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.'"
First (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Fist (Score:5, Funny)
Fist -- apply directly to your forehead!
Fist -- apply directly to your forehead!
Because homeopathy is superstition.
Re:Fist (Score:5, Interesting)
Some superstitions are externally based and come from probability and intuition, not really caring if it's deterministic causation, probabilistic causation or purely co-relational. Others serve the purpose of regulating the internal world, controlling perspectives and where the mind is focused. Self administered psychotherapy, so to speak. Covet not thy neighbours wife, or you will dwell in hell, not because you're going to go there later, but because you're dismissing what you have for what you don't have and putting yourself in hell in your own head, that sort of shit.
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Re:First (Score:5, Funny)
Trolls are notoriously hard to kill, so I'd say you're right :P.
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Mank is a town in Austria. Ind is International Nurses Day. This still leaves us in the dark as what International Nurses Day has to do with small austrian town?
Re:First (Score:4, Funny)
English(UK) is a keyboard layout, not a nationality.
Re:Religion (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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, Interesting)
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.
Mostly true. It's not so much the belief that God has let you down (there are plenty of excuses for that in Christianity), as a certain attitude of depression and a period in my life where everything was upside down anyway, and a combination of seeing some pretty decnt evidence for macro-evolution (species to species evolution by an organism evolving new abilities). A combination of a number of things are necessary for someone to change their beliefs without being brainwashed.
So I think science and logic helps, but you can't reason someone out of their beliefs. They have to doubt them for themselves, otherwise they will just get very defensive and even more entrenched. You can present some evidence to them and leave it with them to let them compare and decide. It's scary losing your faith, especially if you believe in hell or have a lot of friends with the same beliefs, but it's better than living a lie.
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I disagree. The only thing absolutely neces
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Religious belief is dogma .. unquestionable, unalterable, ineffable. Actions are set in stone until some random religious leader decides that too many people are leaving the church and changes it. Questioning by the masses is forbidden, and if someone presses it they can be kicked out of the church.
Reasoning is continuous examination of evidence as it comes in and adjusting one's actions because of it. There is no grand almighty scientist telling us what we have to do or think. The many scientists that are
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What a crock of bullshit. An atheists doesn't hypothesis about the non-existence of something, that is just an ignorant statement offered up by religious people trying to elevate their non-scientific methods of establishing religion to a credible level instead of the dogma and circular logic it really is.
There is no need to believe something exists if there is no evidence that it exists. The only reason religion exists at all is because people are unwilling to admit they are ignorant and don't know everyth
Re:Religion (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, but I've often thought of the best Christians as having "humanist" morals. Perspective is a funny thing.
Somersault, as someone who spent a big part of my life as an academic, I've seen more than one "spiritual awakening" of a very religious person who learns to set aside childish superstitions.
It's not an easy road, but when you can start to see that your morals come from the person you are instead of the fear of punishment, you are truly "putting aside childish things" as a wise man said.
Re:Religion (Score:5, Insightful)
IANAHistorian, but I've been given to understand that faith wasn't diminished by the Black Death, and you'd be hard pressed in the centuries that followed to find anyone in Britain who professed anything other than Christian faith. If anything people became more devout during and after the event - as tends to happen during any crisis. Consider that those who survived probably considered their survival a miracle in the first place...
My understanding is that the economic impact of massive devastation to the working population was the real cause of change. Church and State were almost one and the same during that time, and so the church wielded an incredible amount of power over the daily material lives of the commoners. All land was owned either by the church or by nobles who were closely tied to it, and all workers were essentially beholden to the land-owners to earn a living, grow food etc - and the land-owners pretty much dictated the law and punishment too.
When the population suddenly declined (about a third was lost), there were not enough workers to work the land and such. The balance of power shifted - not massively, but perceptibly - towards the workers. The iron grip was relaxed slightly, and this is what caused the increase in rebellion and unrest. Faith had not diminished, but the power to enforce arbitrary rule had.
It wasn't that the events had shaken people's faith and made them dissatisfied - no doubt they always felt that way. It was that the church/state was somewhat less able to repress their will.
Re:Religion (Score:4, Interesting)
You wouldn't understand unless you yourself had once believed in something. The religious types don't get why you discount all of their beliefs either. From their point of view they have 'evidence' of their beliefs (mostly based on feelings or circular/incomplete reasoning) and can make up even more stuff to discount the rest. I'm saying that from the point of view of someone who used to be religious and was trying to keep fooling myself as well, but eventually gave up on it. There were definitely benefits to being in a large group of likeminded and 'moral' people, but I'd rather live alone seeking the truth, than live a lie with a group of people who think they know the truth and therefore have stopped seeking*.
Religion is basically included in superstition btw, so I considered your post pretty redundant. It also seems pretty flamebait-ish with the mention of republicans. Being left or right wing doesn't necessarily mean being religious. The fact that you "don't get" how different people can believe different things and see the world differently shows that you need to learn more of the science of the mind. I'll give you a clue, logic doesn't always win in there. Quite often the opposite is true.
*Okay, so god created the universe - who created God? You say a watch can't appear fully formed, someone just created it - but a god who is even more complex than us can appear fully formed, or is more likely to have 'always existed' than the universe? Sure. Believing there is a higher purpose in life does make me feel nice and fuzzy inside, and curbs my nihilistic leanings. It also still is possible that there is some higher truth that we just don't have the capacity to grasp yet. But at the moment I don't think humanity has any clue what that is, nor can it be blamed for not being able to understand yet, in the same way that we can't blame fish for having to live underwater. BTW if we did all appear by chance, it doesn't matter how improbable the odds are. We wouldn't be here to question things if those odds had not paid off. I know that's circular reasoning, and I'm not saying that we are just an accident, but IMO it's even more foolish to assume that god always existed fully formed, then decided to create a bunch of people because he was bored.
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" From their point of view they have 'evidence' of their beliefs (mostly based on feelings or circular/incomplete reasoning) and can make up even more stuff to discount the rest."
This is a pretty good description of people in general, not just the religious ones.
Re:Religion (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, so god created the universe - who created God? You say a watch can't appear fully formed, someone just created it - but a god who is even more complex than us can appear fully formed, or is more likely to have 'always existed' than the universe?
Mu, the question is retarded. Have you ever heard a physicist explain that there wasn't any time before the Big Bang? It works like that. God doesn't exist in linear time as we see it, He just sticks his toe in occasionally. Thus, from our perspective He appears to have "always" existed when, in actual fact, time is really a much smaller place than we thought it.
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That's some pretty grand claims when you say that you don't even understand how some humans can have different worldviews from others. Of course perhaps you have stumbled upon the meaning of life, who am I to say when I haven't even heard it :p Personally I wouldn't put it in a book where not many people are likely to read it, I'd put it online and have a link in my sig so that as many people as possible could see it! I wouldn't use it as an attempt to make money. It's very easy to prey on people's insecuri
Re:Religion (Score:4, Insightful)
Religion, Superstition, Science and belief systems are not US centric, the Democrats and the Republicans are. No American president could be elected who would proclaim himself/herself to be an atheist.
Also, whether your theories are perfect or not (if they ever will be awarded the status of theory instead of simply being your opinion) is not for you to say.
Re:Religion (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Religion (Score:5, Insightful)
The current administration is about as anti-Christian as anyone can get, but all Bush has to do is tell people what a great Christian he is, and they believe it, while he murders innocent people, takes from the poor and gives to the rich, and pins medals on people for NOT helping tragedy victims nearby that are dying from lack of a drink of clean water. What Would Jesus Do? indeed.
Yet if you ask most people which party is more religious, most would say Republican. And one the arguments I hear a lot from Republicans about why the Democrats are so bad is that they spend too much money helping the poor.
I'm not saying Democrats are much better. Just that the Republicans have the religious thing figured out.
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And one the arguments I hear a lot from Republicans about why the Democrats are so bad is that they spend too much money helping the poor
This might be what you thought you heard, but no Republican actually said it. The argument is that Democrats make too many simple transfer payments to the poor from the wealthy. If we can accept the general truism that giving a man a fish feeds him today but teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime, then Republicans view transfer payments as part 1 and woul
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.
Re:Religion (Score:5, Insightful)
Science and Religion cover different aspects of human endeavors. Science didn't make religion obsolete.
Heck, I'm mostly an atheist and I'm not sure why you'd think that. I know someone with a BSc, two MSc's, and a PhD -- he's still a practicing catholic. He just doesn't rely on the bible to explain the structure of the universe (he's a computational astrophysicist). He also doesn't use science to inform his morality and understanding of how we find meaning in all of it.
They really are different disciplines, and they're not as fundamentally incompatible as people around here seem to think.
Cheers
Not so sure (Score:5, Funny)
Otherwise the results are completely wrong.
Re:Not so sure (Score:5, Funny)
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 so sure (Score:5, Funny)
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Notably the same as any other kind of reasoning. The only stupid thing is hanging on to some belief after it has been disproved.
not the same (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:not the same (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:not the same (Score:5, Funny)
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].
Re:not the same (Score:5, Funny)
And, of course, zombie myths kept people away from having sex with corpses.
Re:not the same (Score:4, Insightful)
qso science is an improved version of superstition in terms of its value to humankind
Indeed, the example of the lions and rustling grass isn't incorrectly correlating cause and effect, it's just a weak cause/effect relationship with a lot of noise in the data... still beneficial to act on depending on the risk analysis.
Re:not the same - phobias (Score:3, Interesting)
If anything, fear evolved to help mankind survive.
For example, fear of snakes or spiders due to their venom. Natural enough, right?
But go overboard, or be irrational, and you've got yourself a phobia.
Re:not the same - phobias (Score:4, Funny)
I don't trust your statements. In fact, all of you, put your hands where I can see them!
Re:not the same - phobias (Score:5, Insightful)
There are other ways superstition can be very harmful.
Let's say your superstition is that when your children get sick, you're going to pray instead of take them to the doctor.
Your genes may not get very far.
I see his point, though (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (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.
Placebo effect (Score:5, Insightful)
Belief in Homeopathic medicine would also be beneficial because of the placebo effect.
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Re:Placebo effect (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (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:Placebo effect (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Placebo effect (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know. If I could explain the placebo effect I'd be a millionaire. Again, evolution, which is how the placebo effect came to be, doesn't work as we would like it to. It doesn't take the most direct route and it doesn't make sense. So don't ask me to explain why it doesn't make sense.
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I don't know. If I could explain the placebo effect I'd be a millionaire.
Your statement explains Scientology pretty well.
Re:Placebo effect (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that there are several different things that get lumped under the label "placebo effect":
There are probably more things going on too.
Interesting article on the placebo effect by Ted Kaptchuk here [acupuncture.com]. If you can find it, his book with Michael Croucher, The Healing Arts: Exploring the Medical Ways of the World, is an excellent read.
Re:Placebo effect (Score:4, Insightful)
I was saying that homeopathic medicine of the sort that doesn't actually have medicinal effects is a superstition, and that said superstition would be beneficial to individuals thus increasing their evolutionary fitness.
It never takes an indirect route to a goal.
Correct, there is no goal to which evolution could take an indirect route.
I'm just saying you didn't explain anything by saying something evolved to help cause people to take advantage of the placebo effect, that doesn't make sense.
Why not? If I said that thumbs evolved because they allowed us to make better use of our hands it would explain something. Things evolve in the context of the whole organism and are beneficial or deleterious in that context, among others.
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Of course, as far as evolution is concerned, "beneficial" means that you survive to have kids, "deletrious" means you don't. Or at least not as many as the rest of the population. A lot of changes are basically null signals evolutionarily speaking. Red hair? Who cares? (Well, Moslems tend to think it is unlucky, but other tha
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:5, Insightful)
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.
Actually the reverse (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine the first gene. Floating in primordial soup. What did it do?
It found a way of replicating itself.
Then it found a way of protecting itself from the environment.
Then it found a way of protecting itself from other genes.
Then it found a way of taking advantage of other genes. --- (this is us)
They aren't our genes... We are their replication machines.
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> They aren't our genes... We are their replication machines.
And we're so very pretty!
In a way we are the result of a few million years of feature creep.
Re:Placebo effect (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because stress and a negative attitude does somehow leave your body more defenseless and run down, in the same way that your immune system seems to relax when you go on holiday (not even to another country - I often have been ill over holidays but fine during term time - could just be superstition but I have seen other people online saying similar things). Having a more positive, stress free outlook can help to keep your body running well.
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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.
Superstition can also cause great harm. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (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:Superstition can also cause great harm. (Score:4, Interesting)
I love it when people use examples that not only don't prove their point, but actively work against it.
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.
Wiping out most species on the planet has to qualify as an evolutionary step backwards.
It's almost like you've never read any Darwin or Dawkins, whatsoever. As long your species thrives, you're an evolutionary success, regardless of what happens to other species. In fact, if you beat other species at the game of survival, you're an unqualified success. So, no, wiping out other species by theoretically "pushing the button" is not an evolutionary step backward.
Re:Superstition can also cause great harm. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Superstition can also cause great harm. (Score:5, Funny)
You are committing a logical fallacy. By the same logic: Reagan ate breakfast each morning. Therefore breakfast prevents nuclear war.
Corn Pops: part of a complete Foreign Policy
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I would like to point out that we made it through 8 years of Reagan and horoscopes and fortune tellers and whatever else he did, and not only are we all still here, but he's now gone.
Perhaps that's luck, but I know that Reagan himself mentioned that he woke up after 1982 and realized that there really could be a nuclear war by accident, and he moved forward from there.
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Wiping out most species on the planet has to qualify as an evolutionary step backwards.
Unless of course you're a cockroach, in which case it's a huge leap forward.
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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.
Samzenpus is... (Score:2)
A Moron!!
Sorry, at my age, I shouldn't be so flamey. Samz, my man, stay off science stuff. I understand you're into literary stuff? Do that.
Superstition prevents congitive failures (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Generally speaking though, grain production produces more food than cattle production.
Re: (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 t
Superstition *IS* congitive failure (Score:3, Interesting)
The 'belief system' exists so that the brain can cope with congitive dissonance. [wikipedia.org]
You can break the mind loop with other things besides having a superstition in your belief system.
Examples: Sleep, food, sex, drugs
Our brains are pattern processing engines (Score:3, Insightful)
Kid drops lollipop and learns about gravity and slowly builds up an idea that if you drop something it falls. Hand the kid a hydrogen balloon and you'll see that "WTF!" look when it goes up when you let it go.
Kid learns that rocks sink when you throw them in water. I still remember that "WTF!" look on my 4 year old son's face when handed him a chunk of pumic
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:5, Funny)
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.'
Not Exactly. (Score:4, Informative)
What is described in the example is known as Partial Reinforcement, not Superstition.
Homeopathy != alternative remedies (Score:5, Insightful)
You have got to be kidding me. (Score:3, Insightful)
This might be a fascinating bit of research, but the story posting isn't even particularly thinly-veiled cannon-fodder flaimbait. It's practically guaranteed to bring out religion apologists and armchair scientists alike in droves.
[Scientist argues that] science is simply a dogmatic form of superstition.
WTF!?
Science only works because it isn't superstitious ! The very fact that we can use the methods we call "science" to discover the nature of reality refutes this assertion in its entirety. That was the statement of a hack.
By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, "quite a lot of scientists tend to be ignorant quite often."
(Emphasis mine.)
Again: WTF!?
The practitioners of science are the strongest bastion against this sort of dogmatic, superstitious thinking. It is disingenuous to say that "quite a lot of scientists [are superstitious and therefore inept at science]" because that fraction, and certainly that absolute number pale utterly in comparison to the number of people who live every moment of their daily lives, years on-end, in an opaque fog of superstitious belief that some particular list of claims about reality is inerrant while all similar ones are fallacious, and reality can just get bent because "huh, scientists sure are stoo-pid!".
Now we have to endure a flame war between religious zealots, crank science adherents, scientists, and rational non-scientists all seizing this story as a chance to advance their righteousness and deride their opponents, and perform damage control when they suffer affronts in kind.
My predictions (which might admittedly be partially self-fulfilling):
1)at least 850 comments before this story leaves the main page. (Page views galore! Screw enriching the readership; flamefests are more profitable.)
2) A dozen or so comments by the religious regulars who feel they are making the world a better place by spamming the same thoughtless garbage several times a thread, no matter how many times it's refuted. How some of these people have good karma is beyond me. (Please help fix this problem if you have mod points and don't feel like playing whack-a-religious-nutjob-a-mole.)
Murhpy's law? (Score:4, Insightful)
As a programmer I constantly refer to Murhy's law. It helps me through the day by expecting the worst and being positively surprised when my code does what it's supposed to. ;)
Superstition? Why the hell not? It's not very rational is it... But it seems to work for me.
But those elaborate see-a-black-cat-throw-salt-and-spit-over-your-shoulder superstitions? Naah...
Nope, you're good (Score:3, Insightful)
Programmer: The kind of person that looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
I always assume that my code is the only working non-OS process and everything it has to interface has crashed and burnt without having the common decency to inform anyone or even try to restart, the log drive is full and my every memory allocation fails. Then again
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Programmer: The kind of person that looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
Damn right I look both ways before crossing a one-way street! I've been nearly mown down by enough cyclists and even motor vehicles going the wrong way not to!
Sometimes yes, sometimes no (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
Cats carry fleas and the bubonic plague as well as rats. What makes you think having lots of cats around would have helped?
Also, I can't really find any evidence for your claim about Christianity causing cats to be driven away ...
Simple food pyramid question (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, even if cats are carriers, they are also predators.
One cat will dispose of multiple rats, therefore even if cats are carriers, the total number of carriers diminshes. In the absence of predatory checks on the rat population, the numbers of carriers increases (esp. with all these scrummy corpses around to eat!).
I was able to find a charming letter [nih.gov] from 1899 to the British Medical Journal on the subject of cats as plague carriers though.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
superstition (Score:3, Interesting)
Two of the most notorious groups of superstitious people are athletes and gamblers. You hit a home run with your shoes tied a certain way, and the association is made - never changing those shoes again! I know a guy who dropped a penny before playing the slots. He hit big, and now drops a penny before every pull.
I think these circumstances have the following important characteristics: lack of control or partial control over outcomes; high potential for reward. I think this combination of factors leads us to pay extra attention to the relationship between our actions and their outcomes and we are therefore more likely to draw spurious associations.
Lions and Tigers and Bears OH MY (Score:4, Funny)
"if a group of lions is coming there's a huge benefit to not being around."
JESUS CHRIST IT'S A LION GET IN THE CAR!
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Image:Jesus_Christ_it's_a_lion_Get_In_The_Car!.jpg [encycloped...matica.com]
--
BMO
hunting for the superstition factory in the brain (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't believe no one's touched on this yet.
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~fle/gazzaniga.html [ucf.edu]
Executive summary:
Neuropsychology student is studying split-brain patients- people with injuries or diseases that inhibit the hemispheres of the brain from communicating. Their brains function normally kind of, except no information is passed between the two hemispheres.
Speech, or more specifically, translating what you see into words, is predominantly handled by your left hemisphere. Your left visual field is handled by your right hemisphere, and your right visual field by your left.
One experiment he conducted was showing different pictures to each eye at the same time, and then asking the subject to point to a card showing a picture that relates to the image shown.
One subject was shown a picture a picture of a chicken claw to his right eye (left hem.), and a snow covered landscape to his left (right hem.). The subject then pointed to a chicken with his right hand (again, controlled by left hem), and a shovel with his left (right!). Obviously, the logic behind his choice was the claw belongs to a chicken, and you need a shovel to shovel snow. However, when asked to explain his choice, the subject responded with something to the tune of, "The claw belongs to a chicken, and you need a shovel to clean the chicken shed."
Even though acting independently he was able to correctly deduce the response, the lack of communication between the hemispheres meant that when his left hemisphere was trying to put it all into words, it was unable to recall why he chose the shovel from the right hemisphere of the brain.
Gazzaniga (the student conducting the test) believes that in the left hemisphere of the brain lies what he calls the interpreter: a part of your brain whose sole function is to try to rationalize what we do not understand. An evolved speculation machine. Like the article said, I probably served an evolutionary purpose in that it kept us paranoid and safe in the grasslands, but odds are this is also the same part of the brain that saw lightning and concluded there must be an unseen humanoid in the sky making it. Or, when the great questions of "why?" and "how?" concerning our world began to plague the mind, the same brainpiece reached the same god conclusion.
It may have been evolutionarily useful at the time, but like male nipples, serves only to confuse, bewilder, and slow progress anymore. Nietzsche killed it.
Who is Wolfgang Forstmeier? (Score:3, Interesting)
by linking cause and effect - often falsely - science is a simply dogmatic form of superstition.
Examples, please? Could someone tell me about the large number of superstitions that are often correct, and the number of scientific claims that are incorrectly stated as fact? The reason superstition survived isn't because it is more likely to be correct. It is because people were scared to death of what would happen if they were wrong.
Science is not dogmatic. Scientists base their opinions on evidence, and change their minds if contradictory evidence arises. In other words, they admit when they are wrong and learn from their mistakes.
"You have to find the trade off between being superstitious and being ignorant," he says.
To rephrase that, "you have to choose between having a small amount of knowledge, or a large amount of misconceptions". I personally think that being misinformed is a form of ignorance in itself.
By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, "quite a lot of scientists tend to be ignorant quite often," he says.
So does anybody know if this guy is a creationist? This sounds like the kind of vague generality that would only be made in reference to creationism, or possibly the Atkins diet.
Science isn't "dogmatic superstition". (Score:3, Insightful)
Science is a mechanism for filtering superstition out from reality. In fact that's pretty close to a one-sentence summary of what science is for, and what the difference between science and other approaches to understanding the universe are.
What Wolfgang Forstmeier seems to be doing is noticing a tendency for scientists to fail to use the scientific method in situations where they should, and generalizing it to a general case. He's concluding that, since individual scientists may be superstitious, it follows that science is superstition.
This is of course a common superstition about science.
I haven't (Score:3, Funny)
I haven't succumbed to superstition (knock on wood), nor will I ever (cross fingers)!
Lions? (Score:3, Funny)
"if a group of lions is coming there's a huge benefit to not being around."
I can has cro-magnon burger?
Re:Ignorance pleaded - would have worked too (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Science, is thus something that can disprove something is is thought to be true. An example would be horoscopes. Science killed them long ago, yet some people (quite irrationally) still swear by them. Quantum Mechanics is strange and counter-intuitive, but none-the-less has mountains of experimental evidence to show its veracity.
Well, science has tried very hard to kill astrology, but after my years of studying the patterns of behavior in people with respect to their times of birth, I believe it is more acc
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
studying the patterns of behavior in people with respect to their times of birth
Don't forget it can be a completely circular effect. For example Aries are supposed to be self confident and stubborn. By having people tell an Aries that he is supposed to have those traits, and expecting him to behave that way, it can in fact encourage and reinforce those traits in that person. Even if in fact that person was adopted and the paperwork was botched and we was never an Aries in the first place. It's the expectati
Re:I don't understand (Score:5, Interesting)
As Richard Feynman once said "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts"
He also had this comment in his classic speech "Cargo Cult Science"
I don't think I'm as optimistic as Feynman that it's only a small group of scientists that don't have "that kind of disease"...