Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Lewis Wolpert

Sep 19, 2007 Alun Politics 4 Comments Biology, Cultural Evolution, Evolution, Lewis Wolpert, Philosophy, Religion, Social Evolution

This review has could have been writ­ten months ago, were it not for the fact that I’ve been read­ing it with other books like Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathed­ral and cur­rently Boyer’s Reli­gion Explained. I had though it had sur­pris­ingly little atten­tion because as Smiffy said, it is poten­tially a lot more dev­ast­at­ing to the status of reli­gion than the works of Dawkins. Non­ethe­less there are a few people who haven’t got round to read­ing it who have con­cluded it’s bunk. The reason I don’t think these people have read what they con­demn is that they seem to think it’s about reli­gion. This is the sub­ject of just one chapter of the thir­teen in the book. The book is, as the sub­title states, about belief, and it’s far more inter­est­ing because of it.

Lewis Wolp­ert starts off by talk­ing about how our beliefs affect our reas­on­ing. As part of this he uses some simple logic exer­cises — which I’ll steal so you can try them. Does are these valid logical deduc­tions?

No cigar­ettes are inex­pens­ive.
Some addict­ive things are inex­pens­ive.
There­fore, some addict­ive things are not cigarettes.

This is valid because the con­clu­sion fol­lows the premises. Nearly every­one would get that one right. How about this?

No addict­ive things are inex­pens­ive.
Some cigar­ettes are inex­pens­ive.
There­fore, some cigar­ettes are not addictive.

Logic­ally valid or not? The first exer­cise was easy, but this slowed me down. It is logic­ally valid, but only around half of the pop­u­la­tion would get this right. That line some cigar­ettes are not addict­ive really causes some grind­ing of the men­tal gears. The final exer­cise you may need to read sev­eral times:

No unhealthy foods have cho­les­terol.
Some unhealthy foods are fried foods.
There­fore, no fried foods have cholesterol.

Logic­ally valid or not? It is. If you dis­agree you’re not alone. This had me stuck for hours. In the end I had to draw a Venn dia­gram to see that it was valid. Wolp­ert puts it down to a mix of belief-laden and belief-neutral argu­ments.

So it’s not sur­pris­ing that the next chapter is about belief. On page 23 it’s there in black and white

For many, belief is intim­ately asso­ci­ated with reli­gion, and reli­gious beliefs will be dealt with in detail. It is the every­day use of the word I deal with in this book, and I will focus on those beliefs that relate to the causes of events that affect out lives in sig­ni­fic­ant ways. Beliefs relat­ing to moral issues will receive much less attention.

This is why a lot of the anti-atheist dis­cus­sions of Wolpert’s ideas have noth­ing of interest to say. Cer­tainly they’re right if they say that causal beliefs are inad­equate to explain the whole reli­gious exper­i­ence, but that’s not the aim of the book. From here he goes on to look at the vari­ous forms of causal belief.

The next two chapters put those ideas into some con­text. In chapter three he talks about how strange chil­dren are, and they are weird. When you con­sider how they’re learn­ing for them­selves how the world works the pro­gress is amaz­ing. Sadly he only briefly touches on Piaget’s work here. The next chapter is about belief in anim­als which high­lights how rudi­ment­ary some animal think­ing is about cause and effect. The Cale­do­nian Crows come out of it well, thanks to their tool use.

Tool use is the sub­ject of chapter five, and this is the Big Idea in the book. Belief, Wolp­ert argues, is asso­ci­ated with tool use. To use tools you have to have a pretty good under­stand­ing of what your own body can do and a reli­able phys­ical model of the uni­verse. He includes a break­neck tour of the his­tory of tool­mak­ing here. It’s a fas­cin­at­ing idea but this is where the book fails to deliver on its prom­ise. Given this is the cent­ral thesis of the book it would have been nice to have some meat in this sec­tion. Instead what he says is sug­gest­ive, but hardly com­pel­ling. This prob­lem fol­lows through into the next chapter which is a tour through social devel­op­ment and ideas like the­ory of mind. It’s inter­est­ing, but if you’ve read any­thing before on Evol­u­tion­ary Psy­cho­logy it seems a bit light­weight. It’s a shame because the struc­ture of the book is bril­liant, as the next chapter is False

One of the inter­est­ing ques­tions can ask about any­thing is ‘What hap­pens when it goes wrong?’ This chapter cov­ers delu­sion and men­tal ill­ness, By examin­ing what doesn’t hap­pen for some people you have a light to illu­min­ate what does hap­pen in a healthy mind. In this chapter he does toss in the fact that were it not a social com­mon­place reli­gion would unhes­it­at­ingly be called a delu­sion. This, and the follow-up chapter being Reli­gion is argu­ably the pro­voc­at­ive bit of the book. He men­tions Boyer’s work here, who argues that a one-size-fits-all explan­a­tion of reli­gion isn’t going to work. He also men­tions Wilson’s argu­ments from Darwin’s Cathed­ral and looks at how sim­ilar reli­gious exper­i­ences are to men­tal dis­orders, though doesn’t argue the two are the same, Again this is all a bit super­fi­cial. You could write a book on the sub­ject. I can see why there isn’t space for great depth, but say­ing you dealt with reli­gious belief in detail in 21 pages is far more dis­missive than any­thing Dawkins has written.

Another deli­cious irony is that the other chapter to sit along­side reli­gion is paranor­mal beliefs. I’m abso­lutely along­side this. I’m still try­ing to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between ghosts and Gods. So far I have: “A God is a ghost with a civil ser­vice.” which is about 90% accur­ate. Here it’s all about ghosts, alien abduc­tions and other strange­ness. Health is the obvi­ous part­ner and that’s the sub­ject of the next chapter.

The final chapters don’t quite run so smoothly. From health we move to mor­al­ity, this included partly show the amoral, rather than immoral nature of sci­ence. In the Sci­ence chapter the brev­ity focusses the point that Wolp­ert wants to make, which is that Sci­ence is a very odd way of look­ing at things. What sets sci­ence apart from other meth­ods of con­struct­ing beliefs is that it is at best neut­ral towards the beliefs it pro­duces. You could even argue it’s hos­tile, if you’re a Pop­perian. Wolp­ert isn’t and this is one of the chapters which digs at philo­soph­ers. Post­mod­ern­ists he argues suf­fer from envy in com­par­ison to the pro­gress of phys­i­cists. This is some­thing I’d firmly dis­agree with. The most science-hostile post­mod­ern­ists that I’ve read have been bliss­fully ignor­ant of sci­entific method. The final chapter is the con­clu­sion and almost reaches four pages in length.

I thought I was going to dis­agree with PZ Myers on this and give this book a very pos­it­ive review. I liked read­ing it. It is enjoy­able, but when I sat down and thought about what he actu­ally said I see that PZ got it right, Wolp­ert simply doesn’t grab the idea he’s got and pin it to the pages.

It’s also clear why it’s not going to have a large impact. If you are an anti-evolutionist this book is not for you. It removes reli­gion from the centre of belief like Coper­ni­cus mov­ing the Earth from the centre of the uni­verse. This isn’t done in an aggress­ive way, it’s simply clear that reli­gion is only part of what Wolp­ert finds so inter­est­ing about belief. For ‘New Athe­ists’ Wolp­ert isn’t tack­ling the issues that are both­er­ing them, which is the role of faith in pub­lic life. In both cases this is no major loss, as neither are the inten­ded audience.

Unfor­tu­nately I’m not sure that it will make much impact in the social sci­ences either. I can see how you can explain reli­gion or super­sti­tion in terms of tool use, but it’s such a gen­eral explan­a­tion that it doesn’t help with the kind of ques­tions that most social sci­ent­ists ask. It would be a bit like explain­ing the motifs in the Sis­tine Chapel as a product of Michelangelo’s desire to have some­thing to eat. That’s pos­sibly not a fair com­par­ison, Wolp­ert is sug­gest­ing some­thing that isn’t obvi­ous, but it is divorced from the other research in the field. If you’re going to be ori­ginal that’s fant­astic, but you then need to build bridges to show why what you’ve found is use­ful and excit­ing and there’s not a lot of that.

If you’re inter­ested in see­ing things from a strik­ingly dif­fer­ent per­spect­ive to usual argu­ments about belief then it’s a good book. If you’re ser­i­ously inter­ested in the topic though, you may be slightly dis­ap­poin­ted. The open­ing chapter is good, but it never seems to get into top gear.

Other reviews of the book can be found at:
Explor­ing Our Mat­rix
Paul in Won­der­land
Archimedes’ Hot Tub
Seek­ing a Little Truth