Measuring earthquakes, regenerating brains and conquering space.

SIX IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST The Evolutionary Origins of BeliefBy Lewis Wolpert Norton. 243 pp. $25.95

How can the same species that is able to send itself to the moon and read out the entire message of its genome also believe in ghosts (30 percent of Americans) and think that human beings were directly created by God (65 percent)?

Lewis Wolpert, a distinguished developmental biologist at University College, London, takes on that question in this semi-slim volume (whose arresting title comes from one of the White Queen's responses to Alice in Through the Looking Glass, urging the girl to work harder at believing in the absurd). I wish I could say he provides a good answer. His discursive book is peppered with interesting facts and observations about biology, psychology and religion (and also with a fair number of non sequiturs), but it doesn't hold together as a coherent argument. In the end, the book offers little more than the repeated observation that a lot of weird ideas and practices exist in the world and that most people, including some very intelligent and rational ones, believe in some of them.

Wolpert makes one particularly interesting argument, however. It's that technology is the evolutionary wellspring of the believing brain. Using tools, he writes, "requires a deep understanding of the physics of the human body" and of the body's interaction with the environment over both space and time. "Making a tool requires a concept of cause and effect of which no animals other than humans are capable." The mental capacity to understand causes and effects, Wolpert argues, is then applied to events that hand-held mechanics can't explain: the change of seasons, natural disasters, illness and death. Beliefs -- that is, ideas for which there is incomplete evidence -- then result.

And those who hold them have an evolutionary advantage. "I think that religious beliefs were adaptive for two main reasons: they provided explanations for important events, and offered prayer as a way of dealing with difficulties," Wolpert writes. "Those with such beliefs most likely did better, and so were selected for."

Wolpert is a thoroughly secular man, clearly amazed at how many ridiculous things people believe. But he lacks the shrillness and intolerance of his fellow biologist and skeptic Richard Dawkins, author of last year's bestselling The God Delusion. Wolpert writes, almost sweetly, on his last page: "While we may be hostile to the beliefs of others, we need always to remember that it is having beliefs that makes us human."

-- David Brown

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON The Magnificent Madness of The American Lunar QuestBy Gerard J. DeGroot New York Univ. 300 pp. $29.95

As the United States revs up the engines for a return to the moon by 2020 and further travel to Mars, a solid look at the costs and benefits of the nation's earlier experiences with lunar exploration seems especially timely. Was Neil Armstrong's "giant leap for mankind" in July 1969 worth the billions spent to make it happen? Did it fire the imagination in any long-lasting and positive way that subsequent unmanned missions could not? One might expect that Dark Side of the Moon, Gerard J. DeGroot's new look at the Apollo space missions of the 1960s and '70s, would offer valuable insights into these questions. Unfortunately, it does not.

From its first pages, the book bristles with hostility toward virtually everything associated with America's drive to the moon. The lunar quest that DeGroot, a historian at Scotland's University of St. Andrews, describes is scientifically barren, unconscionably costly and absurdly risky -- little more than an ill-conceived Cold War race to outshine the Russians in space. The semi-heroes of the book are President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who saw no reason to race into space, and Alexei Leonov, the cosmonaut of the 1960s and '70s tapped to lead the first Soviet mission to the moon, who is liberally quoted saying enlightened things -- including recalling that his fellow cosmonauts applauded when Armstrong first touched the lunar surface. The goats are just about everyone else -- especially John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Walter Cronkite (a great space buff) and the leadership of NASA.

There certainly was a lot of hyperbole associated with America's early trips to the moon, but by focusing so relentlessly on the "dark side" of the quest, the author becomes blind to its wonder and value. There is, of course, no "dark side" of the moon that never experiences sunshine. There is a far side that we never see. But it, too, is sometimes bathed in light.

-- Marc Kaufman

The reviewers are Washington Post staff writers who cover science and national affairs.