More Leroi

The problem is that here. as so often. Aristotle's technical vocabulary is underdetermined He's very reluctant to coin new terms even When he badly needs them. He's not entirely oblivious to the problem, He’ll often say that a given term is used in several different senses, and even tell us what they are but then. as often as not, leaves us guessing which one he means. 

Indeed. there’s a third sense in which Aristotle uses tides. It’s related to the other two. but goes much deeper, and is much more surprising It's the appearance of an organism, but if this is not too paradoxical its appearance when it cannot yet be seen. It is the ‘information’ or the formula’ which was transmitted to it by its parents, from which it built itself in the egg or womb, and which it will, in turn, transmit to its progeny It is in this sense that Aristotle thinks that the nature of a thing resides primarily in its form. 

To speak of eidos as ‘information’ risks anachronism. Aristotle certainly does not conceive of information in the general sense that we do. Yet this interpretation is supported by passages in which he draws a parallel between the transmission of animal form and the transmission of knowledge. In The Parts of Animals Aristotle considers how a woodcarver might explain his art. He clearly wouldn’t just talk about the wood that’s merely the matter out of which it’s built. Nor would he just talk about his axe and auger -they’re merely tools, Nor would he just talk about the strokes that he makes -that’s mere technique. No, if he is really to convey the origin of the thing he's making, he has to talk about the idea that he had when he began his work the process by which it will unfold in his hands, its final design and ultimate purpose he must talk about its eidos. In the same way, when a scientist seeks to explain why living things have the features they do, he must talk about their aide. It’s just that the forms of living things are not. Plato held, located in the mind of some divine craftsman, but rather located in their patents' seeds. 

There's a passage in the Metaphysics where Aristotle gives another metaphor for the relationship between material and formal natures. Rather marvellously, he compares the components of a body to a symbolic system. Some things he says. are compounds. The syllable ab is a compound of the letters a and b, But putting a and b together is not enough to give you that particular syllable; you need something else: you need to specify the order of the letters (lest you get ba instead) or, as we would now say, you need information. In the same way, flesh is a compound of Fire and earth and something else: the way in which they are ordered. And that order is the form and nature of flesh. 

Aristotle's belief that we should attend less to the matter than to the 
informational structure of living things makes him seem like a molecular geneticist avant la lettre. He did not somehow miraculously anticipate the discovery of DNA: it’s mere coincidence that he used an ordered alphabetical sequence ab v. ba to describe forms as we describe nucleotides. Yet, in retrieving forms from the Platonic realm-beyond-the-senses, Aristotle answered, and answered correctly, the question: what is the immediate source of the design that we see in living things? It is the information that they inherit from their parents.

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Aristotle distinguishes the rules for debating opinions from the rules for constructing scientific explanations. The first he called ‘dialectic’, the latter ‘demonstration‘ (the Greek is apodeixis). By ‘demonstration' he mean“ exactly what a modem scientist means when he says, ‘we have demonstrated that A is the cause of B’ -that is, he and his collaborators have shown that the presence of A is a necessary and sufficient condition for B. He had a high notion of the power of scientific demonstrations: he thought that they delivered truth. That’s because they are the products of logical operations. Aristotle invented the theory of inferential logic known as his syllogistic. It was his greatest technical achievement and dominated the subject for millennia even if it was incomplete and, in parts, wrong. His syllogistic aimed to deduce new conclusions from established premises where the premises are propositions that contain a subject and a predicate. e.g. ‘All octopuses [subject] are eight legged [predicate].’ To analyse such statements he invented a formalism that substituted letters for the terms, e.g. ‘All A are B.’ This formalism allowed him to speak generally of all propositions of a given form, manipulate them and derive the many results that he did. 

For Aristotle, a scientific demonstration rests upon a syllogism. But to qualify as a demonstration a syllogism must meet certain conditions. First, the premises of the syllogism must obviously be true. Second, the premises of the syllogism must be more immediate, more empirically apparent, than its conclusion (at least in natural science as distinct from geometry). Third, it must concern universals rather than particulars. In fact, Aristotle thinks that it’s impossible to have scientific knowledge of individuals. To say that this octopus has eight legs gets us nowhere; scientific knowledge can only 
begin once we‘ve established that all octopuses have eight legs or at least that all normal octopuses do. Finally only universal, assertive and assertoric propositions can form the basis of demonstrations: ‘All A are B; all B are C; therefore all A are C.’ Logicians refer to such syllogisms as being in the 'mood' of‘Barbara’. Such logical strictures may seem remote from the modern scientific 

method and so, in a way, they are. But Aristotle’s reason for grounding scientific knowledge in his syllogistic is, I believe, one familiar to any modern scientist. I suggested that, far from being a natural history or a taxonomy, Historia animalum is a search for associations among the traits that animals possess; that it is, in fact, a data trawl. His syllogistic, then, provides a powerful way of securing those associations of showing that they are true. Secure associations, in turn, demand causal explanations which his syllogistic also identifies. 

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I have been speaking of Aristotle’s ‘theory of demonstration’ as if there is just one of them. In the Posterior Analytics he certainly devote; most space to the method I have sketched. But he also allows that there are other modes of demonstration though he’s quite vague about how they work. In The Parts of Animals he says that the methods of demonstration in natural science are actually different from those in ‘theoretical sciences’ such as geometry. In biology, he suggests that we should start with the end the teleological purpose of an animal and work our way deductively back to infer how the animal’s various parts serve that purpose. Such demonstrations can also, with some twisting, be couched in syllogistic terms. 

Although demonstration is the beating heart of his scientific method Aristotle acknowledges that science rests on various indemonstrable statements. These include the axioms of his syllogistic as well as various Primary definitions. For example, geometry requires a definition of‘spatial magnitude and arithmetic a definition of ‘unit'. The axioms and primary definitions of biology are less obvious but include statements such as ‘nature does nothing in vain‘ an apophthegm that he puts to hard use. Aristotle isn’t clear how such ideas can be justified, and suggests that their truth is just apparent by induction (epagoge), but argues nonetheless that they're needed if science is to get off the ground. 

This is certainly right. In our day there are people who think, all evidence to the contrary, that science is just one system of beliefs among many. Aristotle had to contend with them too. Some people, he says, claim that scientific knowledge is impossible because any inference we make must rely on some previous inference, and that must rely on another, and so on to infinity so that, ultimately, we can know nothing. Other people. he continues, claim that anything can be demonstrated: everything is true hence nothing is true. 

Aristotle recognizes that both thoughts are lethal to the possibility of science, and he deals with them briskly. No, there isn’t an infinite regress of inferences, nor is it true that everything can be demonstrated. because our arguments ultimately begin with axioms and our perception of the empirical world. His language is combative. It has to be. He has to show against his opponents, not just Plato but the sophists with their razorsharp dialectic, that it is possible to extract real knowledge from the sensible world. We may wonder whether he succeeded. Modem science rests on fundamental axioms no less than Aristotelian science. and scientists mostly justify them by the fact that they work. But Aristotle could hardly defend his assumptions, as a modern scientist can, by flicking on a light.‘

Aristotle

From Armand Marie Leroi

The world that Aristotle knew was bound by the Straits of Gibraltar to the mm. the Oms to the east, the Libyan desert to the south and the Eurasian plains to the north. Within it lived more than 500 different kinds of animal. or at least that is about how many he names. Everything about them interests him. He speaks of the reproduction of lice. the mating habits of herons, the sexual incontinence of girls, the stomachs of snails, the sensitivity of sponges, the flippers of seals, the sounds of cicadas, the destructiveness of starfish, the dumbness of the deaf, the flatulence of elephants and the structure of the human heart; his book contains 130,000 Words and around 9,000 empirical claims. The animal world is a vast subject and Aristotle started from scratch. Some medical writings aside, there is no evidence that anyone wrote a zoological treatise before he did. So where did he get all these facts from? The answer appears to be: from just about anywhere that he could. 

Some of them came from books. Aristotle is coy about his sources. but it‘s possible to identify a few of them from glancing allusions. Given the stated scientific nature of his enterprise. a few of the works that he does name are rather odd. Homer crops up occasionally; and he quotes a verse by Aesop on the plumage of hoopoes but that's the Reader at work. The surprise is what is missing Not that much anatomy seems to come from the Hippocratic treatises. and yet Aristotle’s father was a doctor. Here one suspects him of failing to give his predecessors credit. Plato is never cited as a source of factual information no loss there though his speculations pervade Aristotle‘s theory. The physiologoi contribute few facts; they. too. are mostly sparring partners in theory. We learn, Aristotle once said. ‘by pressing on those in front. and not waiting for those behind’. 

There is a suspicion that some of Aristotle’s data on mammalian anatomy came from hieroscopic texts books about prophecy by entrails. He pays an unreasonable amount of attention to the gall bladder, an otherwise insignificant organ that loomed large in the undergrowth of prophetic belief. He’s an expert on the astragalus, a minor foot bone used as a die by gamblers and prophets. If Aristotle did indeed get some of his data from sources like this, then he kept the anatomy but ditched the prophecies. Plato did the reverse. 

A prophetic manual also probably supplied quite a bit of ethology. ‘This is where diviners get their terminology of “alignment” and “non-alignment”: animals at war are “non-aligned” while those at peace count as “aligned”.’ He goes on to describe how eagles fight vultures (and snakes, and nuthatches and herons); how hunting wasps and geckos fight spiders; how snakes light weasels; how wrens fight owls and so on for pages in a war of nature that is almost Darwinian in its violence. There’s a lot of low-quality data here. That wrens, larks, woodpeckers and nuthatches feed on the eggs of other birds would come as a surprise to ornithologists. And if, in Aristotle’s day, the ass was at war with the lizard because ‘the lizard sleeps in his manger and gets up his nostrils and so stops him eating‘. then modern asses can rest easy for modern lizards appear to have given up this nasty habit. 

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IN DEFINING NATURE AS an ‘internal principle of change and rest’, Aristotle merely delimits the scope of natural science. The question- the great question that motivates his entire scientific enterprise- is what are the causes of change? 

To answer this question Aristotle began to read. By the time he arrived at the Academy in 367 BC, the intellectual tone was anti-scientific and the great line of physiologoi extinct. But their books -papyrus scrolls- were still around I won’t venture to say how or when Aristotle retrieved them from the library shelves. I note only that when he left the Academy he was thirty seven, so he'd had plenty of time to read. take notes and think. 

Among the works that he read were Democritus’. Only Plato looms larger in Aristotle's intellectual hinterland than he. The natural Philosopher‘s natural philosopher, Plato is said to have loathed him and wished his books burnt. Later philosophers evidently read them. so we know that he did not destroy them. yet posterity has granted Plato his ignoble wish for not one now exists. Aristotle's physical theory is constructed largely contra Democritus', but much of what we know about the latter comes from the former for, unlike Plato, Aristotle paid his opponents the compliment of preserving their words. 

As Aristotle tells it. Democritus held that the world was ultimately composed of entities that were invisible, solid, indestructible, indivisible. immutable, infinite in number and variety and perpetually in motion in short, atoms, He called his atoms onta ‘things’. He learnt the theory from his teacher Leucippus. Today he and Leucippus are jointly celebrated as the fathers of atomic theory and all that it entails, for the theoretical thread that connects them to Dalton and Rutherford is, however etiolated, real. 

Democritus developed his atomic theory into a cosmology The theory, which is sketchy though whether due to Democritus’ failures or to history’s vicissitudes we do not know proposed that atoms heating in the void collide with, and adhere to, each other and so form larger entities, ultimately the planets and stars. He also apparently explained sex determination, sensation and movement in animals by appealing to the shapes and motions of atoms. He may have elaborated a whole reductionist theory of life the doxographers list three books on the Causes of the Animals- but we do not know since they are lost. Even so, the general thrust of his theories is clear. When Democritus sought to explain the nature of things, why they change, he appealed exclusively to matter the stuff of which they were made He was not the first to do so; materialism is one of the great threads of Neo-Ionian speculation, but his account was the most sophisticated. Aristotle would spend much of his life trying to show why it is wrong, in a way his scientific works are one long argument against the materialists. We have arrived at one of the great turning points of scientific thought. It's often been judged a wrong turn. 

The problem with Democritus' cosmology, Aristotle argues. is that it has the universe arising spontaneously from atomic collision. To explain why this is improbable. Aristotle analyses the meaning of ‘spontaneous‘. Suppose, he says, we see a tripod standing on its three feet. we would naturally suppose that someone had deliberately placed it so But that nee not be the case: perhaps the tripod fell from a roof and just happened to land on its feet- the Greek is automaton from which our ‘automatic‘ comes. Democritus supposes that the cosmos is like a tripod standing on its feet one that wasn't put there deliberately. but just happened to land so.

It seems like a peculiar argument. Why shouldn’t the Cosmos just happen to have landed on its feet? But Aristotle’s point is that spontaneous events are those that appear to have a purpose but in fact don't. And that m the nub of the matter: Aristotle thinks that the cosmos the stars, the planets, the earth, the living things it contains, the elements themselves obviously have a purpose; they show the hallmarks of design. And although purposeful things can arise spontaneously it just seems implausible to him, that a cosmos that is so exquisitely ordered could spontaneously self-assemble. 

Most modern cosmological theories suppose that the universe does not have a purpose but just is. Only a child would ask ‘what are the stars for?’ But that’s not a childish question to Aristotle. His sense of purpose embraces almost everything. Perhaps this will seem less strange if we see him as a kind of cosmic biologist. We may think that he’s on uncertain ground when looking at the stars, but he’s obviously right to argue that the random collisions of atoms can’t explain the regular and purposeful features of life on earth (or anywhere else). 

Aristotle’s biologist’s vision of the world is explicit when tackling another of the physiologoi. Whenever he discusses Democritus, Empedocles is usually close by. For Aristotle, they are both materialists, albeit of different stripe. Empedocles thought that the world was composed of four basic elements earth, water, air, fire which can be read as matter in its solid, liquid and gaseous phases, with fire as an extra. These elements combine in particular proportions to give all the different kinds of stuff stone, iron. bone, blood that we see. 

"Existing things have no nature only a mixing and a separating of what has been mixed. Nature is a name given by human beings." 

‘Nature’ is just mixology. Empedocles’ verses explain how a conflict between Love and Strife brings about the cyclical creation and destruction of the world and, with it, the periodic creation of living things. In the first phases of each cycle Love forms tissues, each to a particular chemical recipe, and from these tissues strange creatures emerge composed mostly of single organs: ‘eyes without faces’. ‘heads without necks' and 'single limbs‘. Love waxes. Strife wanes, the cycle turns, body part creatures fuse together in random combinations to produce creatures that have two faces, two chests. or else are part male and part female. or else are hybrid ‘man faced ox calves‘ or 'ox faced men' a teratological bestiary complete with a Minotaur. And it may seem that Empedocles is far from being able to produce the animals that we actually see except that he has a brilliant solution. Simplicius. a sixth century AD commentator on Aristotle's Physics. tells us what it is: 

Thus Empedocles says that under the rule of love parts of animals first came into being at random heads. hands. feet and so on and then came into combination: ‘There sprang up ox progeny. man-limbed, and the reverse [obviously meaning human progeny with oxen limbs, i.e. combinations of ox and man]. And those which combined in a way which enabled them to preserve themselves became animals. and survived because they [the parts] fulfilled each other's needs the teeth cutting and grinding the food. the stomach digesting it. the liver converting it into blood. And the human head, by combining with a human body. brings about the preservation of the whole, but by combining with the ox’s body fails to cohere with it and perishes. For those which did not combine on proper principles perished. And things still happen the same way nowadays . . . 

Most of the recombinants were unfit and perished, so we see only the survivors today. Many early natural philosophers, Simplicius remarks, had this idea That, if true, is remarkable, for it suggests that in Aristotle's time the idea of selection as a source of order was a commonplace. Certainly Epicurus. a generation younger than Aristotle, gave an even more elaborate selection-based cosmogeny than did Empedocles at least he did if Lucretius’ Epicurean verses are to be relied on. 

One might expect Aristotle to like Empedocles’ model. The Sicilian has at least as Simplicius tells it -a perfectly reasonable mechanism capable of producing complex, functional creatures out of chaos. Surely Aristotle. seeking an explanation for purpose in nature, would see. and seize upon. this? He certainly sees the force of the logic. He picks a lovely bit of biological design: teeth. In infants, the front teeth incisors come up sharp fitted for tearing food while the molars emerge broad and useful for grinding food. Why, he asks, shouldn‘t we view this as the product of a process in which things that are fittingly ordered survive and those that aren‘t don't; Why aren't teeth ‘spontaneous‘. 

Aristotle can think of several reasons why not. But, to understand them it's necessary to have Aristotle’s version of selection clearly in mind. It probably isn’t Empedocles‘, for the Sicilian’s extant verses tell only of recombination selection events that occurred in some remote historical past; ever since then the forms of the survivors the plants and animals we see have been fixed. Aristotle, by contrast, supposes that selection is working today. But Aristotelian selection isn’t Darwin’s either; it’s much more radical. Darwinian natural selection supposes that organisms have a system of inheritance that transmits their features more or less intact from one generation to the next, that the inherited material varies slightly nevertheless, and that this subtle variation is the substrate for natural selection Aristotelian-Empedoclean selection, however, assumes that every individual forms itself de novo by a variational-selection mechanism. The womb contains, as it were, a formless soup from which selection produces a child complete with teeth. Aristotle, in short, turns a cosmological model into an embryological one. 

Which he demolishes with ease. His arguments are fascinating, for some of them have been used against the theory of evolution by natural selection. (I) Spontaneous events are rare, but the signature of genuinely purposeful events is that they are common: teeth always come up in exactly the same way This is a probabilistic argument for the existence of a purposeful agent and, like all such arguments, it is wrong, for selection can regularly produce order from disorder.‘ Admittedly, Empedocles helps Aristotle to this conclusion by making his cosmogonies indeterminate: ‘[sometimes] it may happen to run one way. but often it ran otherwise’ the line is quoted by Aristotle. (2) It’s not just the end of development that has the appearance of purpose; it’s also the process. Every step in development is obviously directed towards a final goal, rather like each step in the construction of a house. These steps must be the product of an intelligence that has the final product in mind. (3) Although development is very regular mistakes do happen (in The Generation of Animals he has a lot to say about conjoined twins and dwarfs). but they are mistakes: deviations from some existing, purposeful programme that must be already in place. Indeed, even Empedocles’ original recombinant animals could not have come from nothing. they must have sprung from “some corruption of some principle corresponding to what is now the seed’. (4) Besides, we simply don't see that much variation. Granted, monstrous progeny sometimes appear, some perhaps even as monstrous as Empedocles’ man-headed calf, but why don’t we see the same thing in plants, an olive’headed vine sapling, say? “An absurd suggestion’ -and one wishes that one c0u1d have shown him a homeotic mutant flower. (5) Organisms inherit their forms from their parents. A given seed doesn’t develop into any creature, but rather into aspecific one: a cicada, a horse or a man. Selectionism can’t do that. Aristotle’s right his version of it can’t. 

The heart of Aristotle’s rejection of materialism is his conviction that the cosmos, and the creatures it contains, have order and purpose. His dismissal of Democritus’ conviction that order can simply arise spontaneously is, perhaps. understandable. His objection to Empedocles is less certain, for selection even non-Darwinian selection can bring about order from disorder; it is, indeed, the only known naturalistic explanation for it. Aristotle seems to have painted himself into a corner. Where, then. does order come from? And what is its purpose?

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That's just the sort of reaction we expect from Socrates. Unexpectedly. Aristotle has much the same complaint. For. a few pages after complimenting Anaxogoras on his invocation of Intelligence, Aristotle retracts and accuses him of using Intelligence as a deus ex machina. dragging it in only when he's at a loss. and generally explaining events by appealing to all sorts of other causes. The problem is not that Anaxagoras invokes Intelligence; the problem is that he doesn’t give it full rein. When we find Socrates Plato and Aristotle, the first so hostile to science. the other so utterly committed to it, united in their disparagement of a third (or is it a fourth?) philosopher, we can be sure that we have found a deep connection between them. And so it proves. For Aristotle’s conviction that the cosmos must be explained in terms of goals or ends is one that he learned at Plato’s knee. 

Explanations that appeal to goals, or purposes, or final causes are known as ‘teleological’ explanations. The word is derived from telos ‘end’ and was coined in 1728 by the German philosopher Christian Wolff. The perennial fascination of teleological explanations is that, in attributing purpose to the world, they appear to demand the existence of purposeful agents; indeed, the phenomena they explain become evidence that such agents exist. It was for that reason that William Paley in his Natural Theology (1802) limned the functional perfection of the eyelid: 

Of the superficial parts of the animal frame, I know none which, in its office and structure, is more deserving of attention than the eyelid. It defends the eye; it wipes it; it closes it in sleep. Are there, in any work of art whatever, purposes more evident than those which this organ fulfils? or an apparatus for executing those purposes more intelligible, more appropriate, or more mechanical? 

And for that same reason Socrates did too:

"And besides all this. do you not think this looks like a matter of foresight, this closing of the delicate orbs of sight with eyelids as with folding doors. which. when there in need to use them for any purpose. can be thrown wide open and firmly closed again in sleep’ 

Socrates goes on to argue that the foresight and purpose manifest in the eyelid comes from God, 'a wise artificer full of love for all living things’. It is the first appearance in history of the Argument from Design. the argument upon which Paley‘s Natural Theology and The Brldgewater Treatises (1833 40) depend. It is a gesture towards the sort of account that Socrates sought from Anaxagoras and the other physiologoi, one that would lead him from the phenomenal world to the beautiful and the good and the Divine. It is almost certainly Socrates’ argument, for it appears in Xenophon’s Memorabilia rather than in Plato’s works. But if Socrates merely gestured towards an account of the world. Plato wrote one or something that looks like one. 

The Timeus may be a 'myth’, but it is a myth written by Plato and so, between the jokes and the moralizing, pullulates with ideas. Of course Genesis and the Rig Veda contain ideas too, and those in The Timaeus would be as irrelevant to the history of science as theirs are, were it not that Aristotle read The Timaeus and transmuted its conceptual lead into the gold of scientific explanation. 

The myth that Plato tells is one of intelligent design. The cosmos and its creatures exist and are beautiful because a divine craftsman. the Demiourgos, made them so. Plato, no zoologist, mentions only six kinds of living things: the heavenly gods (aka. stars and planets), humans, land animals, birds, fish and shellfish. Even so. he has a good deal to say about how and why the Demiourgos made them as he did. 

His account of our digestive tract reveals the Dmiourgos‘ design priorities. Our intestines are, Plato says, looped into coils to ensure that nourishment does not pass through them too quickly. The coils. therefore. restrict how much food we can eat. That's good, because when we eat we become ‘deaf to the command of the divinest part of our nature’ -we literally stuff ourselves silly and so cannot think, and that‘s bad. Philosophy, it seems, begins in our bowels. 

The Damiourgos is also remarkably farsighted. Plato explains that we have fingemails ‘for our framers knew that some day men would pass into women and also into beasts, and that many creatures would need nails (claws and hoofs) for many purposes; hence they designed the rudiments of this growth from the very birth of mankind’. One is tempted to suppose that Plato is thinking of evolution here, and that fingernails are pre-adaptations for claws. That would make this a weird but interesting passage; in fact, it’s weird but boring. It’s just another of his transmutationist bizarreries. rather like the one that has astronomers becoming birds. 

It’s not that there aren’t some interesting ideas in The Timaeus. Aristotle uses many of them in his zoology. But Plato, characteristically, does not think that we should accept his divine teleology on its scientific merits. In Law: he explains that materialism the materialism of Empedocles and Democritus is malignant, for, dispensing with divine purpose, it leads to atheism and so social disorder. There’s a moral sting in every Platonic tale.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

by Italo Calvino

Of course the ideal position for reading is something you can never find. In the old days they used to read standing up, at a lectern. People were accustomed to standing on their feet without moving. They rested like that when they were tired of horseback riding.

Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best. 

It‘s not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You’re the Sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn’t serious. 

So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that If on a winter’s night a traveler had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn’t published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you. 

Following this visual trail. you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves. trying go cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed. that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read. the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading. Books Read Even Before -You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages, the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Y0ur Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified. 

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them. 

With a zigzag dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author Or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general) and New Books By Authors 0: On Subjects Completely Unknown ( at least to you). and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new). 

All this simply means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the bookshop, you have turned toward a stack of If on a winter’s night a traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established. 

You cast another bewildered look at the books around you (or, rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him). and out you went. 

You derive a special pleasure from a just-published book, and it isn't only a book you are taking with you but its novelty as well, which could also be merely that of an object fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacket begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the binding becomes dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries. No, you hope always to encounter true newness, which. having been new once will continue to be so. 

Worse still if you belong- willingly or unwillingly -to the number of those for whom working means really working, performing. whether deliberately or without premeditation, something necessary or at least not useless for others as well as for oneself; then the book you have brought with you to your place of employment like a kind of amulet or talisman exposes you to intermittent temptations. a few seconds at a time subtracted from the principal object of your attention, whether it is the perforations of electronic cards, the burners of a kitchen stove, the controls of a bulldozer, a patient stretched out on the operating table with his guts exposed. 

In other words, it’s better for you to restrain your impatience and wait to open the book at home. Now. Yes, you are in your room, calm; you open the book to page one, no, to the last page, fast you want to see how long it is. It‘s not too long, fortunately. Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years. 

You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it. is a part of the pleas new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book.

So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don’t recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself. Here, however, he seems to have absolutely no connection with all the rest he has written, at least as far as you can recall. Are you disappointed? Let’s see. Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost, as when a person appears who, from the name, you identified with a certain face, and you try to make the features you are seeing tally with those you had in mind, and it won’t work. But then you go on and you realize that the book is readable nevertheless, independently of what you expected of the author, it’s the book in itself that arouses your curiosity; in fact, on sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.

The Big Clock

“Earl was asking about you a moment ago,” Orlin told me. “Wanted you to meet somebody.” 

“I was delayed. As a matter of fact, I’ve just finished a twenty-minute conversation with President McKinley.” 

Miss Delos looked mildly interested. “Who did you say?” she asked. 

“William McKinley. Our twenty-fourth President.” 

“I know,” she said, and smiled. A little. “You probably heard a lot of complaints.” 

A man I recognized as Emory Mafferson, a tiny little dark fellow who haunted one of the lower floors, Futureways also I think, spoke up. 

“There’s a guy with an iron Face like McKinley‘s in the auditing department. If that’s who you mean, you bet there were complaints.” 

“No. I was truly and literally detained in a conversation With Mr. McKinley. At the bar of the Silver Lining.“ 

“He was,” said Georgette. “I was, too.” 

“Yes. And there were no complaints at all. Quite the contrary. He’s making out quite well, it seems.” I had myself another Manhattan from a passing tray. “He’s not under a contract, of course. But working steadily. In addition to he: a McKinley he‘s sometimes Justice Holmes, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ward Beecher, or anyone important but dignified. He's been Washington, Lincoln, and Christopher Columbus more times than he can remember.” 

“I call him a very convenient friend to have,” said Delos “Who is he?” ' 

“His earthly alias is Clyde Norbert Polhemus. For business purposes. I’ve known him for years, and he’s promised to [let me be his understudy.” 

“What’s he done?” Orlin asked, with reluctance. “Sound; like he materialized a bunch of ghosts, and can’t put them back.” 

“Radio,” I said. “And he can put anyone anywhere.” 

And that was about all, the first time I met Pauline Delos. The rest of the late afternoon and early evening passed as always in this comfortable little palace, surrounded as it was by the big and little palaces of greater and lesser kingdoms than Janoth Enterprises. Old conversation in new faces. Georgette and I met and talked to the niece of a department store. Of course the niece wanted to conquer new territory. She would inherit several acres of the old territory, anyway. I met a titan in the world of mathematics; he had connected a number of adding machines into a single unit, and this super-calculator was the biggest in the world. It could solve equations unknown to and beyond the grasp of its inventor. I said: “That makes you better than Einstein. When you have your equipment with you.” 

He looked at me uneasily, and it occurred to me I was a little drunk. 

“I’m afraid not. It was a purely mechanical problem, developed For special purposes only.” 

I told him he might not be the best mathematician on earth but he was certainly the fastest.

All the King's Men- final 2 passages

I lay there, having drowned in West, my body having drifted down to lie there in the comforting, subliminal ooze on the sea floor of History. Lying there, I had what I thought then was a fine per- spective on my own history, and saw that the girl I had known that summer a long time back hadn’t been beautiful and charming but had merely been smooth-faced and healthy, and though she had sung songs to Jackie-Bird while she cradled his head on her breast, she hadn’t loved him, but had merely had a mysterious itch in the blood and he was handy and the word love was a word for the mysterious itch. And that she had been tormented by the mysterious itch and torn between its impulse and fear, and that all her withholdments and hesitations had not been prompted by some dream of making “love mean something’ and making me understand that dream but that they had been prompted by all the fears which the leaning, sibilant, sour-breathed old dough-faces of conventional society had whispered into her ear like fairy godmothers while she lay in her cradle, and that those withholdments and hesitations were no better or worse than the hottest surrender nor better or worse than those withholdments practiced by Lois for other ends. And in die end you could not tell Anne Stanton from Lois Seager, for they were alike, and though the mad poet William Blake wrote a poem to tell the Adversary who is Prince of This World that He could not ever change Kate into Nan, the mad poet was quite wrong, for anybody could change Kate into Nan, or if indeed the Prince couldn't change Kate into Nan it was only because Kate and Nan were exactly alike to begin with and were, in fact, the same with only the illusory difference of name, which meant nothing, for names meant nothing and all the words we speak meant nothing and there was only the pulse in the blood and the twitch of the nerve, like a dead frog's leg in the experiment when the electric current goes through. So when I lay there on the bed in Long Beach, and shut my eyes, I saw in the inward darkness as in mire the vast heave and contortion of numberless bodies, and limbs detached from bodies, sweating and perhaps bleeding from inexhaustible wounds. But finally this spectacle, which I could summon up by the mere act of closing my eyes, seemed merely funny to me. So I laughed out loud. I laughed out loud, and then after watching for some time the rhythmic flushing of the sea mist by the neon sign, I went to sleep. When I woke up I made ready to go back to the place and the things I had come from. Years before, a young girl had lain there naked on the iron bed in my room with her eyes closed and her hands folded over her breast, and I had been so struck by the pathos of her submissiveness and her trust in me and of the moment which would plunge her into the full, dark stream of the world that I had hesitated before laying my hands upon her and had, without understanding myself, called out her name. At that time I had had no words for what I felt, and now, too, it is difficult to find them. But lying there, she had seemed to be again the little girl who had, on the day of the picnic, floated on the waters of the bay, with her eyes closed under the stormy and grape-purple sky and the single white gull passing over, very high. As she lay there that image came into my head, and I had wanted to call her name, to tell her something—what, I did not know. She trusted me, but perhaps for that moment of hesitation I did not trust myself, and looked back upon the past as some- thing precious about to be snatched away from us and was afraid of the future. I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore I lacked some essential confidence in the world and in myself. She came, as time passed, to suspect this fact about me. I do not know that she had words to describe the fact to herself. Or she only had the easy words people gave her: wanting to have a job, studying law, doing some- thing. We went different ways in the world, as I have said, but I had with me always that image of the little girl on the waters of the bay, all innocence and trustfulness, under the stormy sky. Then, there came the day when that image was taken from me. I learned that Anne Stanton had become the mistress of Willie Stark, that some- how by an obscure and necessary logic I had handed her over to him. That fact was too horrible to face, for it robbed me of some- thing out of the past by which, unwittingly until that moment, I had been living. So I fled west from the fact, and in the West, at the end of His-tory, the Last Man on that Last Coast, on my hotel bed, I had dis- covered the dream. That dream was the dream that all life is but the dark heave of blood and the twitch of the nerve. When you flee as far as you can flee, you will always find that dream, which is- the dream of our age. At first, it is always a nightmare and horrible, but in the end it may be, in a special way, rather bracing and tonic. At least, it was so for me for a certain time. It was bracing because after the dream I felt that, in a way, Anne Stanton did not exist. The words Anne Stanton were simply a name for a peculiarly complicated piece of mechanism which should mean nothing whatsoever to Jack Burden, who himself was simply another rather com- plicated piece of mechanism. At that time, when I first discovered that view of things— really discovered, in my own way and not from any book— I felt that 1 had discovered the secret source of all strength and all endurance. That dream solves all problems. At first It was, as I have said, rather bracing and tonic. For after the dream there is no reason why you should not go back and face the fact which you have fled from (even if the fact seems to be that you have, by digging up the truth about die past, handed over Anne Stanton to Willie Stark), for any place to which you may flee will now be like the place from which you have fled, and you might as well go back, after all to the place where you belong, for nothing was your fault or anybody’s fault, for things are always as they are. And you can go back in good spirits, for you will have learned two very great truths. First, that you cannot lose what you have never Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West, after all. If you believe the dream you dream when you go there. 

and

a settlement named Don Jon, New Mexico, I talked to a man propped against the shady side of the filling station, enjoying the only patch of shade in a hundred miles due east. He was an old fellow, seventy-five if a day, with a face like sun-brittled leather and pale-blue eyes under the brim of a felt hat which had once been black. The only thing remarkable about him was the fact that while 332 you looked into the sun-brittled leather of the face, *which seemed as stiff and devitalized as the hide on a mummy's jaw, you would suddenly see a twitch in the left cheek, up toward the pale-blue eye. You would think he was going to wink, but he wasn’t going to wink. The twitch was simply an independent phenomenon, unrelated to the face or to what was behind the face or to anything in the whole tissue of phenomena which is the world we are lost in. It was remarkable, in that face, the twitch which lived that little life all its own. I squatted by his side, where he sat on a bundle of rags from which the handle of a tin skillet protruded, and listened to him talk. But the words were not alive. What was alive was the twitch, of which he was no longer aware. After my tank had been filled, I continued to watch that twitch, with glances stolen from the highway, as we sat side by side in the car and hurtled eastward. He was going east, too, going back. That was back in the days when the dust storms were blowing half the country away and folks headed west like the lemmings on a ram- page. Only, the folks who got there lacked the fine ecstasy of the lemmings. They did not start swimming in teeming, obsessed hordes straight out to the middle of the blue Pacific. That would have been the logical thing for them to do, just start swimming, pa and ma, grandpa and grandma, and Baby Rosebud with the running sore on her little chin, the whole kit and kaboodle of 'em, flailing the water to a froth and heading out. But, no, they were not like the lemmings, and so they just sat down and starved slowly in California. But this old fellow didn't. He was going back to north Arkansas to starve where he had come from. “Californy," he said, '‘hit is jes lak the rest of the world, only it is more of hit." “Yeah," I replied, “that is a fact." “You been thar?" he demanded. I told him I had been there. “You goen back home?" he asked. I told him I was going home. We rode across Texas to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he left me to try for north Arkansas. I did not ask him if he had learned the truth in California. His face had learned it anyway, and wore the final wisdom under the left eye. The face knew that the twitch was the live thing. Was all. But, having left that otherwise unremarkable man, it occurred to me, as I reflected upon the thing which made him remarkable, that if the twitch was all, what was it that could know that the twitch was all? Did the leg of the dead frog in the laboratory know that the twitch was all when you put the electric current through it? Did the man's face know about the twitch, m and how it was all? And if I was all twitch how did the twitch which was me know that the twitch was all? Ah, I decided, that is the mystery. That is the secret knowledge. That is what you have to go to California to have a mystic vision to find out. That the twitch can know that the twitch is all. Then, having found that out, in the mystic vision, you feel clean and free. You are at one with the Great Twitch. 

Does God Exist?

From Robert Wright

It‘s a bedrock idea of modern physics that, even if you define “ultimate reality” as the ultimate scientific reality-the most fundamental truths of physics- ultimate reality isn’t something you can clearly conceive. 

Think of an electron, a little particle that spins around another little particle. Wrong! True, physicists sometimes find it useful to think of electrons as particles, but sometimes it’s more useful to think of them as waves. Conceiving of them as either is incomplete, yet conceiving of them as both is...well, inconceivable. (Try it!) And electrons are just the tip of the iceberg. In general, the quantum world-the world of subatomic reality-behaves in ways that don’t make sense to minds like ours. Various aspects of quantum physics evince the property that the late physicist Heinz Pagels called quantum weirdness. The bad news for the religiously inclined, then, is that maybe they should abandon hope of figuring out what God is. (If we can’t conceive of an electron accurately, what are our chances of getting God right?) The good news is that the hopelessness of figuring out exactly what something is doesn’t mean it doesn‘t exist. Apparently some things are just inconceivable-and yet are things nonetheless. 

At least, some physicists believe electrons are things. The fact that nobody’s actually seen an electron, and that trying to imagine one ties our minds in knots, has led some physicists and philosophers of science to wonder whether it’s even accurate to say that electrons do exist. You could say that with electrons, as with God, there are believers and there are skeptics. 

The believers believe there’s something out there-some “thing” in some sense of the word “thing”-that corresponds to the word “electron”; and that, though the best we can do is conceive of this “thing” imperfectly, even misleadingly, conceiving of it that way makes more sense than not conceiving of it at all. They believe in electrons while professing their inability to really “know” what an electron is. You might say they believe in electrons even while lacking proof that electrons per se exist. 

Many of these physicists, while holding that imperfectly conceiving subatomic reality is a valid form of knowledge, wouldn’t approve if you tried to perform a similar maneuver in a theological context. If you said you believe in God, even while acknowledging that you have no clear idea what God is-and that you can‘t even really prove God per se exists-they would say your belief has no foundation. 

Yet what exactly is the difference between the logic of their belief in electrons and the logic of a belief in God? They perceive patterns in the physical world-such as the behavior of electricity --and posit a source of these patterns and call that source the “electron." A believer in God perceives patterns in the moral world (or, at least. moral patterns in the physical world) and posits a source of these patterns and calls the source "God." “God” is that unknown thing that is the source of the moral order, the reason there is a moral dimension to life on Earth and a moral direction to time on Earth: “God“ is responsible for the fact that life is sentient, capable of good and had feelings, and hence morally significant; “God" is responsible for the evolutionary system that placed highly sentient life on a trajectory toward the good. or at least toward tests that uttered the opportunity and incentive to realize the good: in the process “God" gave each of us a moral axis around which to organize our lives, should we choose to. Being human, we will always conceive of the source of this moral order in misleadingly crude ways, but then again you could say the same thing about conceiving electrons. So you‘ll do with the source of the moral order what physicists do with a subatomic source of the physical order, such as an electron-try to think about it the best you can, and fail. This. at least, is one modern, scientifically informed argument that could be deployed by the believer in God. 

The Atheist Strikes Back 

There are plausible rejoinders that an atheist scientist who believes in electrons could make, because there are places where the analogy between God and an electron breaks down. In particular, the scientist could say, “But something like an electron is necessary to explain patterns we see in the physical world. In contrast, something like God isn’t necessary to explain the moral order of the universe.” 

It’s a good point. This book’s account of the moral direction of history has been a materialist account. We’ve explained the expansion of the moral imagination as an outgrowth of expanding social organization, which is itself an outgrowth of technological evolution, which itself grows naturally out of the human brain, which itself grew naturally out of the primordial ooze via biological evolution. There’s no mystical force that has to enter the system to explain this, and there’s no need to look for one. 

Indeed, when the religious believer talks about the “source” of the moral order. the scientist could reply that the source of the moral order is. . . the electron- or, strictly speaking, other subatomic particles that are more fundamental than the electron.

 After all, the primordial ooze ultimately consisted of subatomic particles; if the expansion of the moral imagination can be explained in materialist terms. then its deepest explanation is the deepest explanation for the material world in general-the grand unified theory that physicists have been looking for. So why start talking about God? 

The believer has a reply, and it takes us back to chapter 18. There we saw something that modern biologists and the nineteenth-century Christian theologian William Paley agree on: the existence of animals-compared to, say, the existence of rocks-demands a special kind of explanation. And the reason isn’t that the creation of an animal can’t be explained in material terms; indeed, with growing success scientists understand how an animal’s intricately integrated functionality (organs of digestion, of perception, and so on) grows from a fertilized egg via explicable physical processes. Rather, the idea is that this emphatically material process-the emergence of integrated functionality via biological maturation seems like the kind of physical system that wouldn’t “just happen”; it must be the result of a creative process that imbues things with functionality-either a designer (such as a god, as Rev. Paley argued) or a “designer” (such as natural selection, as Darwin later argued). 

Turns out it was the latter-a “designing” process, not a designing god. But, however big a setback that fact is for Rev. Paley’s religious beliefs, there is a moral to this story that modern believers will want to emphasize: biologists agree that a strictly physical system or process whose workings can be wholly explained in mate~ rial terms-can have such extraordinary characteristics that it is fair to posit some special creative force as its source and ask about the nature of that force. Darwin inquired into the creative force behind plants and animals, and his answer was evolution. Surely the believer is entitled to ask the same question about evolution: Where did the amazing algorithm of natural selection come from? 

Such a believer, by the way, would not here be making an argument for “intelligent design,” the idea that natural selection isn’t adequate to account for human evolution. On the contrary, the idea here is that natural selection is such a powerful mechanism that its origin demands a special explanation; that evolution by natural selection has patterns and properties every bit as extraordinary as an animal‘s maturation toward functional integration. 

We spelled out some of those patterns in chapter 18: as natural selection ground along, creating more and more intelligent forms of life, it eventually created a form of life so intelligent as to give birth to a second creative process, cultural evolution; and as cultural (especially technological) evolution proceeded, the human species exhibited larger and larger expanses of social organization, and eventually this expanse approached global proportions; and in the process there appeared a moral order, linkage between the growth of social organization and progress toward moral truth. This moral order, to the believer, is among the grounds for suspecting that the system of evolution by natural selection itself demands a special creative explanation. 

This suspicion may be wrong, but the argument behind it is intelligible and legitimate-parallel in structure to the argument that, before Darwin, provided motivation to search for the theory of natural selection. And if the believer, having concluded that the moral order suggests the existence of some as-yet-unknown source of creativity that set natural selection in motion, decides to call that source “God,” well, that’s the believer’s business. After all, physicists got to choose the word “electron.” 

Of course, you could ask why the believer is entitled to suspect a creative source as exotic-sounding as a “god,” when the creative source of organic life turned out to be a mere mechanical process known as natural selection. To which the believer might reply that a physical system exhibiting moral order demands a more exotic explanation than a physical system exhibiting only a more mundane form of order. 

Even if the atheist scientist found this argument persuasive, the believer would still have some work to do. For there’s a formidable argument the scientist could make against the whole idea of comparing the conjectured existence of God to the conjectured existence of the electron.... Granted we believe in the existence of the electron even though our attempts thus far to conceive of it have been imperfect at best. Still there's a sense in which our imperfect conceptions of the electron have worked. We manipulate physical reality on the assumption that electrons exist as we imperfectly conceive them and - voila- we get the personal computer.

and

To answer this question (how did religion get built from the ground up) we have to view cultural evolution at a tine-grained level. We have to think about individual units of culture--beliefs and practices, in this case-and how they spread. The biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” for units of culture, in part because it sounds a bit like “gene,” and he wanted to stress some parallels between cultural and biological evolution. For example: just as genes are transmitted from body to body, down the generations, memes are transmitted from mind to mind. And just as newly minted genes “compete” for a place in the gene pool, newly minted memes “compete” for the finite space in the world’s supply of human brains. In this constant struggle of meme against meme, what kinds of memes will have a “selective advantage”? Newspapers are a good place to look for clues. Newspaper editors work hard to figure out what kinds of information people want. and to fill that demand. They are accomplished meme engineers, and thus students of human nature. One thing you’ll notice about newspapers is that they have a bias toward good things and bad things. The headlines “Stock market rises by 5 percent“ and “Stock market drops by 5 percent” will get better play than the headline “Stock market does nothing in particular.” Here religions, and certainly “primitive” religions, are like newspapers. In every hunter-gatherer society. Religion is devoted largely to explaining why bad things happen and why good things happen- illness, recovery; famine. abundance: and so on. 

There is also devotion to raising the ratio of good to had. The Andaman Islanders, convinced that whistling at night attracts bad spirits whereas singing repels them, do more singing in the dark than whistling in the dark. People naturally try to exert control over their environment, and believing that they have such control naturally makes them feel good. So people’s minds are open to ideas that promise to give them such control. This doesn’t mean people uncritically embrace every such idea that comes their way. But it does mean that these ideas get their attention-and for a meme, that’s the first step toward acceptance. While the Andaman Island meme asserting that thunderstorms are divine punishment for melting beeswax was hardly guaranteed a place in the society’s religion, it had a big head start over memes saying, “Thunderstorms just happen-there’s nothing you can do about it.” 

Another thing you’ll notice in newspapers is that the strange and novel wins out over the ordinary and expected. Tuberculosis and the West Nile virus are both bad news, and in terms of the number of people killed, tuberculosis is the worse of the two. Yet the headline “Outbreak of deadly new virus puzzles experts” easily crowds out “Usual number of people expected to die of tuberculosis this year” (except, perhaps, in the humor magazine The Onion, which earns its laughs by violating this pattern). As journalism sages famously put it: “Dog bites man” is not a story; “Man bites dog" is a story.6 

It makes sense that human brains would naturally seize on strange, surprising things, since the predictable things have already been absorbed into the expectations that guide them through the world; news of the strange and surprising may signal that some amendment of our expectations is warranted. But one property of strange surprising claims is that the're often untrue. So if they get preferred access to our brains, that gives falsehood a kind of advantage-if a fleeting advantage over truth. In the days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. one widely circulated story was that a man at the top of one of the twin towers had survived by sliding down the rubble as it formed. It was a story so incredible that it virtually compelled you to click the “forward” icon on your e-mail-and a story so incredible that it wasn’t true. It was an example of the famous dictum that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on. 

Of course, in the long run, the truth often does get its boots on, and people often welcome it upon its arrival. Indeed, if the attraction to surprising news weren’t balanced by an attraction to claims that survive subsequent scrutiny, the average human ancestor wouldn’t have lived long enough to become a human ancestor. Imagine a local sage, 200,000 years ago, saying that eating a certain berry will let you live forever. Now imagine that the first two people who follow his advice drop dead. Genes that counseled continued faith in advice thus besieged by countervailing evidence would not long remain a part of the species, whereas genes that inclined the brain to take account of such evidence might. This natural human respect for evidence is the reason convincing someone that one plus one equals three, or that water flows uphill, takes real work. 

But some kinds of beliefs are harder to test than those two. And hard-to-test beliefs could do well in the process of cultural evolution that gave birth to religion. Indeed, hunter-gatherer religious belief-like religious belief generally-consists largely of claims that resist falsification. The Haida, a people indigenous to the northwest coast of North America, when caught in a storm while out at sea, would try to appease the relevant authorities (killer whale deities) by pouring a cup of fresh water into the sea or putting some tobacco or deer tallow on the end of a paddle. Many people no doubt returned from sea to report that these measures had kept them from drowning. No one, presumably, ever reported that they had taken these measures but drowned anyway. 

To be sure, some religious beliefs can be put to a clearer test. 

If the Andaman Islanders were right, and melting beeswax was a leading cause of thunderstorms, then a melting moratorium should cut down on thunderstorms. But how can you be sure that, in the days preceding a thunderstorm, no one in your village melted a smidgen of wax -or engaged in some other thunder-inducing activity. such as making a loud noise while the cicadas were singing?

Such loopholes are found in modern religions, too. If you pray for someone to recover from illness, and they don’t, then prayer would seem to have lost credibility. But religions usually have ways of explaining such failure. Maybe you or the sick person had done something horribly wrong, and this is God’s punishment. Or maybe God just works in mysterious ways. 

So far, then, we would expect the following kinds of memes to be survivors in the dog-eat-dog world of cultural evolution: claims that (a) are somewhat strange, surprising, counterintuitive; (b) illuminate sources of fortune and misfortune; (c) give people a sense that they can influence these sources; (d) are by their nature hard to test decisively. In this light, the birth of religion doesn’t seem so mysterious. 

But doesn’t our attraction to strangeness have its limits? It’s one thing to believe that a man could survive a slide down a crumpling skyscraper through a series of lucky breaks. It’s quite another to believe, with the Inuit (in chapter I), that a sudden shortage of game is the work of a pouty female deity who lives at the bottom of the sea. In other words, “Man bites dog,” however unlikely, seems more plausible than “God bites man.”