Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast - book review

My heart sank as I saw the book on the New Books shelf at the library. Someone had used the title I thought I'd use someday for a book I hadn't even started to think about. The title Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Lewis Wolpert refers, of course, to the conversation between Alice and the White Queen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass". The White Queen has just been telling Alice that it isn't that hard to believe impossible things but it does take some practice. The Queen then says by way of boasting a little, "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

These days when we're asked to take so much on faith, from weapons of mass destruction in Iraqi hands to non-political firings directed (or not directed) from the White House, it is important to consider what exactly does belief consist of and why are some things more easy to believe and some people easier to convince.

Wolpert has written a fascinating book that would be even more fascinating if it were organized and edited better. Although he has a topic for each chapter, some of the subchapters are more important than several whole chapters. The entire chapter on health, for example, is a rambling discussion about anecdotal medicine and how little science was used to improve medicine until just the last 100 years. And how, even now, there is as much spent on non-scientific "cures" than on ones developed or proven effective by science. He claims that cultures want reasons and causes but not necessarily truth or reliability.

Wolpert would have us believe that believing is a necessary trait that evolution selected for as humans began to use tools. Belief in cause and effect allowed humans (or proto-humans) to build complex tools and design complex cultures because of their ability to believe, to see the end result from the beginning inputs. Animals, he claims, have little or no such ability. Wolpert's case would be stronger if he didn't himself admit that his "analysis is speculative and my evidence weak".

The book tells us that it is somewhat of a fortunate accident that the Greeks invented science as a method for getting and proving causal effects thus giving human belief systems something better to use than trial and error. The latter works but approximately at the same pace as evolution.

I would like to see Wolpert team up with Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett to develop a really good book about the evolutionary origins of belief.