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| > > > Contatti Ex Libris Comunicazione s.r.l. Torino - via Palazzo di Città 21 Roma - via Zanardelli 34 Milano - via Giulio e Corrado Venini 25 tel +39 011 5695614 fax +39 011 19785300 e-mail ufficiostampa@exlibris.it www.exlibris.it Responsabile Ufficio Stampa |
29 ottobre 2008 ABSTRACT Lewis Wolpert: Sei cose impossibili prima di colazione The title refers to beliefs. Why do people have the impossible beliefs that they do? Believing in things for which there is no evidence like angels, UFOs, talking to the dead. Most people believe that they are above average in relation to practically everything from intelligence to kindness, so unravelling the basis for their beliefs is a complex issue. It is important to recognise that it is a human characteristic that we cannot tolerate not knowing the causes of important events that affect our lives. Some false beliefs like confabulation and the Capgras delusion are due to brain abnormality. My suggestion is that many human beliefs, including religion, originate from our unique ability to conceptualise that physical effects have physical causes. There is very good evidence that children from a few months age have a concept of physical cause. Causal understanding in children is a developmental primitive. At 18 months, infants are effectively using objects as tools. Children ask many questions about causes as they are growing up. What makes us human and different from all other animals is causal belief. No animal has the concept of physical cause and effect There are experiments which show that chimpanzees, our nearest relatives in the animal world, cannot distinguish between a banana with a hook attached to the block and another banana just touching the block and therefore, more easily removed. My proposal is that causal beliefs evolved in relation to tool making. You cannot make a tool of any complexity without having a concept of cause and effect. Humans started putting stone bits onto a stick and you cannot do that without having a concept of cause and effect. And it was tools and technology drove human evolution. Once our ancestors had a concept of cause and effect, they began to wonder about the causes of things that affected their lives like illness, death, pain, bad weather, hostile animals, disease and dreams. Early humans imagined that what caused all the things that they did not understand were some kind of human beings like themselves but who were invisible, Gods, and that was the origin of religion. Such an interpretation of the world persists today because people who have such beliefs or the inclination to such beliefs, do better because it removes the anxiety of not understanding. It also provided a means of seeking help by, for example, prayer important ways. Thus those people who had religious beliefs did better and evolution selected those whose minds went in that direction. There is evidence that those people who have religious beliefs are on the whole are healthier than those who do not. A possible additional reason that religious beliefs persist is that there is a mystical aspect embedded in most of our lives. Surveys have found that many people have a strange experience once or twice a year. It may be that LSD activates these circuits. So I suggest that we have in our brains this inbuilt tendency to mystical thinking which is very widespread through all human populations. I conclude that the tendency to have religious or mystical experiences and beliefs is part of the human condition. Lewis Wolpert Professore di Biologia Applicata presso il Dipartimento di Anatomia dello University College di Londra. > indietro > scarica doc |
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