious and Burger’s book sparked an interest in this topic, I proceeded to procure this book.

It took a while for me to get back to this book as I became interested in other things. I’d started it but I continued to pick it up and putting it down over the months. It wasn’t because of the writing or of the subject matter. It was because the book brought out a certain amount of my own ignorance and caused me to ask some unanswerable questions.

Stuart Firestein is a neuroscientist, and how he got to this particular field is fascinating by itself. I will leave him to tell that story and not ruin the narrative. It is in the chapter titled Case Histories.

This is a short book, packed with excellent insights and interesting stories. The author approaches the task of convincing the reader of the importance of ignorance as the centerpiece of intellectual and scientific inquiry from a broad perspective. Even though he is countering the intellectual history of the MO of our societal approach to science and scientific inquiry, he makes his mutiny palatable and very rational.

The idea is that the mass media and the lay community looks upon science and the goals of science with the wrong attitude, even some scientists live in a world where the tail is wagging the dog. The purpose of scientific inquiry is not to create knowledge, the purpose is to create ignorance, but not just ignorance but quality ignorance; ignorance that will push our thoughts towards better understanding and towards action that will expand our ideas and ask better questions. These questions must necessarily expand and dig deeper into our knowledge. In other words, to give us more areas of known ignorance so that we can research and investigate these open areas.

The author uses the familiar technique of digging into scientific history to give us anecdotal history of specific stories. He has combed through the scientific histories for some extremely interesting stories, he’s included many different areas of science, including his own expertise of neurosciences, as well as physics, astronomy, mathematics, etc. Fortunately for us, he is a very good story teller.

I will say that I have become jaded to this process of illustrating specific points by the author spinning a yarn which supports exactly his thesis, but when the tactic is well executed, such as this book is, I will overlook my pet peeve.

The book is in eight chapters. The initial chapters are used to present the author’s main argument about ignorance. In those chapters he goes into great depths to convince us of his main argument: that the cultivation of ignorance is the primary function of scientific inquiry. I was already a convert so I would say that he was successful in that regard. Chapters four, five, and six are the author’s way of presenting the structure of the ignorance business, the foibles of making predictions regarding scientific progress prematurely and under dubious assumptions.

My favorite chapter is the Quality of Ignorance, because the author delineates the difference between cultivating just ignorance and ignorance with a purpose. The main differentiator is that the quality ignorance must create more and better questions and unknowns which will drive the scientific inquiries deeper.

The longest chapter is chapter seven: Case histories. This is where he uses the case history tool to illustrate his points on how ignorance helps drive the inquiry and the nonlinear way it creates pathways to more knowledge. I must say that this chapter was kind of a long slog, but worthy of the slogging. It definitely did its job.

Finally, the author drives home the point regarding the importance of using ignorance and the gravitas of having this kind of mindset as it advances not just science, but society forward.

This book was published in 2012, and by then, the anti-intellectualism and wanton lack of scientific knowledge of the general public is already well known. The last chapter is actually a pleas for sanity. As I read this chapter five years since its publication, I marvel at how far we have fallen. I would like to say that the author was prescient in his prognostication, but sadly, he wasn’t prescient enough, for we are at a much worse point in time than he had predicted.

I thoroughly enjoyed this read. I did have to put it down often to contemplate and reflect on what he is saying. I believe that was his purpose and he did very well in meeting his purpose.