Faber £14.99 pp256
In Through the Looking Glass, when Alice declares that she cannot believe impossible things, the White Queen advises her to practise. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” As Lewis Wolpert sees it, the White Queen’s formidable credulity merely marks her out as a human being. We exceed all other animals in our capacity to believe things for which there is no rational evidence — a category that, in Wolpert’s reckoning, includes all the world’s religions, and every species of paranormal and supernatural belief, from aromatherapy to zen. It needs a big brain to hold so much nonsense, and why and how our brains got so big is a key part of Wolpert’s argument. Some researchers trace it to the development of social relationships and the invention of language. He contends, however, that the driving force behind the brain’s evolution was the making and use of tools.
Although some other creatures, notably chimpanzees and crows, use primitive tools, no animal except us has ever joined separate components to make a tool — as in the haft and blade of an axe — and only humans have learnt to use containers such as pots and bags. These achievements set us on a dizzying technological trajectory that led, in a mere 20,000 years, from flint arrowheads to the International Space Station. To make tools, Wolpert argues, you have to believe in cause and effect — not, of course, in an advanced scientific way, but just through rapid, everyday assumptions about the mechanics of the physical world. “Causal” beliefs of this kind distinguish humans from other animals and, Wolpert argues, they had a decisive impact on brain development. For once our tool-inventing ancestors had got used to the idea that effects had causes, they started to wonder what caused distressing and seemingly inexplicable events such as illness, death and natural disasters, and to answer these questions they invented religious belief.
Gutting Wolpert’s argument in this way does no justice to the brilliance and persuasiveness of his exposition. But it has the advantage of exposing some seeming blips in his reasoning. It is not clear whether he thinks that causal beliefs led to tool-making, or that tool-making led to causal beliefs. He can be found saying both things in different places, and it is a rather important contradiction, because if causal beliefs were necessary before tool-making could happen, then tool-making cannot have produced them. Perhaps, though, this objection can be set aside if we imagine tool-making and causal beliefs developing in tandem over millions of years, while the human brain expanded to cope with more and more complex mechanical tasks, as well as with the increasingly daunting credulousness required by theology.
A more serious difficulty seems to be Wolpert’s assumption that the kind of causal belief needed for making tools could lead to a belief in the supernatural. They appear, at first glance, quite different things. For tool-making is precise and reliable, while supernatural beliefs are, in Wolpert’s view, mere imagination. However, this objection underestimates the strength of human belief, which can, for the believer, be just as precise and reliable as tool-making. The human brain is, it seems, powered by a “belief engine” that makes us eager to seize on causal explanations for events, irrespective of whether they have any basis in truth. Wolpert gives many examples of this, both from history and from contemporary life. Around half of all Americans believe in astrology, and 72% believe in angels. Belief in “good luck”, and ways of ensuring it, extend to the superintelligent. The Nobel prizewinning physicist Niels Bohr kept a horseshoe nailed to the wall above his desk and, when asked whether he believed it would bring him luck, replied: “Not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you luck whether you believe in it or not.”
Neuroscience reveals that belief and logic activate different parts of the brain, and where belief and logic clash, humans will almost always opt for belief, sticking to it obstinately despite adverse evidence. Students offered alternative sets of statistics will choose the one that confirms their prejudices, and a dogged reliance on existing beliefs shows up emphatically in matters affecting health. The belief that vitamin supplements provide a defence against illness, and that “natural” products are not harmful, is widespread even among educated people. Wolpert does not condemn such superstitions, for beliefs, it seems, can keep you healthy, whether they are valid or not. Experiment shows that all sorts of pain can be relieved with a sugar-pill placebo, provided the patient believes in its curative powers. Credulity may ensure survival better than logic.
The same applies with religious beliefs. Surveys suggest that religious people are happier, more optimistic, less prone to strokes and high blood pressure, more able to cope with life’s problems and less fearful of death than the irreligious. It follows that belief in the supernatural is an evolutionary advantage, and our ability to have such beliefs must, Wolpert deduces, have been partly determined by our genes. Religious people might rejoice at that, concluding that God has wired us up to believe in him. But for Wolpert, the wiring is no more divine than our guts or toenails, or any other part of our evolved anatomy. Mystical raptures, similar to those reported by the devout, can be produced, he points out, by mental illness or hallucinogenic drugs and this, too, indicates that religion depends on neural circuits in our brain that accident or malfunction can activate. Some neuroscientists now link spiritual experiences with specific brain areas. Stimulating the brain of subjects with electromagnets causes tiny seizures in the temporal lobes that induce the subjects to believe they have spiritual experiences. The visions of St Teresa, it is suggested, may have been symptoms of temporal-lobe epilepsy.
Reductionism of this type can infuriate religionists. Yet Wolpert, though an atheist, is no foe to religion — at any rate in its benign aspects. A predisposition to religious beliefs is probably, he thinks, an essential part of human nature, and he tells how his youngest son, who had a difficult late adolescence, joined a fundamentalist Christian church and was undoubtedly helped by it. The book’s argument is conducted modestly and without heat. It has a beautiful and sometimes breathtaking clarity, as when he writes of the protein molecules that made early multicellular organisms mobile, and evolved, over millions of years, into the nerves controlling movement in creatures such as molluscs and flatworms. These were the precursors of human brains, and their purpose was simply to make muscles move, so as to find food or avoid predators. “No muscles, no brain . . . And that is why plants do not have brains.” The same neatness and brevity vitalise many passages in this radiantly intelligent book. They make a refreshing change from the hot air, vanity and bald assertion that characterise so much contemporary discussion of art and literature.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £13.49 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585
THE OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL
Lewis Wolpert appears at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Tuesday, March 28, at 10.30am. Telephone 0870 343 1001 for tickets
