The Science of Discworld IV

we may also have, to some extent, a belief
in
science, as distinct from belief in a religion or a cult: we believe
that
science can find ways out of humankind’s present difficulties, ways that are not available to politics, philosophy or religion.
    There is also a different usage of ‘belief’ altogether, one that we suspect is not always appreciated. Suppose that a scientist says ‘I believe that humans evolved’, and a religious person counters with ‘I believe humans were created by God’. On the surface, these are similar statements, and it’s easy to conclude that science is just another kind of religion. However, in religion, once you believe something, then you consider it to be an immutable truth. In science, the same word means ‘I’m not very sure about this’. As wemight say ‘I
believe
I left my credit card in the pub’, when we haven’t a clue where it’s gone.
    Ponder Stibbons believes that Roundworld is a construction whose genesis was events on Discworld. We, and you, believe the converse: that Discworld is a construct, created by Terry Pratchett in Roundworld. It’s just possible for both of these beliefs to be true – for a given value of truth. We all have beliefs of one kind or another. Let’s look at how we get them, and how we might judge them.
    Do newborn babies have beliefs? Surprisingly, the answer seems to be ‘yes’. They are very primitive, ill-formed beliefs, and they are considerably refined even in the first six months of life, but a few behaviours, even of newborns, suggest that a lot of wiring-up of the brain has gone on in the womb. The baby is far from being a blank slate on which anything can be written – a stance that Pinker argues persuasively in his book
The Blank Slate
. The baby is especially responsive to the sight of its mother, and can become very disturbed if she simply disappears from view. It responds to music that is similar to what it heard while in the womb in the later stages of its development; it can distinguish jazz from Beethoven or folksong by attentively ‘listening’ for familiar sounds. It has a whole suite of beliefs about suckling, about breasts and what they’re for. These things are beliefs in the sense that the baby’s brain already holds some model of mother, and of music, and it prefers things that fit this model.
    Soon, the baby begins to smile in response to a smile; even to a drawing of a smile. Is that a belief too? The answer depends on, but also illuminates, what we mean by a belief. The baby acts in particular ways – smiles, or suckles – because of the way its brain is wired up, because of programmes in its brain that could be otherwise, and, in occasional babies,
are
otherwise. Mostly, these are pathologies; apart from different musical preferences, there are few normal differences between baby brains. But very soon, because of a mother’s behaviour, whether the baby is swaddled or carried on a bare back into the fields,or left out on a mountainside, or has its feet bound, babies
diverge
. And very soon, they are inducted into the Make-a-Human-Being kit that is characteristic of, and specific to, each human culture.
    There are several ways to look at how a baby interacts with its surroundings. When the baby throws out toys from its pram, for example, this can be read in at least two ways. On the one hand, we might simply assume that it cannot retain a good grasp of the toy, which falls. However, observing the radiant smile with which it welcomes the return of the toy, we might conclude that the baby is teaching its mother to fetch. Such apparently minor interactions have a strong effect on the baby’s future, and they complicate it in ways that often reinforce the culture concerned. They include little songs and stories; learning to walk, to talk, and to play. We say ‘learning’ here, but these processes are like birds learning to fly. Many features of the ability are already wired into the brain, but now they have to be adjusted in a kind of dialogue with the real world. ‘If I stretch this bit out, and pull it back, what happens?’ So these abilities
mature
: they are not learned from scratch.
    In
Unweaving the Rainbow
, Dawkins likens juvenile humans to caterpillars, voracious in their uptake of information, especially from parents: Father Christmas, Heaven, fairies, what food to eat at festivals. He points out how credulous we
must
be as juveniles, to avoid obstacles to learning; but also how we should