Better believe it - science isn't natural

It was, as he admitted himself, an unusual topic with which to kick off a cell biology meeting. But Prof Lewis Wolpert's plenary lecture, 'The Biology of Belief', which he gave at the ComBio 2002 meeting in Sydney this morning, straddled clinical research, anthropology, ancient history and technology -- setting the tone for the breadth of research that was to come at the conference.

Wolpert, a professor of biology at University College, London, is well known within the scientific community but is probably just as popular outside it, for books like The Unnatural Nature of Science and Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression.

His next book will tackle belief -- no small subject in a world where, as he pointed out, 90 per cent of Americans are said to believe in angels. "I wanted to understand what it was that made people believe," he explained.

And as a scientist, his approach to the topic takes a different view from other attempts.

"The one place I didn't look was to the philosophers," he said. "And I claim that nothing that any philosopher of science has said has had anything of interest to any scientist."

Belief, Wolpert said, was about the human brain. "What is the point of your brain and why don't plants have brains?" he said. "The only function of your brain is to control movement."

The concept of cause and effect was key to understanding the nature of belief, Wolpert said. Once human beings grasped that concept, they wanted to understand other things, like death or weather. Religion or beliefs in the paranormal -- in which category he placed psychoanalysis -- came about to fill the gaps left by things that could not be explained by cause and effect.

"We find it very difficult to live without causal explanations for what goes on in our lives," he said. "The one causal agency that we know about is human agency. If it was a human kind of agency it was something you could appease," otherwise it had to be something else.

Causal beliefs were what mattered, he said, and because animals did not have any concept of cause and effect they could not have beliefs.

"It's not that [apes] are not terribly intelligent animals, but they have no concept of cause and effect," he said, citing Daniel Povinelli's influential book Folk Physics for Apes. "By contrast, children, from a young age, have a very firm concept of cause and effect. "It all comes back to tools. You cannot make a complex tool without having a concept of cause and effect. It's technology that drove human evolution -- not social interaction.

"Chimpanzees, for example, have very complex social interactions, but how does that help you? Chimps can trace very complex patterns, but they will never initiate them. I don't think you could get a chimpanzee to be a very good tennis player."

Wolpert said it was important not to think that people who believed in witchcraft, for example, were irrational. Their beliefs were false from a scientific point of view, he said, but helped to provide people with explanations for the "more than 90 per cent" of events whose causes were not easily explainable.

"Our ability to be suckers -- the 'Barnum effect' -- is very common," he said.

"And science is difficult. Any commonsensical view of the world does not fit with science. Science is peculiar and it is not natural."

But in its favour, he said, science had clinical trials, "where anecdote just will not do"... and ended with a quote from Ancient Roman poet Lucretius: "Happy is the man who knows the causes of things."