I doubt that this is what the author intended, but it could be interpreted to refer to human's cultural ability to pay attention to small, seemingly unimportant (if not unseen) details.

Take climate change: most informed people think this is a job for science, this is where we should exert our effort and invest our funds. But this overlooks that individual human opinion and volition plays an absolutely massive role in the problem, at many levels. From where I'm sitting, this problem is not even on science's radar, beyond general complaints about those stupid people who ruin everything (overlooking that it was science that invented the technologies that went on to enable climate change in the first place...but you see, that doesn't count, it is(!) not a part of "the" chain of causality). Metaphysical causality is something else that is basically not on science's radar, or in their Theory of "Everything".

But of course, all of this this is pedantic, and can be safely ignored, or better yet, suppressed.