Has Superstition Evolved To Help Mankind Survive? 621
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.'"
Playing the odds. (Score:1, Informative)
"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."
For a species that has a poor sense of smell compared to other species. It would be better to err on the side of caution most of the time than be bold and be dinner.
Not Exactly. (Score:4, Informative)
What is described in the example is known as Partial Reinforcement, not Superstition.
Re:Placebo effect (Score:4, Informative)
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.
If I understand correctly (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), the placebo effect is all about subjective measures of benefit. For example, if you give subjects a placebo pill for their back pain, and tell them it's a pain reliever, there's a measurable reduction in reported pain. However, if you give a placebo to people with an objectively measurable problem X, and tell them it's a cure for X, then there's a much smaller effect, or no effect at all.
Re:Superstition can also cause great harm. (Score:5, Informative)
"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:Placebo effect (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't that kind of stupid to have a brain evolve a feature just to counteract another arbitrary feature?
Not necessarily. Check out Daniel Dennett's book Breaking the Spell for some interesting hypotheses as to why the placebo effect might be adaptive.
Zeus (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
The thing is, as far as the kosher laws go...some of them make dietary or scientific sense...many do not. The most plausible "scientific" explanation for them that I've heard is that they reinforced cultural boundaries. Cultures that don't eat the same things are less likely to intermarry.
Re:Not so sure (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it is all BS, but a nice try nonetheless.
AFAIK knocking on wood originates in Germanic and Slavic tribes' beliefs that trees are inhabited by spirits; knocking was supposed to alert the spirits to your presence, so that they could help you.
Re:not the same (Score:4, Informative)
That's the ideal. Unfortunately in practice a vanishingly small percentage of scientific papers ever have their experiments reproduced (ie most science is never verified but only subjected to the "does this sound plausible and agree with what I already thought" test of a peer-review). Meanwhile, papers in their analysis regularly overstretch what can really be concluded from the data -- because the importance of the result is a factor in whether or not the paper would be accepted. So, as the original article mentions, we do end up quite regularly with scientific results that are not much better than "rustling grass means lions are coming (even if you live in a country with no lions)". If you are not someone who reads scientific proceedings, quite a few dodgy studies turn up on the BBC website -- the BBC tends to run a general-interest story about "what scientists have discovered" at least once a week, and because they pick the "interesting" ones they usually end up picking ones that have either rediscovered the obvious, or made an overreaching conclusion from miniscule data.
Obviously this varies from field to field within science. But I have an awkward feeling that a large number of studies from the LHC will follow this pattern: the experiments are so hideously expensive to run that the results will be accepted without much experimental checking or reproduction. (And any reproduction could only occur in exactly the same facility, so hidden variables would be that much harder to reveal.)
One solution, at least in the cheaper sciences, is for the research councils (the science funding bodies) to fund studies that intend to reproduce or verify results more often. The issue is that if an experiment is only funded once, it only gets performed once, and never gets verified.
Re:Religion (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Except Churches were the first building to use lightening rods..
There's nothing like having the spires of loads of churches exploded off to make people think a little technology can be a good thing.
Actually, thats not quite fair. The church was never against technology as such, just idea's that challenged their version of the world. Technology usually led to richer states, and therefore a richer church. It was things like 'Earth isn't the centre of the universe' and 'God didn't create the world in 7 days' that gets them twitchy.
Heck, they even reverted back to a strict Aristotelian world view just to avoid the problems posed by Zero. Not because they were afraid of accounting, but because if such a thing as 'nothing' existed, then God couldn't be there, but he was meant to be everywhere. This caused an even wider rift, because of course, businessmen *did* like zero, it made accounts easier to keep.
Re:Religion (Score:5, Informative)
As far as I'm concerned the same thing can be said of religion.
I would say that religion falls firmly into the category of superstition.
However, these guys seem to be using a different definition of superstition than I would: They are saying that superstition is a tendency to link cause and effect where that link is rarely true - the example of the rustling grass is a case where the link is rarely true, but the prehistoric human knows it is _occasionally_ true because she's seen people being eaten by lions after hearing the grass rustle (or has been told about such incidents). To me, this isn't an example of superstition, it is an example of assessing a real risk.
I would describe superstition as a tendency to link cause and effect where there is no evidence that the link is *ever* true - take for example, belief in ghosts, religion, etc.
That's a recent thing, though (Score:5, Informative)
Well, that's a recent thing though.
E.g., antibiotics exist only since the 1930's. So only since then you have choices like, basically, "do I trust the doctor and take these pills, or do I trust the shaman and take this extract of Aqua Clara?"
If you go back, say, 5 centuries, already the choices were a lot more like:
A. "Do I trust the alchemist and drink the Aqua Vitae, or do I trust the barber-doctor and let him draw a pint of blood, do I trust the priest and pray real hard to God?" All three were wrong, and actually the first two were _worse_. The alchemists only had distilled alcohol as a cure-all placebo, and drawing blood tended to be worse in the vast majority of cases than doing nothing. So blind faith and superstition might actually have been the better choice in a lot of cases.
B. "Do I trust the superstition that storing pots and dishes with the opening downwards repels evil spirits, or am I an enlightened renaissance man and laugh at such superstitions?" Again, actually the superstition had a point. Dust setting into pots was harmful, and even if nobody had seen a microbe, some people did figure out a correlation between how you store your empty pottery and how often you get sick.
Heck, as late as the 19'th century, during the cholera outbreaks, the superstitious folks had better chances of survival. Mortality in the homeopathic hospitals was actually lower than in the proper medical establishment ones. Of course, homeopathy was still bullshit, but the doctors also bled you dry as the only treatment method they knew, while the homeopaths merely gave you harmless water to drink. (Or rather, solutions of something or another, but so dilluted that they were effectively just water.) The homeopathic solution didn't help, while the other actually caused extra harm to someone already dehydrated and weakened.
Likewise, in the 90'th century, some 50% of the women who gave birth with a doctor would die of septicemic shock, whereas among those who trusted a midwife mortality was a _lot_ lower. Some people actually proposed that doctors wash their hands after performing autopsies on corpses, and before operating or helping people give birth, but that was discounted as a ridiculous superstition. Well, what do you know? The superstitious guys killed a lot less patients. There actually were some nasty germs which the rest got off corpses, and just helped transplant them into previously healthy people.
Etc.
And if you go even further back in time, to when the brain evolved to jump to conclusions and make such hasty generalizations from too little data, the choice was even simple. "I tried to go through this thorny bush, and it hurt for a week. Do I (A) generalize and avoid this kind of bush, or (B) think you can't learn anything from a sample of one, and try again with a dozen other bushes like this?" Or like, "I ate that spotty mushroom and threw up my immortal soul, and was sick for a week. Do I (A) hastily generalize that there's something evil about them, and avoid them, or (B) think it was just a statistically insignifficant coincidence, and try again?"
Simply put, option A was the _safer_ one. Sure, it was sometimes wrong. Sometimes it wasn't the bush, it was the patch of poison ivy it was in. Sometimes it wasn't the mushroom, it was simply an illness which happened at the wrong time. But there was no way to know better anyway. Getting some quick empirical cause-effect rules was the best you could do.
Option B wasn't that safe at all. A lot of time trying something harmful again, just to see if you got the cause right, would outright get you killed.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against science or medicine or anything. Sure, _nowadays_ that's a better choice than superstition and empirical generalizations. Very much so. But the interval where we even had that choice at all is infinitesimal, at evolution scales. We had medicine for less than 100 years, the human species alone is 200,000 years old.
Levi-Strauss (Score:2, Informative)
Re:First (Score:1, Informative)
A "mank" or "manc" is also a slang term for someone from Manchester. (that might be related to "manky", though in my experience the sluts in manchester are wonderful)