The Hidden Half
The Unseen Forces That Influence Everything

Causality is really, really hard and many solutions do not work. Why? 1. When genetically identical Marmorkreb crayfish are grown in the same environment and given lots of food, they all grow to very different sizes (published in Nature!), it proves that we simply don’t know what affects their size o......more

Michael Blastland is co-author of one of my favourite titles on the use and misuse of numbers, The Tiger that Isn't - so I was excited to see this book and wasn't disappointed. Blastland opens with the story of a parthenogenic crustacean that seems to demonstrate that, despite having near-identical n......more

In the quippy social media vernacular: This book could have been an email. Okay, that's the disappointment of a reader who had high expectations talking. The truth is, this book would be an excellent long article, or long form podcast. In fact, it was the latter. I found the book via a long form inte......more

Michael Blastland is upset that everything is not neat and tidy. That there is no guarantee of symmetry. That economies are not predictable. That genetics does not describe nearly everything about life. In his The Hidden Half, he examines a multitude of disciplines and events to show we must be miss......more

The Hidden Half is mainly an argument of two halves: what we know through research, anecdotes, probabilistic knowledge, etc; and what we don't know as a result of hidden messy factors that lie beneath our knowledge. The book uses stories from a multitude of fields such as genetics, medicine, economi......more