Interesting Excerpts; Some Things I've Been Reading

From Freeman Dyson's review of Dennett's new book on religion as a "natural phenomenon":

Dennett puts forward other hypotheses concerning the evolution of religion. He observes that belief, which means accepting certain doctrines as true, is different from belief in belief, which means believing belief in the same doctrines to be desirable. He finds evidence that large numbers of people who identify themselves as religious believers do not in fact believe the doctrines of their religions but only believe in belief as a desirable goal. The phenomenon of "belief in belief" makes religion attractive to many people who would otherwise be hard to convert. To belong to a religion, you do not have to believe. You only have to want to believe, or perhaps you only have to pretend to believe. Belief is difficult, but belief in belief is easy. Belief in belief is one of the important phenomena that give a religion increased transmissibility . . . .

I really liked that phrase, "belief in belief." This seems pretty much right-on to me. Then there was a hilarious anecdote, from Dyson:

To be workable, a solution does not need to be scientifically or philosophically consistent. When I was a boy in England long ago, people who traveled on trains with dogs had to pay for a dog ticket. The question arose whether I needed to buy a dog ticket when I was traveling with a tortoise. The conductor on the train gave me the answer: "Cats is dogs and rabbits is dogs but tortoises is insects and travel free according."

I should note that Dyson is correct: a workable political compromise need not be philosophically or scientifically consistent, although that kind of consistency doesn't hurt, either.

Last week, I also read Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. This is the story, somewhat obviously, of a whaleship, called the Essex, which was sunk after a giant sperm whale attacked it. If that sounds familiar, from a little book called Moby Dick, it should, because the real-life story of the Essex was one Melville and his contemporaries were familiar with, and served as an "inspiration" for the story of the white whale.

I just wanted to say that In the Heart of the Sea is a very good read. After the whaleship was sunk, the crew of twenty was adrift in their open whale boats, thousands of miles from land. But some of them still survived, after a truly horrifying experience that included, of course, cannibalism.

I thought one of the more interesting things in the book, though, was the explanation for why sperm whales are called sperm whales, a name that has, I have to admit, somewhat BeevisandButtheadishly, always made me snicker ("You said sperm."). Here's the takeaway (p. 6):

[The sperm whale's] block-shaped head contained a vast reservoir of even better oil, called spermaceti, that could be simply ladled into an awaiting cask. (It was spermaceti's resemblance to seminal fluid that gave rise to the sperm whale's name.)

For what it's worth.