Books: Blinded by Science: The Social Implications of Epigenetics and Neuroscience: Perfecting People

David Wastell and Susan White Policy Press, 2017, HB, 304 pp, £ 21.59, 978-1447322344 Science is one big story. Or, more accurately, it is lots of stories: conflicting, contested, merging, evolving — and sometimes ossifying, constraining, and distorting. Wittgenstein referred to the ‘railway tracks’ of science: the unspoken assumptions and shared ways of thinking within a scientific community, without which science cannot progress, and Thomas Kuhn talked of research paradigms: shared and evolving ways of conceptualising, theorising, empirically studying, and arguing about scientific topics. In their critique of an emerging new paradigm, David Wastell (a cognitive neuroscientist) and Sue White (a social scientist) offer an interdisciplinary text in two parts: ‘Getting to grips with the thought styles’ (an overview of the shared assumptions, practices, and methodologies on which modern neuroscience is based) and ‘Fixing real people’ (a critique of contemporary empirical findings and applications of neuroscience, especially in relation to social disadvantage). In Part 1, the authors explain that neuroscience asks questions like ‘Which part of the brain is responsible for which function?’ and ‘What happens when that part of the brain is damaged?’ A core assumption, which many neuroscientists share but these authors emphatically …