Has Superstition Evolved To Help Mankind Survive?

Pickens writes "The tendency to falsely link cause to effect — a superstition — is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. For example, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide. Most of the time, the wind will have caused the sound, but 'if a group of lions is coming there's a huge benefit to not being around.' Foster worked with mathematical language and a simple definition for superstition to determine exactly when such potentially false connections pay off and found as long as the cost of believing a superstition is less than the cost of missing a real association, superstitious beliefs will be favored. In modern times, superstitions turn up as a belief in alternative and homeopathic remedies. 'The chances are that most of them don't do anything, but some of them do,' Foster says. Wolfgang Forstmeier argues that by linking cause and effect — often falsely — science is simply a dogmatic form of superstition. 'You have to find the trade off between being superstitious and being ignorant,' Forstmeier says. By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, 'quite a lot of scientists tend to be ignorant quite often.'"

First

I heard getting first post increases your life expectancy.

Re:Fist

Fist -- apply directly to your forehead!
Fist -- apply directly to your forehead!
Fist -- apply directly to your forehead!

Because homeopathy is superstition.

Re:First

Trolls are notoriously hard to kill, so I'd say you're right :P.

Re:Religion

As far as I'm concerned the same thing can be said of religion. Thousands of years ago, before we scientifically understood everything, we had religion to give us an inaccurate but constructive understanding of our world and our existence. However now religion has become obsolete and more accurate and scientific things are taking its place. This is obvious to me. I don't understand why all the Republicans don't get it.

Religion wasn't obsoleted by science so much as by disease, at least in the west.
Religion had a firm grip until the Black Plague hit Europe in the Middle Ages.

During that time people felt, with good reason, that the church should be doing its job and getting God to sort it all out.
This didn't happen, so there was a trend towards being less included to obey the church, and the first recorded attack on a monk by members of the public (an unbelievable event at the time).

It didn't help the church that the survivors felt, rightly, that they were entitled to make a lot more decisions on their own about work, pay, housing and such. No longer were they satisfied with doing what they were told and being content with what they had.

Following the plague, whilst religion regained some of its influence, especially in rural area's, its hold was never again universal, and has been in decline since.

Science doesn't help, that's for sure, but you can't shake a true believer with science. The only thing likely to turn them is the belief that God has let them down somehow.

Re:Religion

Science doesn't help, that's for sure, but you can't shake a true believer with science.

You can. Put a lightning rod on your roof and none of the roof of the church.

Not so sure

I hope they knocked three times on their desk and spun around in a circle before they did this study...
Otherwise the results are completely wrong.

Re:Not so sure

In ancient times, knocking on wood was essential to survival. Slaves would often "knock" on wood after moving large stockpiles of wood. The "knocking" would help shake off many bugs after each handled load. Since many died from ticks or suffered from fleas, knocking on wood quickly caught on and became a superstition. Haha, just kidding the above was all just bs.

Re:Not so sure

Probably not... it is bad luck to believe in superstition.

not the same

Superstition is not as easily verifiable as scientific statements. I am not talking about money, science is more expensive that Mythbusters. I am talking about the design of scientific statements.

The director of the scientific institution I grew up in said once that good scientific paper should answer to one yes-or-no question.

Science is about analysis, superstition does not care. Science about cleaning up cause-effect relationship in nature to make a repeatable experiment in the lab, superstition just takes cause-effect pairs as they are - in a raw form mudded with all kind of unique circumstances.

I see his point, though

Well, I see his point, though. The mammalian brain didn't evolve to make scientific reproductible experiments and calculate the error bar. Any given creature wouldn't have enough data or the chance to perform some meaningful experiment. So learning some cause-effect pairs, no matter how flawed, is all that was available and better than nothing.

E.g., if you're a goat and trying to eat one kind of bush gives you some nasty thorn wounds, you just remember that and move on. From now on, you avoid that bush if you can. You don't have the luxury to sample enough such bushes and enough such goats, divided neatly into two groups for a proper double-blind test, to see if you have a good sample. (And probably wouldn't live long if you did.) In practice, maybe that bush was growing through a barbed wire fence, but you wouldn't know that.

The same would apply to the early humans too. If cousing Urgh and aunt Graah ate the funny spotted mushrooms and died, you avoid those mushrooms. You don't divide the tribe in two halves and do a double blind experiment to see if it was really the mushrooms.

So they're not the same, but one of them was all that was available. And we're built to jump to conclusions, basically.

Re:not the same

you can either do science and test if it happens every time you touch it or just coincidence, or you can just be superstitious about not touching fire.

Obligatory xkcd [xkcd.com].

Placebo effect

Belief in Homeopathic medicine would also be beneficial because of the placebo effect.

Re:Placebo effect

The placebo effect is when you get the effects of having taken a medicine when you didn't really take it, so it would be beneficial because you could cure diseases, or maybe just symptoms, without actually needing an effective agent, just an agent that you believed to be effective.

Isn't that kind of stupid to have a brain evolve a feature just to counteract another arbitrary feature?

Maybe, but evolution can be pretty stupid sometimes. It works pretty much by brute force, sometimes literally, so it ends up taking strange routes. Remember, evolution is not guided, not stupid or smart, just a natural process.

Re:Placebo effect

Ok, well why does it require you to believe it? If the body can just magically fix itself, why have conscious thought involved?

• Your body is pretty good at repairing itself. Your immune system will successfully eliminate vast majority of illnesses you encounter in your life. (most problems will go away on their own no matter if you do anything or not)
• stress is known to have numerous harmful effects, including decreased resistance to disease.
• If you give someone a pill they they believe will cure them, this reduces anxiety (stress) and lets the body be more efficient at healing.

Re:Placebo effect

It never takes an indirect route to a goal.

Evolution has a goal?

The placebo effect probably evolved. It may or may not be beneficial. Humans make the mistake of assuming that we are the pinnacle of evolution, and therefore every trait we possess must be of benefit for some reason. In fact, we are not the pinnacle of evolution, and we still possess many traits that make little sense from a "survival of the fittest" standpoint. The placebo effect may be evolutionarily advantageous, but it might also just be an evolutionary dead end.

Re:Placebo effect

Biologists tend to avoid using the word goal at all, even in a neutered sense. There is a human tendency to bring teleology into things when answering the question of why something happens. But part of what separates modern science from the work of, say, the ancient Greeks, is the mechanistic vs. teleological approach.

Consider the difference here (practically, it's the same - philosophically, it's not):
- Evolution happens so that life can continue to exist.
- Life continues to exist because of evolution (genetic mutations + natural selection).

Right now the wikipedia article on teleology [wikipedia.org] sums it up as function following form rather than vice versa. The point being that, not is only evolution not conscious, it has no goals. Not even the preservation of life.

That said, it does seem like life tries pretty damn hard to perpetuate itself, doesn't it? But there is no scientific basis for assigning a goal to evolution. We do ourselves a disservice by seeing something and declaring that it has to be that way.

Superstition can also cause great harm.

There are plenty of examples of flawed superstitious beliefs leading to an equally large disadvantage or equally great damage. For examples see what happens to people who join cults. For a really good extreme example much more elloquently stated than I possibly could take a look at Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" and look for a persuasive argument why Nancy and Ronald Reagan consulting fortune tellers and horoscopes might not be a good thing when Ron's got his finger on the nuclear button. Wiping out most species on the planet has to qualify as an evolutionary step backwards.

Re:Superstition can also cause great harm.

"There are plenty of examples of flawed superstitious beliefs leading to an equally large disadvantage or equally great damage. "

No doubt but knowing who has truth from who doesn't is a hard problem, science and peer review are are flawed because humans aren't good at detecting what is true from what is not in their own thought processes, concepts and philosophies.

If there were errors in how we think about things (ie. base concepts) then there are errors all the way down. I've been studying this, concepts are the lenses by which people see and interpret the world but few people understand the process by which concepts/knowledge are conceived by a person before they are passed down.

All people operate under tremendous amounts of ignorance, hence Socrates said "All I know is that I know nothing", he knew knowledge was endless.

Socrates often said his wisdom was limited to an awareness of his own ignorance. Socrates believed wrongdoing was a consequence of ignorance and those who did wrong knew no better. The one thing Socrates consistently claimed to have knowledge of was "the art of love" which he connected with the concept of "the love of wisdom", i.e., philosophy. He never actually claimed to be wise, only to understand the path a lover of wisdom must take in pursuing it. It is debatable whether Socrates believed humans (as opposed to gods like Apollo) could actually become wise. On the one hand, he drew a clear line between human ignorance and ideal knowledge; on the other, Plato's Symposium (Diotima's Speech) and Republic (Allegory of the Cave) describe a method for ascending to wisdom.

Socrates believed the best way for people to live was to focus on self-development rather than the pursuit of material wealth. He always invited others to try to concentrate more on friendships and a sense of true community, for Socrates felt this was the best way for people to grow together as a populace. His actions lived up to this: in the end, Socrates accepted his death sentence when most thought he would simply leave Athens, as he felt he could not run away from or go against the will of his community; as mentioned above, his reputation for valor on the battlefield was without reproach.

The idea that humans possessed certain virtues formed a common thread in Socrates' teachings. These virtues represented the most important qualities for a person to have, foremost of which were the philosophical or intellectual virtues. Socrates stressed that "virtue was the most valuable of all possessions; the ideal life was spent in search of the Good. Truth lies beneath the shadows of existence, and it is the job of the philosopher to show the rest how little they really know."

Re:Superstition can also cause great harm.

look for a persuasive argument why Nancy and Ronald Reagan consulting fortune tellers and horoscopes might not be a good thing when Ron's got his finger on the nuclear button.

Did Reagan launch any nukes during the 80's? No? Then your argument is completely flawed. In fact, since he didn't launch after consulting fortune tellers, it would appear that using fortune tellers actually helps prevent nuclear annihilation. Or maybe I'm just being superstitious in seeing that cause and effect.

"Post hoc ergo propter hoc"

You are committing a logical fallacy. By the same logic:
Reagan ate breakfast each morning. Therefore breakfast prevents nuclear war.

Superstition prevents congitive failures

Our brains are made to continue to think about things until we figure them out....that's what curiousity is and it's key to intelligence.

Problem is, if our brain is unable to find the answer, it's best to have some sort of exception handler break it out of the loop. That's where superstition comes in. So we don't spend all day trying to answer questions about, say, how we came to be, as opposed to trying to figure out why our bow and arrow doesn't shoot as straight as we'd like.

That's my theory anyway.

Zeus

The problem with this article and other stories is that it's not superstition they're dealing with.

I recall one study where they shocked cats or something if they walked too close to an object, and reported that the cats had developed a "superstitious" aversion to the object, obviously showing how gullible and stupid all of us carbon-based life forms are, and how religion is probably just a complex fraud.

Of course, the problem is that the cats weren't being superstitious. There WAS actually an invisible man in the sky throwing fucking lightning bolts at them, and they learned that correlation.

I know that if I got hit by a lightning bolt every time I climbed to the top of half-dome, I'd damn well stop climbing to the top of Half Dome. I don't need Zeus, or even a working understanding of electromagnetism, to come to that conclusion. I'd avoid it.

Re:Superstition prevents congitive failures

So we don't spend all day trying to answer questions about, say, how we came to be, as opposed to trying to figure out why our bow and arrow doesn't shoot as straight as we'd like.

VEG-e-tar-i-an - Native American for 'bad hunter with crooked arrow.'

Homeopathy != alternative remedies

Ignoring the painfully vague inclusion criteria for "alternative" treatments, it's just plain wrong to lump every non-pharmaceutical/medical treatment in with a sham like homeopathy. There's solid biochemical/clinical research to support a number of therapeutically active plant compounds and conservative treatment strategies that would probably be considered alternatives to conventional medical protocols. This sort of arrogant badmouthing keeps patients from getting decent information about their treatment options.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no

Superstitions, culture, religion has had its place in ensuring the safety of the believers. Take a look at the dietary restrictions of various religions. Often, they concocted supernatural explanations for diseases or parasites that we understand today. Like prohibitions against eating pork or shellfish. The cost of continuing to avoid such foods, even when we understand the science and can prepare them safely is minimal.

However, there are times when the refusal to understand explanations behind superstitions cost our ancestors dearly. Take cats. Cats coexisted with ancient man as efficient means to keeping rodents out of grain stores. After a time, some civilizations came to hold cats in high regard, even worship them. Ancient Egypt is one example. Enter Christianity. Rather than examine the basis of other religions and cultures reverence for the cat (understanding their practical utility shouldn't have been that hard, even in the middle ages), they associated cats with pagan religions and eventually witchcraft. Cats were feared, driven out of human habitations and killed en mass. Now, the bubonic plague arrives. Societies that didn't buy into the cat loathing of Christianity fared far better then those that did.

Re:Ignorance pleaded - would have worked too

Why not tell them right away: You may drown.

One day while driving, my five year old managed to unlock and open his car door. The door stayed mostly shut long enough for me to pull over and close it. I sternly warned him that if he did that again, he could fall out of the car and be seriously hurt. When he didn't seem phased by that, I told him that his toy could fall out of the open door and be lost. He got very frightened and promised not to do that again. (He hasn't.) Why the different reaction? I think that falling out of a car and being seriously hurt is an abstract concept to him. He just can't really imagine what it would feel like. But losing a toy that he likes, that he can easily imagine. Sometimes with kids the bigger threat isn't the one that they can wrap their minds around and thus isn't the scarier option.