Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast:
The Evolutionary Origins of Belief
by Lewis Wolpert
Summary for the Secular Humanist Society of NY Book Club
By Elaine Lynn
As an evolutionary biologist, Wolpert examines here the way the human brain has evolved to produce our beliefs. He regrets, as do we all[1], that belief has not been the subject of much neuroscientific research.
He illustrates how common false reasoning is in ‘common sense’ and everyday behavior, which he attributes to a compelling need to understand things around us -- a need that is more ambitious than our resources for filling it. This psychological imperative explains why we create explanations that are not rational by even our own standards of rationality. We need explanations to deal with the world around us and to satisfy the background anxiety of not understanding.
Unlike much research which relates the development of primate intelligence closely to social interaction, Wolpert asserts that we can understand it far better by recognizing that the primary function of the brain is to control bodily movements. In the movement of single-celled and the earliest known multi-celled animals, all with no nervous system, the protein molecules that produce movements toward food or away from predators are the precursors of all muscles. In the somewhat more developed animals, like earthworms, the precursors of brain-like structures are the collection of nerve cells to direct the movement of muscles. The value of being able to sense more about an animal’s environment, for example, was obviously critical in natural selection as these brains developed. Plants don’t move and never needed to develop brains.
Given that brains evolved to control movement and its use for survival, “it is not that unreasonable to suggest that belief arose in relation to tool use and manufacture, as both require a belief in causal interactions”.
He devotes two chapters to showing the extent to which a sense of causality is genetic, describing research on the way children learn, even in infancy, and contrasting that with the learning of chimpanzees.
Animals have little if any “causal beliefs – that is beliefs about what causes movement and events in the world around them. The general consensus,” he tells us, “seems to be that other primates lack causal beliefs.” It appears that his view of brain evolution wouldn’t depend on this assumption, however.
Most of the research into primate learning tries to establish higher- level understanding in chimps to demonstrate how closely related to humans they are. Acknowledging that the subject is controversial, Wolpert insists that an understanding of cause and effect doesn’t exist in other animals. He presents examples of both research supporting and disputing his view. He believes that, in the extant primate species closest to man, we can detect development in the direction of understanding causality. Chimps can use simple tools by imitating, in a very general way, the physical action of a person or another chimp, but they can’t figure out how to make or use tools, which is basic for the human brain. They can’t even understand the use of tools well enough to figure out that a hooked stick will work better than a straight stick to pull something toward them, or whether a rope needs to be attached to an object or just be near it to pull that object. No animal uses a container to carry food, water or anything else.
Children, however, “begin to realize that correlation and coincidence do not necessarily underlie causality without an idea of mechanism. . . . If children, and even adults cannot figure out how an event comes about, neither doubts that there is a cause, even if we do not know the mechanism. Children assume there is a mechanism and will search for it”.
He tells us of many interesting surveys of what people, in different countries, in particular years, tell various kinds of survey takers as to whether they have a religion or not, what they believe about God, the devil, etc. One of the principal conclusions we might draw from them that is not drawn by the author is that people’s religious attitudes fluctuate a great deal, suggesting that particular beliefs are not compelling without social pressure.
The book contains more familiar material describing psychological studies on how people learn, how they make decisions about facts in the world, and how they make moral judgments. We easily recognize the fallacies and inadequate nature of our “knowledge,” but Wolpert views this with equanimity, pointing out that we have to constantly make judgments without sufficient information and we use the mechanisms built into our brains by evolution to do so. By its very existence, this generation of human beings is evidence of the value of our evolutionary inheritance.
On the subject of religion, he cites the famous Minnesota twins study, in which identical twins separated in childhood were found to have more personality and intellectual traits in common with each other than they had with the people who raised them. The heritability factor in the development of religious belief was about 50%, showing a highly significant genetic component. But religiosity was not merely the result of inherited mental traits, he concludes, it was adaptive. He explains (sort of) that he holds this conviction for two reasons: the religious beliefs provided explanations for important events, and offered prayer as a way of dealing with difficulties. “Those with such beliefs most likely did better,” he writes “and so were selected for. . . . There is a tight linkage between genetic evolution and cultural history, and gene-culture evolution has created many human societies with religious beliefs”. He is not much more specific on why they “did better”. He includes a very personal story about his son “who had been through a difficult late adolescence” but who was greatly helped by his conversion to a fundamentalist Christian religion which takes the Bible literally. Although an atheist himself, Wolpert is satisfied with this eventuality because his son is not having, presumably, such a “difficult” adulthood.
Wolpert, a scientist, does not believe people have been significantly influenced by modern science and there is no likelihood that they will in the future because science involves a special way of thinking that is “unnatural” and counter to common sense. He rejects the absurd school of sociology that treats science as just a social construct, and he believes science will continue to advance without public understanding.
He expects he is offending religious people with his thesis that “religion and causal beliefs in general had their evolutionary origin in tool making, which drove human evolution,” presumably because they believe that religion is precisely a recognition of a reality outside people’s minds, not a human characteristic that formed in the course of human evolution. He believes that only when religion interferes with the rights of others, when attempts are made to force religious beliefs on people who don’t share them, are they a problem. “It is the action based on beliefs that ultimately matters, and respect for the rights of others is fundamental.” And so closes an interesting book, leaving more ideas than resolutions.
[1] OK, maybe just me