(no subject)

[timelets]

There's a bunch of logical and factual errors in the paragraph below, but it would take a painstaking analysis to debunk the causal chain implied by this text from a bestseller book about innovation (4.5 stars on amazon!):

“Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market demand for spectacles encouraged a growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to the invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells. You wouldn’t think that printing technology would have anything to do with the expansion of our vision down to the cellular scale”

Excerpt From: Steven Johnson. “How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World.”

The two easy ones would be:
1) "printing press created a surge" - the printing press is a machine, it can't create demand. Besides, in China and Korea similar machines didn't create anything; therefore, you can't attribute to it an exclusive causal relationship.
2) "suddenly realize that they were farsighted" - people knew they were loosing eyesight long before and used glasses to address the problem, but there was no large market for glasses before the new education system (forced in part by the Reformation) kicked into a higher gear.

There must be a systematic way to show that such arbitrary chains of events trough time are a figment of imagination, rather than a factual account.