Ingenious by Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson

Ingenious: The Unintended Cost of Human Innovation
by Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson
Harvard University Press, 2019

In their new book, Ingenious: The Unintended Cost of Human Innovation, medical academics Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson argue that the progress of human technological development has not necessarily been a net positive for the human species. We now have more information at our fingertips than was contained in most libraries for most of human history, we can now contact dozens of acquaintances from across the seas in the blink of an eye, fly across the world in less than twenty-four hours, and acquire a dinner with the same caloric density in it as a meal that would have taken our hunter-gatherer ancestors days of stalking and foraging to acquire, but have all these advances really been good for us? Or are they turning us into overweight automatons who can’t focus for more than ten seconds?

Or at least that is the subject of the last three chapters of this book. In the first five chapters, the authors appear to feel duty-bound to build the reader’s knowledge of evolutionary theory from the ground-up, starting with Darwin’s finches and moving forward through the idea of niches, the basics of genetic inheritance, epigenetics (how life experiences can alter the way genes are expressed), to why peacocks have such voluminous feather displays despite the fact that they are, at times, serious impediments to their survival (a topic covered in-depth by Richard O. Prum in his 2017 Pulitzer-nominated book, The Evolution of Beauty). Presumably, they do this because this knowledge will be crucial to their argument later in the book.  

And it is true that at least a part of their critique of modernity rests on what they call a mismatch between the environment in which humans evolved and the present world that we have created for ourselves: 

The human brain evolved in social and macro-environmental conditions that are very different from those in which we now commonly live. If these modules were based on psychological adaptations appropriate to the conditions in which they evolved, then there would now be a mismatch between those modules and the modern constructed world. There would therefore be situations where the adaptations that underlie human behavior have lost their adaptive advantage, and might now manifest as maladaptive pathologies.

Yet one would be forgiven for wondering what the point of learning, for example, what a spandrel is to many of their crucial arguments. Surely any reader could understand that, while the Internet is a great way to stay in touch with people, it has also contributed to an epidemic of loneliness in which many people have hundreds of acquaintances rather than a few truly close friends; that while fossil fuels have been invaluable to making travel and industry more efficient, they have had the unfortunate side effect of climate change; and that the over-use of antibiotics can lead to mutations among bacteria that could make them obsolete, without all of this extraneous information about niche modification and multilevel selection? However, worse than the redundancy of almost half the book, such observations as those above have been made in a hundred other places, and a hundred times better, making this book feel at best banal and at worst a waste of time. 

Indeed, this boring book is weighed down further by the writing, in which Gluckman and Hanson commit the worst sins of authors who write for scholarly journals, leading to dry, lifeless prose that makes this read like the illegitimate offspring of a textbook and an academic article. Take a zinger like this: “Addressing these issues will require us to apply our ingenuity to develop new technologies and innovations, if our species is to continue to thrive,” or this: “Science is about explaining what we know and what we do not, acknowledging the complexity in every subject we study.” Such pseudo-insights appear on almost every page, and it culminates in entire blocks of prose that are utter gobbledygook:

We think the digital transformation will be even more impactful than many expect it to be, and that it will require deep and broad reflection instead of the largely passive responses that are now common. Much of the discussion of this transformation has focused on the future of work and the impact of digitalization on productivity. But the digital transformation is affecting far more. It is pervading every aspect of individual, family, and group life. It is arguably the most important change in our evolution and in human society since the development of agriculture and living in settlements. 

And then there are the ponderous endnotes, where the authors take every opportunity to give short biographies of every scientist and thinker and elaborate on any concept they discuss for at least half a sentence. This leads to such pointless passages as those where the authors describe Pascal’s wager, put forth evidence that the butchering of dead animals was taking place as early as 13,000 years ago, and devote a whole paragraph to the thought of Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet charlatan who rejected the role of genes in inheritance (none of which, needless to say, has any bearing on the effects of the internet on humans’ cognitive abilities or the effects of sugary foods on people’s weight).

To paraphrase Bojack Horseman, Gluckman and Hanson say nothing new, and they say that nothing badly.  

—Karel Carpenter is a graduate student and writer living in the United States.