From: Deborah Murray <blinkeeblink@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: July 13, 2008 1:24:47 AM EDT
To: BookShare <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Just submitted
Reply-To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi all,
I've just submitted for validation
"Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of
Belief"
by Lewis Wolpert.
It's cleaned up; headers stripped and page numbers and chapter titles
protected.
Approx. 250 pages.
[From the book jacket]
Why do 70 percent of Americans believe in angels, while others are
convinced
that they've been abducted by aliens? Why does every society around
the
world have a religious tradition of some sort? What makes people
believe in
improbable things when all the evidence points to the contrary?
In Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen tells Alice that to
believe in
a wildly farfetched fact, she simply needs to "draw a long breath
and shut
[her] eyes." Alice finds this advice ridiculous. But don't almost
all of us,
at some time or another, engage in magical thinking? Franklin
Roosevelt and
Winston Churchill canceled all appointments on Friday the 13th.
Niels Bohr
tacked a horseshoe over his desk-just to add some luck to his quantum
universe.
In Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, evolutionary biologist
Lewis
Wolpert delves into the important and timely debate over the nature of
belief, looking at belief's psychological basis to discover just what
evolutionary purpose it could serve.
Are there advantages to imaginary friends and fantasy worlds,
superstitions
and religions? Are we born with an evolutionary defense mechanism to
believe
in things that make us feel better about the world? Wolpert leads
the reader
through all that science can tell us about the beliefs of which we
are so
instinctually sure. He deftly explores these questions and the
different
types of belief-those of children, of animals, of the religious, and
of
those suffering from psychiatric disorders-and he asks whether it is
possible to live without belief, or whether it is a necessary
component of a
functioning society.
Enjoy!
Deborah
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