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Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief QUOTES

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief QUOTES

1 " Mania has been described as having a mystical quality, an example of which is described by the writer Theodore Roethke. One day he felt good, and then felt that he knew what it was like to be a rabbit, and then a lion; so he entered a restaurant and ordered and ate raw meat. Kay Redfield Jameson bought twenty Penguin books in order to form a colony of penguins, and the poet Robert Lowell believed on one occasion that he might be the reincarnation of the Holy Ghost and could, if he wished, paralyze cars. "

― Lewis Wolpert , Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief

2 " Science, as I have argued, goes against common sense, and we also usually lack the necessary information on which to make a scientific judgement. But more importantly, our belief engine, programmed in our brains by our genes, operates on different principles. It prefers quick decisions, it is bad with numbers, loves representativeness, and sees patterns where often there is only randomness. It is too often influenced by authority, and it has a liking for mysticism. "

― Lewis Wolpert , Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief

3 " When Alice says she cannot believe in impossible things, the Queen replies: ‘I dare say you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. "

― Lewis Wolpert , Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief