The Science of Discworld IV Judgement Da - By Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart Page 0,110

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 become more sceptical as adults, and that too many adults fail to do so, hence, alas, astrologers, mediums, priests and the like.

We can see just how indiscriminately juveniles pick up information through something that happened to Jack. He ran an extramural class in animal-handling for about thirty years, and became very impressed by the distribution of animal phobias (although he did realise that this was a very peculiar group of students in that respect). About a quarter of the students had a spider phobia, rather fewer had snake phobia (which, if bad, included worms). Some had a phobia for rats and mice. A few reacted badly to birds, feathers or bats. It seems likely (but we can’t document it in this instance) that these phobias came about by cultural infection: Mother screamed when she found a spider in the bath, or a television series depicted snakes as poisonous. (Less than 3% actually are, but it might be wise to assume lethality as a default, for solid evolutionary reasons.) Rats are often depicted as being dirty, and the same goes for mice. Jack never