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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.'"
I heard getting first post increases your life expectancy.
Whenever I get onto my computer, I do a tap dance before checking slashdot. I have found a high success rate in getting first posts this way.
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.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
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 do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Belief in Homeopathic medicine would also be beneficial because of the placebo effect.
A blog about stuff.
Yes, superstition may have helped us survive, but it's still here today. Dangerous or threatening sounds or out of the ordinary sensory input will put us on alert. It seems odd that they're putting scientific correlation with superstition, it is sort of the same, yet quite different. Correlation is not causation, and correlation is neither superstition. Superstition is assuming that the correlated variables have causation from one another while only observing one variable and predicting the other variable. Correct me if I'm wrong here.
Fist -- apply directly to your forehead!
Fist -- apply directly to your forehead!
Fist -- apply directly to your forehead!
Because homeopathy is superstition.
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.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
"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.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Science proved that!
RAmen!
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.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
-Finian McLonergan
-Dave
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.
What is described in the example is known as Partial Reinforcement, not Superstition.
A belief in a being that created everything and cares about our insignificant little speck of dust in the entire universe.
A little bit of egotistical, self-centered belief tossed in with superstition, and you get a personal supreme being.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
tag "religion"
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.
When your g/f or wife cries during a new baby born commercial, PMS is a-coming.
Ok, enough with the jokes, I believe that we have instincts, which is a form of sense, beyond our 5 known senses.
It could be the ability of one or more of our 5 senses to work together and provide info, faster than we can rationalize it, or maybe there are other senses at work, maybe we do possess a "radar like", which somehow, works for us, but which we aren't always aware consciously.
Stress often occurs when one doesn't follow their "gut" instinct, so to speak.
So, obviously, when it comes to this topic, we yet, lack any real scientific proof, but, that doesn't mean it's not there. 100 yrs ago, we didn't know atoms existed, but they where there for sure.
I believe that our biggest drawback is in the way we are educated from childhood, we do not develop any of our instincts and thus, in a way, suppress them, instead of acknowledging them. How many stories about very young children who can see ghosts, etc... Why so young? I say because they are more instinctive, their minds are more receptive.
Those who are more "sensitive" and/or more "instinctive" usually function very badly if/when they don't work with their gifts. It's almost like they are working against their nature, thus, causing themselves all kinds of health issues, including stress.
I say "More" in the previous paragraphs, because each and every one of us, is born with strengths and weaknesses. From having stronger bone structures to better eyesights, or weaker lungs, etc.. Well, our minds, and our abilities towards the instinctive knowledge, is also something which for some is stronger than others.
While this isn't a "proven" theory, I've seen enough of this around me to know it's right.
Bottom line, this type of knowledge, the powers of the mind, instinct, mind reader, clearvoyance, etc.. well, it cannot be dismissed, it does exist.
Yes, there are many charlatans and snake oil doctors out there, but there are quite a few who are truly gifted.
Even the law enforcement know of these individuals and will request their aid in helping them solve crimes, etc...
Like anything else, ignoring something which may not be explanable yet, but does exist, doesn't make it go away.
That's why for some people, ignoring their "instincts" may cause them stress, because, their bodies are telling them things which their minds are not acknowledging. That's why it would be nice if we would try and learn more about this and master it for what it is, perhaps just another sense we possess, but either used to be able to tap into, or have lost the knowledge to do so, and need to rekindle and relearn again.
Let's not forget how we only use about 5% to 10% of our brain, so, who knows what else we can do with the rest of it.
That's my opinion.
"The tendency to falsely link cause to effect a superstition is occasionally beneficial"
What a piece of unfortunate crap, but probably true. Anyhow. Ignorance pleaded - would have worked too and wouldn't have had all side effects.
But, people probably began telling the inquisitive children and adults made up stories.
"Don't swim in the deep water or the water monster/god/goblin will eat you. He and his family came from far away. Not all of them are bad, you see. One rules over the forest, etc."
Why not tell them right away: You may drown.
The sad thing is that these chain of innocent little lies got hold over people's mind and life, and became more elaborate, like religions.
Frankly, I have never seen anything good done by that part of reality.
If you don't know. Say so or keep shut! Avoid lies.
I believe humans are hardwired to jump to conclusions. Throughout the existence of man, you haven't had any chance of knowing the actual physical processes of many of the crucial functions of life (reproduction, illnesses, weather etc.). Also, you generally don't have enough personal experience to draw statistically significant conclusions. So you jump to them.
And among the wild guesses are a few valid ones and they might be life-savers. As for the rest, a few prayers a day won't kill you.
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.)
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...
.: Max Romantschuk
Seriously. Read The Science of Discworld and, in particular, it's sequels (all co-authored Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart in addition to Pratchett). They (particularly #2) touch upon this subject.
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
According to this guy
- Science is like superstition - Superstition is not ignoring things that are potentially false - Some scientists are ignorant - These ignorant scientists are ignoring mounting evidence, which makes them not-superstitious - Science needs to be more superstitious I've either missed something, or he's contradicting himself, or he's making a judgment on a profession based on the actions of small group of scientists who shame the profession by calling themselves such.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
Aside from labeling mis-generalization as superstition (where superstition is really only one possible category of mis-generalization), what has this guy really done? Shown that a mis-generalizaion that is based on some observation might occasionally pay off when that observation does occasionally represent itself? Big Suprise!
If we use our brains a little, this is a bit of a sad excuse for an article is it not?
"""
science is simply a dogmatic form of superstition
"""
This is a laughable statement that implies that this guy has no clue what science really is. Science is about creating a theory that produces predictions that are experimentally verifiable across time/space. So, no matter where you are, no matter when it is done, the experiment produces the same result which will either prove or disprove the prediction which will prove or disprove (at least part of) the theory.
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.
Other than that, all I have to say is this: This so called "research" sounds more like that paper that that Mathematician put out a while ago to "prove" intelligent design than actual science. So, my review gives this paper two opposable thumbs down. For shame non-researcher. For shame.
The tendency to falsely link cause to effect â" a superstition â" 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.
First, this hardly seems like a false link. A link based on a slim probability perhaps, but when the stakes are high enough (e.g., being eaten by a lion), that's probably perfectly reasonable. Second, it's not superstition that helped evolving humans survive, it's the propensity to link cause and effect at all; superstition just consists of cases where it's taken too far. Superstition arises because, even though correlation does not imply causality, "correlation does imply causality" is a close enough approximation to the truth when you're hunting, gathering, and dodging sabertooth tigers. (Or so I would think. IANAEB. (I am not an evolutionary biologist.))
Wolfgang Forstmeier argues that by linking cause and effect â" often falsely â" science is simply a dogmatic form of superstition.
Tsk tsk. Science is the pursuit of finding the true links between cause and effect. Anyone who insists dogmatically on false links is not doing science, and the fact that scientists, being humans, may occasionally dismiss homeopathic remedies or something with a bit of prejudice does not invert the meaning of science, nor does it necessarily mean they're wrong.
What is described in the example is known as Partial Reinforcement, not Superstition.
She turned me down this morning (again)
There is sunlight outside.
Clearly, women must be vampires!
[Who am I kidding. I'm a slashdot reader, of course I didn't ask a girl out]
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.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
..that if I see something posted on Slashdot that any hyperlink in the article will be dead within 5 minutes
The 'belief system' exists so that the brain can cope with congitive dissonance.
You can break the mind loop with other things besides having a superstition in your belief system.
Examples: Sleep, food, sex, drugs
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
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 pumice to throw in the water and it floated!
When a pattern is beyond our ability to comprehend then it becomes a superstition: 6 is my lucky number and green is an unlucky color for me; if I dream about snakes then bad stuff is going to happen.
Perhaps these days pseudo-science has largely replaced straight-out superstition. People believe crap like cellphones can pop popcorn.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Pascal's Wager.
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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.
I see a second benefit mechanism for stupid beliefs;
I see that "arbitrary" beliefs can form mutually exclusive groups, in which the cost of believing is the rejection from other groups, and the benefits are membership in the group with the same beliefs.
This need to demand exclusive loyalty better explains the outward expressions of belief.
How does this author explain the prevalence of outward expression, if there is no related benefits?
To study a concept, follow it no matter where it goes. That's the job of a scientist. Keep our eyes open and prove every concept.
Well, unless it goes into the Bible; then we pretend there's no proven validity to it, call it quaint and decide our line of thinking no longer has value. The Bible is such a show-stopper.
Yeah, this is why I have such bad 'karma' on this site. Almost no one reads me, my input is disturbing.
Equally disturbing:
1. "Let there be light" identified the start of this reality.
2. "The Earth is suspended from nothing" tells us that unlike the other ancients, the Earth sits on nothing.
3, It talks about the "land being split" in the continental divides. (Is that Plate tectonics? I'm not a specialist.)
4. It was right about the lost Hittite capital.
5. It was right about the last Babylonian administration.
6. While it doesn't list all 5,000,000+ species of animal, it does call out the stages of plant development, and that matches the fossil record.
So why is it so absurd to believe that the rest of it's true? More than 100 civilizations have a 'great flood' mentioned in their history. Think that was just a really, really good rumor? YouTube viral video?
Meanwhile, the "Tree of Life" talks about all animals slowly evolving over time, starting at, let's say, amoebas and ending with man. Except the fossil record shows all life 'sprung' into existance (cosmologically speaking) in the Pre-Cambrian era: all the phylum, vertebrates and invertebrates.
The "Tree of Life" was simply a sketch in "Origin of Species". Flawed though it is, is it better to cling to that, and ignore the proven truths of the Bible? That's no longer ignorant, it's hiding from the truth.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
The main threats our ancesters faced were natural and largely beyond their control. Now the main threat we face is each other, i.e. the other 7 billion humans on this planet, each with their own superstitions.
Our rapid success as a species is turning this asset into a liability.
So the real question is: can it *devolve* quickly enough before it ends up destroying us?
You should not eat black olives on the third Tuesday after the summer solstice, or if it has been raining for four consecutive days with lightning appearing on the second or the fourth days but not on the first and third.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
It's not superstition. If he thinks its a pack of lions in the grass its logic and fear of chance. If he thinks its a demon its a superstition.
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.
I'm not convinced superstition itself is responsible for our survival. Instead, I think superstition is a necessary but (hopefully) temporary side effect of our cognitive development as a species. The moment our ancestors gained the ability to form mental models of the world they also gained the ability to form false mental models of the world and therefore the ability to hold superstitious beliefs. In the sense that our cognitive abilities have aided our survival it could be argued superstition was a necessary element but not itself a major contributor to our survival.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Unless a scientific theory can reliably predict the future it's just a narrative.
Superstition might provide some further advantage by randomizing the behavior of humans. Suppose, for example, that some group wishes to pass undetected through a hostile tribe's territory. By acting on some superstition, they would deviate from their normal routine in an apparently random way, perhaps providing them with some safety. Likewise, if a tribe chooses hunting grounds on the basis of superstition, the location is more likely to appear random, and thus less likely to be avoided by prey.
"So why is it so absurd to believe that the rest of it's true?"
Even if I thought your list agrees with reality, that question is no better than asking: Harry Potter takes place in the United Kingdom, and the United Kingdom is a real place... so why is it so absurd to believe that the rest of Harry Potter is true?
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
that's all superstition is
raw pattern recognition: an establishment of a relationship between two different contemporaneous things
that's what we excel at as human beings
so really, its pattern recognition that helps us survive. superstition is merely the extreme of pattern recognition
superstition often has a "reason" as to why there is a relationship between one thing and another, and the reasons are oftentimes nothing more than the magical realism a toddler could come up with
it can be ridiculous, but again, its about what helps you survive, not about being right or wrong. sometimes there is a roundabout relationship between two things that has a genuine reason
so yes, superstition is valid oftentimes, valid in that it establishes a connection. the reasons it comes up for the connections are usually preposterous, but the establishing of that connection often isn't
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't trust your statements. In fact, all of you, put your hands where I can see them!
...the only sensible thing to do is elect McCain/Palin to ensure the survival of mankind. Vote superstitious, vote Republican.
I wouldn't doubt that a lot of what is in the bible is oral history that was eventually written down.
I'm not sure where you brought up the Tree of Life, but I'll clear some things up for you. The Tree of Life is a global effort to map taxa(whatever the division of organism may be, kingdom down to species) by using related gene sequences and statistical analyses to determine just how related things are, and draw phylogenetic trees that have the highest percentage of reliability. It's simply a genetic road map of how things have been modified within DNA which can give a good picture of how organisms are related. It is a continuous map that doesn't have an end point.
Who modded your post insightful?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Well, unless it goes into the Bible; then we pretend there's no proven validity to it, call it quaint and decide our line of thinking no longer has value. The Bible is such a show-stopper.
Yeah, this is why I have such bad 'karma' on this site. Almost no one reads me, my input is disturbing.
Sorry, but that's a lot of rot. There are a lot of events being described in the bible that could indeed serve as the foundation for a hypothesis. Old cities, floods, animals and plants being around in certain era's, all of it we can try to determine and test. What drives people nuts is when the link is made between "according to the bible there was a flood, and we think this happened around x years ago" and "according to the bible God caused a flood". The first statement can be subjected to the scientific method, the second can't.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
B\E 0 | 1
0 | x | 0
1 | x | 1
Agreed.
The bible has 2 purposes: explaining the history of God and the Jews, and Explaining the Sacrifice of Jesus. Those are religously significant, but not scientifically so. And for all understandable reasons, if we could ask an oracle if the story of Jesus was true and found out it wasnt, what would fill the void of loss of Christianity?
I would rather they live in ignorance (and come to on their own terms) than have the void of a top 3 religion go poof.
That's because you do not play the slashdot game correctly. One cannot talk good about something unless it is open source, free, or cool. Religion has none of the 3, and is popular whipping boy for the atheists.
First, what does the original translation say? What translation are you going by? NIV? King James? Also, might I remind you, in observance of #2 that the Greeks were able to determine the circumference of the Earth. A few sayings from the bible aren't willing to convince me... or shall we dredge up Exodus on how we should treat our neighbors after they wrong somebody?
It's fairly commonly accepted that the great flood of Noah was a stolen story from the times of Gilgamesh. I also saw no such youtube video. You ought to explain yourself more here, as I have no clue and no link from you.
Meanwhile, the "Tree of Life" talks about all animals slowly evolving over time, starting at, let's say, amoebas and ending with man. Except the fossil record shows all life 'sprung' into existance (cosmologically speaking) in the Pre-Cambrian era: all the phylum, vertebrates and invertebrates.
The "Tree of Life" was simply a sketch in "Origin of Species". Flawed though it is, is it better to cling to that, and ignore the proven truths of the Bible? That's no longer ignorant, it's hiding from the truth.
Proof? You either believe the bible, or you dont. Dont make this some sort of bible thumping session. That's why nobody likes to hear from you. Better yet, only use the original languages the native peoples used: Roman, Greek, Aramaic. That would be fairly impressive IF you found real references of such, not a re-re-re-re-re-retranslation.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
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Has Superstition Evolved To Help Mankind Survive?
So you're saying Superstition didn't evolve, but was created?
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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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Think about the situations in which people are likely to develop superstitions and its a clue to what's going on.
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.
well duh.... i always thought superstition probably has a very close relationship with both religion and with OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER. all of the above seem like means of trying to impose a sense of control on factors that may inherently be outside of your control. so by throwing salt over your shoulder, praying to jeebus or washing your hands enough, you can avoid misfortune. you probably start with vigilance hyper-vigilance hyper-vigilance + super-natural hyper-vigilance + super-natural + coherent backstory. : ) and just as a lot of people probably got burned at the stake because they had tourette's syndrome, i'll bet the pathology informs this phenomenon as well. jin
i heard it increases your penis size.
Hmm, lemme see... You mean 'Knock on wood'?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
When some unrelated statements are true, it doesn't follow that other unrelated statements are necessarily true.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"For example, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide." this is because of memory. i have no memory of ghosts appearing when it's dark, and i doubt my ancestors did either. maybe when i was a kid i saw the shadow of a coat at the end of the hall and my impressionable mind thought it was a tall looming figure, and enough of this has made me associate the experience and expectation with darkness and that's why my hair stands up when it's pitch. how does this association imply superstition in any way? it doesn't. thinking a rabbit's foot gives you good luck; that's a superstition. being afraid of the dark? or expecting something to happen because the sound of rustling grass catching your attention? nah
"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
--
BMO
"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.""
that's not superstition. is an action based on a slight correlation between those two happenings.
the correlation is small but the cost is high.
Superstition allows one to perceive, albeit rather inaccurately, aspects of nature that would otherwise be ignored completely. This is of great evolutionary advantage... eventually, though the jury is still out, and will remain out for a very long time.
John_Chalisque
Some people seem to think that evolution has some greater plan for developing the perfect human, but it doesn't. There's no one in the drivers seat. Whatever survives influences how life evolves.
Superstition might not have evolved from need, but be a sideeffect of something else that was in need. It just happened to stick around because it didn't decrease our chances of survival.
For instance, we still have hair on our arms. It serves no purpose, but does not decrease our chances of survival (albeit this may have more biological/genetic reasons for still being there).
My UID is prime. Hah!
How many rats do a cat need to survive. How many flea per rats, how many maximum possible flea per rats. Now add 1 plus 1 and see why cat would have helped by reducing greatly rodent population and thus reducing the possibility of contamination , spread, and natural reservoir for the plague.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
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.
Deleted
I didn't know they have this kind of silly jobs at the likes of Harvard, but lately there are quite a few research/study reports are coming out them. The study is silly and tries to explain the obvious with "mathematical model" of superstition, no less -- who would have thunk it! Do I sound superstitious when I say I think the quality of research is rapidly declining at these places?
"as long as the cost of believing a superstition is less than the cost of missing a real association, superstitious beliefs will be favored."
Rationally speaking, if there's a significant positive expected return, how can that be superstition? It's just rational risk management.
In other words, some form of pragmatic knowledge.
It's pretty easy to prove: drop a _non-superstitious_ mathematician in the rustling grass and see how long he survives...
Hopefully for us, prehistoric men weren't so "clever" and we stood a chance of existing at all.
And which societies that "didn't buy into the cat loathing of Christianity" fared far better during the Black Plague? I've never read that Christian societies fared particularly worse (or better) than anyone else during the Plague.
It is well known that during the london plague the mayor thought dog & cat could have been transporting the plague (they, do but to a lesser extent than a big black rat population which is then a natural reservoir). He ordered the pet to be killed, and it has been recorded that since the rat had no enemy anymore, their population exploded making an accelerated spread of the plague. So yes there is at least an example of population faring worse after killing the cat (and dog).
Now there are also assertion that people which did not obey london's mayor order of killing their pet fared better off than others statistically, but I have not seen any article evidence of that. But it could still be the case, but I would wonder why the flea would not then try to jump on the cat while it eats the rat, and fleas can survive a long time (monthes?) with the plague.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Superstition: I did X and Y happens. Therefore X causes Y. If Y is bad, I should avoid X. If Y is good try X every time.
Science: I did X and Y happens. Let's try X as many times as possible. Let's try not doing X as many times as possible. See how many times Y happens.
Sometimes superstition works. Statistically it will give better than average odds since it will include such superstitions as "last time I ate cheese I was ill so I'd better avoid it". Even evolution can be said to be superstitious. If I'm a mutant with an extra kidney I could still get hit by a bus tomorrow and that gene is removed from the gene pool even though it most likely had nothing to do with my death.
Still, science as dogmatic superstition is wrong. It's a way of testing superstition.
Fear evolved to help many species survive you mean. Unless you're saying that everything exists just for us? It might feel like that sometimes, but we have no evidence of it :p
which is totally what she said
We...study a concept, follow it no matter where it goes...unless it goes into the Bible; then we pretend there's no proven validity to it...
Understanding of reality derives its validity from the methods of scientific investigation, not from "authority" in any form, including "holy" books. If such a book has a claim vague enough that some people think they see a reflection of reality, they seize upon it as evidence for their belief that the book is valid. On the multitudes of false claims, they syncretize or perform an about-face by saying "oh, that part's allegory/metaphor/non-literal, but the rest of it that's not contradicted is evidence that THIS book is the infallible word of my god."
So tacitly they understand that it is not the book itself, but some judgement they make about the book's authority, which they must make on their own and without the aid of the book in question, based on their own understanding of the world. You make explicit examples of exactly this kind of fallacious thinking:
1) Perfect example of selective hearing (reading): you say Genesis tells of the Big Bang. But it doesn't; it claims that "heaven and Earth" were created "in the beginning", that God then did some stuff on a "formless" Earth which nevertheless possessed "waters" (btw, this is an aspect of the "diver" theme among creation myths). Later still, he said "Let there be light". Genesis means the word "light" literally and not as a metaphor for the creation of space, time, matter, and energy, but you seem content to count it as a hit anyway.
This is a lay understanding in the first place; the universe had to cool and expand considerably before there was any "light" in it. But there's always the safety net of saying "light" isn't meant to be taken literally.
2) I'm not sure what you mean by "the other ancients". Ancient creation myths (or the people telling them)? Ancient celestial bodies? If the former, you're wrong. There are lots of creation myths, and they all place Earth at the center of (and usually nearly filling) the universe, and the theme of Earth needing no pedestal to justify its (apparent) immobility is only one such theme, and the Abrahamic mythology is only one in which it appears.
If the latter, that's a framing error. It begging the question to think that the Earth needs no suspension, because it implies that other bodies do. There is no such suspension in our rigorously tested understanding of force laws, spacetime, and the matter-energy relation.
3) It doesn't mention "continental divides" at all; that's something you're projecting onto it, trying to retroactively enforce (er, "perceive") continuity. No such concept was known in the bronze age, when the bible was written. I'm not even certain which bible story you're referring to, but I do know it depends on the translation. Funny that the English translations predating the recent (in terms of bible translations) discovery of plate tectonics tend to be less charitable toward your interpretation. KJV makes no use of such terminology in Psalm 60 or Isaiah, but some translations starting in the mid-20th century do. I'm not versed in ancient Hebrew/Greek/Aramaic, but I'll bet they never had to talk about our concept of plate tectonics.
4 and 5) Part of what makes the Bible's claims so insidious is that it mixes historical facts, such as the existence of a Jesus of Nazareth (he was only one of many messiahs with the same details as Jesus) and socio-political circumstances (city-states, etc.) with fantastic ones, such as that the universe was created in 6 days, that there was a virgin birth, that people returned to life after dying (including claims that eyewitnesses actually experienced it), that some ascended into the sky inexplicably, and that an undetectable creator god exists.
6) First, it's more like 10,000,000,000+ species; 2,000 times greater than 5,000,000+. And those are extant species alone; more than 99.9...% of all species that have ever existe
The first two chapters in the first book of the Bible contradict each other in a a literal reading. Genesis 1: creation by word, and specifically says that man was created last. Genesis 2: physical creation, and the breath of life. Also, man is created while "no plant of the field had yet sprung up".
The Bible is wonderful but you have to understand that it is very hard for most people, especially non-Christians, to squeeze science out of the Bible when it is full of those sorts of contradictions.
I am annoyed when I see someone confuse scientists with science. The author in this piece says "by linking cause and effect -- often falsely -- science is simply a dogmatic form of superstition". But science doesn't do that, scientists do. Scientists don't define science, it's the other way around.
Such remarks play into the hands of religious fundamentalists, who would like nothing better than to judge science on the basis of individual behaviors. That would be like judging religion on the same basis, something that's obviously unfair.
Science is something more than the actions of individual scientists, and those actions don't turn science into a superstition.
A few weeks ago the Economist magazine ran an article about a Indian priest who, when he grew old and could not walk, would have his acolytes go to Ganges river and bring him a cup of water; from the article;
QUOTE
So, to save Mr Mishraâ(TM)s creaking knees, his acolytes sometimes bring him a morning cup of Ganges waterâ"a cloudy brown soup of excrement and industrial effluentâ"to relish.
Mr Mishra has contracted typhoid, polio, jaundice and other water-borne ailments. A hydrologist turned environmental activist, he reasonably assumes that his morning devotions are to blame. By official standards, water containing more than 500 faecal coliform bacteria per 100 millilitres is considered unsafe for bathing. As it passes Mr Mishraâ(TM)s temple, at the upstream end of Varanasiâ(TM)s 6.5km (4 mile) stretch of terraced riverbank, or ghats, the Ganges contains 60,000 bacteria per 100ml
UNQUOTE
I thinks that this is an extreme paradigm of where superstition may lead a sane person-
Fear of snakes and spiders is not superstition.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
No. Perfectly reasonable; as programmers we can attest to the fact that everything always goes wrong. Haven't you ever heard the definition of programmer?
;). Probably because every *nix programmer writes paranoid code as I do. I've (*sigh* I can't believe I'm about to admit this) fatfingered an effective 'rm -rf /.' with a shell command on a production box. Before and the windows clients connected went down harder and faster than the Linux box that was limping along screaming "'Tis but a flesh wound!" Had to put the thing down like Old Yeller and ddrescue through the night.
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, I make none of these assumptions when I'm doing 'doze programming
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I can't believe no one's touched on this yet.
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~fle/gazzaniga.html
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.
Good strategy and, see, you didn't lie!
...if you were a young Earth creationist you'd say we were created superstitious 'cos that's how your God wanted us to be.
Before they had any concept of scientific explanations, people believed everything was caused by gods (wind god, mountain god, valley god, grass god, tree god, forest god etc.). When the time came to explain things they discovered worked scientifically, they had to use the same language as scientific language was not yet available. So they explained the most important discovery, the nature of consciousness, by describing relationships between god and man. Since the ability to dereference this myth has been lost, all you can do is try to interpret it scientifically to recover its meaning. This is how science uncovers the meaning of the natural world. Taking the myths literally does not yield any clue to their meaning. Nor does superstition help you understand reality.
I live in Rome, Italy - which is perhaps one of the most superstitious countries in the world (hhmmmm...coincidentally also home to the Vatican) but superstition is what gives this city its charm and mystery. It is also a deterrent at times to improvement as there is always a justified superstition to use (also as an excuse). It's a really interesting topic of discussion and altogether I think a little bit of superstition is in fact good (because a little bit does really go a long way). Louise
What supersition, and it's bigger brother religion have in common, is it's a way of building rules of conduct. It's a way of transcending and thinking that there is actually more to things than 'you're born, you fumble around, you die, game over'. But it's also a way of making assertions that are _generally_ useful - you get people to believe, for example, eating pigs is unholy, because ... well, pigs carry a lot of diseases that can really mess you up.
But in an age where it's hard to actually _prove_ that sort of thing, then it's far easier to deal with it with 'but god/the spirits' said so.
There's also the hopeful aspect - put aside the futility of the now, your reward for a hard life is in the future. Lets face it, life could be pretty miserable if you were just a peasant who'd plough fields until he died. It's only natural that a coping strategy evolved.
Religion and superstition provide us with the myths, that make the proletariat comfortable. That let those wise enough to 'know' influence those that 'believe'.
Those myths have been useful to our society - even the scientific method is built upon an established consensus.
But generally speaking, it's just a form of Myth Management.
This is not a new realization. It's one of the tenets of functionalism in sociocultural anthropology, and it's been around a long time. Religions and belief in the supernatural serve a purpose to the culture that adopts them. That isn't news.
Maybe the real point of TFA was that we now understand the mechanism by which those beliefs get selected?
"Except the fossil record shows all life 'sprung' into existance (cosmologically speaking) in the Pre-Cambrian era: all the phylum, vertebrates and invertebrates."
Lol.
The precambrian lasted 4 billion years. Life starts around 1.2 billion years ago. Multi-cellular organisms start to appear about 500 million years ago.
yeah, life just ~sprung~ out of nowhere.
"The "Tree of Life" was simply a sketch in "Origin of Species". Flawed though it is, is it better to cling to that, and ignore the proven truths of the Bible? That's no longer ignorant, it's hiding from the truth."
No, what's ignorant is clinging to this nonsense. The so-called "Truths" you cite are useless in terms of historical or scientific accuracy. If we find there was a flood that covered half the earth a hundred million years ago, you'd find some way to make Noah fit the bill.
(Incidentally, the best flood theory I've heard was about a lake giving way and flooding a few towns. This probably was enough to kick-start flood global myths in several religions).
No, what you have is no better than what the astrologers have.
And even IF the bible contains the tiniest shred of historical truth, that still doesn't support the supernatural side of it.
The bible is also a terribly unreliable source - we know it's been rewritten, translated, edited, censored and spun over the past few millenia, and that many of its exotic stories were written decades or centuries after the times in which they were supposed to occur. It's next to worthless.
The bible is an interesting historical artifact in itself, but little more.
by Niels Bohr. (Possibly apocryphal, but often attributed to him)
When asked by a friend why he had a horseshoe hanging over his door, he replied "Of course I don't believe in it, but I understand it brings you luck whether you believe in it or not"
[ ]Half Empty [ ]Half Full [x]Twice as big as it needs to be
I know many interesting places where I would like to stick a fist in, but the forehead is not one of them.
Wiping out a species by "pushing the button" may bring you a step backwards quite rapidly if you are in someway dependent upon that species...
or to paraphrase john donne: mankind is not an island
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.
Like when people say "Don't walk under ladders, it's bad luck". It is how you get the layman to understand "you have a statistically higher probability of getting a tin of paint dropped on yor head - hence you get hurt - aka BAD LUCK". They couldn't really understand it, so called it bad luck. Now days - I just tell people not to walk on pidgeon crap, as its bad luck... easier to explain than "you have a statistically higher probability of getting a bird crap on your head" :-D :-P
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Of course superstition is for survival. The two obvious ones are "Don't walk under a ladder, bad luck.", no you will get your head stoved in if whomever is up there drops a tool on your head! The other is "don't open an umberella indoors", yes 'cos there's very little space and stuff will get broken and people will get poked in the eye!
Jeez, anymore statements of the bleedin obvious they would like to share with us?
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
Errm, yes.
Superstition is a sub-variant of premeditation, more commonly known as "thinking ahead" or just plain "thinking". The one prime ability that seperates us from animals and the rest of the living stuff on this planet.
So, yeah, I would say that "thinking" managed to get humanity where it is today. Duh. And that you can also think wrong / asume wrong when 'superstizing' (wording??) is a part of the deal. So no news here either.
So, yeah, humans can think. Contrary to animals, they can actively memorize, they can pre- and post-meditate and they can apply the results of that to self-restraint and a managing of their animalistic drives and instincts. Yepp, that's quite a survival benefit if you ask me. Philosophers have answered those issues like 5000 years ago already.
And what was the big scientific news again?
Next up:
Earth is not flat.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm so tired of hearing so called scientists say something is impossible. If you think something is impossible it just means you aren't smart enough to figure out how it works.
So, anytime something strange and new comes up instead of saying, "That's impossible! I'm an asshole!"
Say, "Wow! That's really cool. Where's the proof? Let me see if I can duplicate it."
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Essentially people often use "because" or "goal" when talking about evolution, but the causality is reversed. Trait X didn't evolve because it was useful, but because some lucky individual got a precursor of X and precursor-X was marginally useful in improving survival/reproduction rate than no X at all.
The very act of associating cause and effect is a huge step for human beings (and other animals like crows, etc). Sometimes it will be wrong and sometimes it will be right and for the most part that knowledge will evolve.
Today we call a wrong association a failed hypothesis and anyone who holds onto such a belief in the face of appropriate counter evidence (or in some cases where there is a lack of any evidence) superstitious.
Superstition does inhibit the evolution of science. However the mechanism is all of a piece with science. They are just two different ways of reacting to a negative outcome, or, to stray into the land of psychoanalysis, to loss.
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
This guy earned an award! To claim it, please print & frame this.
Seriously:
"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."
How the fsck is this an example of superstition? If it had been the approach of a shoggoth or some similarly fictional creature sure then it'd be superstition, but the very reasonable assumption that it might be a predator therefore early man decides to apply the precautionary principle show the complete opposite of superstitious behaviour.
TFA states in part "...a simple definition for superstition ..."; I'm pretty confident I can prove/show/demonstrate any theory/pov I want to if able to arbitrarily define what it is I'm proving.
Surely this guy has missed his calling as a public relation's guru...he seems tailor made.
Also, "...Wolfgang Forstmeier argues that by linking cause and effect â" often falsely â" science is simply a dogmatic form of superstition";
Who the fsck is this other guy and his assertion is about as academically valid as mankind's proof that black is white in the hhgttg... hopefully he'll be making his way across a zebra crossing real soon.
captcha: academy !
Knock on wood is a psychological tool to put things out of your mind so you don't dwell on them.
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.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Everyone knows superstition didn't evolve. It was intelligently designed.
Well, keep in mind, there's room for interpretation. Lines like "blood to the bridles of horses" are ancient wordplay that aren't literally meant. Kinda like "raining cats and dogs", but hermeneutics shows the truth. Like when "coming on clouds" is used, it's always meant as an oncoming correction for sin (variation from man's intended life) and it's always used that way.
Ya see, part of the problem is that some people...especially people who don't wish to see anything in the Bible...look at a single line or piece of information and condemn the entire work. But like *any* text, there's context and all the other human-textured parts. "Back to 'rainging cats-n-dogs', for example.
But it's incontrovertible that some of these major concepts were right: "let there be light", "suspended from nothing", "divided contenents" and so on. Even with the story of the Great Flood, God hands Noah the size/aspect-ratio of a sucessful, sea-going vessel. At the time this was unknown to man.
But beware timing and the Bible.
We're a petri dish, here on Earth. Both sides are attempting to sway us. Did you notice that in all of mankind's time, neither side has ever 'won' and solidified into one or the other? Part of this balance is the importance of not "proving" God's existence. If you can point scientifically to the singularity causing this reality, and tie it to a date/time in the Bible, it's all over. You won't find dates in the Bible, but you'll find the order of things.
It's one of the reasons that, people like my brother see "seven days" to creation and assume the whole thing took 6,000 years (despite natural evidence to the contrary.) "Young Earthers" really drive me nuts.
Yeah, the flood's a great big story, but read Genesis, Job and such.
It's a big book, with millions of researchers having spent a lot of time on it. If it were mere BS, I think that would have been clear several thousand years ago.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Like anyone else I agree that stereotyping is unfair (to say the least). So don't get me wrong when I say that this same reasoning can be used to justify stereotyping or any other socially-unacceptable behavior that, mathematically, results in an individual limiting their exposure to situations that are likely to put them at risk despite the fact that they don't see anything immediately threatening.
Well, heck if I know- I usually get modded down because this secular IT crowd doesn't agree with me.
But back to the tree: notice the trilobite: the ancient little creature that looks like a saw-bug or armadillo. It's been spotted as one of the oldest non-plant ever found. Notice it has a spine? That's a problem for the tree of life, no? Isn't the template that micro-orgs ran the plant for millenia then grew up into something more?
I understand the intent of the tree...but it's wrong. Fossils don't lie, right?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
The point you raise, of course, is perhaps the very best of all the points raised against Astrology, and it is indeed the most startling.
Most of the other arguments I've seen to be logically flawed, but that people's behavior patterns are influenced by subtle suggestion and various other factors has been proven over and over again in many areas of life. --That people do not recognize just how true this is, is the startling part. Through television programming and advertising and education, people's behavior is influenced. Further, it is modified through the types of food we eat, the drugs we take and even climate we grow up in, even the ambient sounds in our environment and, (I would argue), the electromagnetic spectrum, and who knows what other influences.
The human being is very easily influenced. --Which brings us full-circle.
There is no doubt in my mind that behavior is shaped and modified by subtle influences all around us, and that some of those behaviors 'bake' into us and become a sort of base-line, as we grow up, which as I argue, a probable basis for astrology. The question is. . , the chicken or the egg, right?
Well, I tend to feel that being told that you are "Neon" (to take your example), only works when you are able to understand language and the complexities of meaning. When you are a baby, or even embryonic, that kind of influence isn't going to work the same way as it does with adults.
But still. . .
How does one tell which influence is which? Are somebody's observed behavior patterns there to begin with or are they "Neon" instructions picked up from glancing at a newspaper horror-scope? (Newspapers are the last place anybody should look for anything of value. Even the comic strips stink these days!)
I started trying this experiment; --I searched around until I found a very well researched book on Chinese astrology, (a translation of a well-respected Chinese text on the subject). The Chinese system bases its primary sign on the Year as opposed to the Month, and it speaks to a different layer of a person's behavioral 'format'. (I have found that Western Astrology seems to measure people's behavior in a short-term kind of way, as they handle themselves in conversations and immediate influences, whereas Eastern Astrology seems to measure one's background long-term behavioral biases; their fundamental beliefs and approaches to life.)
I began measuring the qualities of the various people I knew against the archetypes. It was surprising, in this one text, just how detailed and exact the descriptions were, as well as brief when specific elements were taken into account in conjunction with signs. (A 'metal Ox' vs a 'wooden Ox', for example.) Specific in some cases to the point of describing an individual's passionate and life-consuming primary interests, ("Will operate their own green house or garden" or "Will have their own extensive and highly indexed library"). The brevity was important because it implies that the Astrologer isn't on a 'fishing for hits' expedition. After a long moment of unhappy silence after I read out the description of one engineer I know, he said, "Okay. But now read all the rest of it," to which I was responded, "That's it. There is no more." --We had been having an argument about Astrology and he demanded that I read out the half page under his sign and specific element. It rather back-fired, as the book had him down cold with an exactingly accurate description of his personality and life-defining interests. Not everybody has such a right down the middle set of influences, but in his case, it was painfully apparent.
The really nice thing about Asian astrology, (from a sociological perspective), is that for many years, people in the West knew almost nothing about it. Animal signs didn't appear in newspapers, and to a large degree still do not, and as such, the contamination from incident 'instruction' to behave in a certain way, is much lower than with Western astrology. This helps to address the point
"First, what does the original translation say? What translation are you going by? NIV? King James? Also, might I remind you, in observance of #2 that the Greeks were able to determine the circumference of the Earth. A few sayings from the bible aren't willing to convince me... or shall we dredge up Exodus on how we should treat our neighbors after they wrong somebody?"
Translation doesn't come into play, unless you're actually *trying* to discredit the Bible. By now the texts of various kinds are so well known we should be able to quote them easily. (In the 50's they actually were, but the culture drifted.)
And yeah....let's dive right into the instance of genocide to which you allude. Apparently you don't remember why that command went out. Apparently the practice of taking newborns and putting them into the glowing-hot metal idols of their local gods until dead completely slipped your mind. Don't feel bad; a large number of people skim right over parts of the Bible.
For example. The one thing that annoys me about Firefly is that River, the girl-genius on board, gets the Bible and starts recounting problems with it. Her key problem is that "it's the only way to explain 5,000 species of animal on one small boat". Problem is...going by the description, the number of animals Noah was told to gather could fit in a rowboat. People just pick and choose things to remember.
Back to the tree: the story that science uses goes, 'tiny non-plants bumped into each other enough times to mutate into slightly bigger things. This process continued through invertebrates to vertebrates and eventually man." But the trillobite, one of the oldest if not the oldest creature ever found (looks like a saw-bug or armadillo) has a spine. Checking the fossil record, all these animals, every phylum, sprug to life in the pre-cambrian era. That's the fossil record. It's also the Bible, but you'd rather follow the data into a rathole than pursue it to a book that has so many things correct? That doesn't sound scientific- it sounds political.
And no...it's not re-re-re-re-translation. Each and every translation has to pass exhaustive checks. They're very finiky there, devoting their lives to the word. Just like geologists and ever other scientist.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
And even IF the bible contains the tiniest shred of historical truth, that still doesn't support the supernatural side of it
"IF"? Much of the Bible IS historical fact. Many towns mentioned in the Bible that were thought to be mythical (because scholars said "we all know this was written 700 years after the fact for political reasons ... yada yada yada"), have been unearthed by archeologists. And it may have been rewritten and translated many times, but that also makes it the most well documented and verified (by comparing copies and translations) ancient text in existence.
Now regarding the "supernatural" side of it, I'd like to point out that arguing for the supernatural with a materialist (i.e., most of the posters on slashdot) is as pointless as arguing against it with a religious person. A materialist has decided that those sorts of things just can't happen at all:
How do you know the miracles are fake?
Because it's scientifically impossible.
But here's an eyewitness account...
It's false.
How do you know it's false?
Because it's scientifically impossible!
Personally, I try not to *completely* discount anyone's claimed experiences, whether it be about God or ghosts or UFOs or whatever. I may have an *opinion* about it based on what I believe, but what do I know? Only God is omniscient. (that's what *I* believe, anyway.)
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
I have no problem with evolution- not micro-evolution. I mean, things change. Tests with mayflies and other animals clearly prove that. It's just the "everything fell into place at random' idea that gets me. Those are some really, really, really long odds.
As to superstition, isn't it a part of trying to figure things out, getting some bad data mixed in there and taking time to disprove it? Back, closer to the caveman-days it doesn't seem like they'd be picking apart their mental machinations like this- Plato and the guys seem to have started that conversation in Greece and such.
Part of my view is that yeah, one day there were mere humanoids, just like the fossil records show. But one day God took the design idea and made one similar to it, but with enhanced 'software'. Unlike the animals that have hard-coded processes for mating, navigation and such, 'man' (as opposed to caveman) was permitted to make his own choices. (so no, not a 'young earther'). :>
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Some comments can't inevitibly went to religion, etc. They are missing the implications of atheism which this study highlights.
If you are built merely for survival and not by design, you cannot trust your own thoughts. You can assume they help you survive, and that's about it.
So if believing something helps you survive for whatever reason (that you matter, morality exists, that Darwinism is true or not, that you have a consciousness, etc.), all you can say is that it helps you survive. You can't trust your own thoughts.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
"Equally disturbing:
1. "Let there be light" identified the start of this reality."
etc.
You're forgetting that there's another creation story in Genesis 2:4b to 2:25, which has the following sequence of events:
1. The Earth already exists in the form of a misty, rainless desert.
2. God makes a man out of dust, and constructs a garden to put him in.
3. Animals are created in an attempt to provide a helper fit for his new man.
4. The animals prove to be unsatisfactory (i.e. God was in error!), so He makes a woman out of the man's rib.
Which of the two is the true account, because they can't both be true unless God created everything including the Earth and everything on it, then wiped the slate clean only on Earth leaving a misty desert, after which he created exactly the same things (including the two people with the same names) that had displeased him previously, but in a different order.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
... or is "you run when you hear something that *might* be a lion coming to eat you" a really strange thing to be called "superstition" or especially an "incorrect linkage of cause and effect"? I'd say it's a correct linkage --- and a correct reaction, but maybe I'm being superstitious.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Superstition, whether defined as it initially was in the original article, or in terms of religion and a macro world view, is based on the concept of intermittent reinforcement. Think way back to Psych 101. Rats would continue pressing the bar for food for a much longer stretch of time, after food stopped being dispensed, if the reward of food for pressing the bar had been intermittent. If it had been consistent with the bar press, or consistent on a time basis, the rat stops pressing the bar relatively quickly.
Move to gambling, slot machines, for example. Intermittent reinforcement is what keeps the gambler sitting in his/her chair at a slot machine for hours as their pile of quarters diminishes, gradually, but with a win on random occasion. If it were something that was at all consistent, we would stop pulling the lever, and dropping quarters, very shortly after the machine stopped dropping coins.
The strengthening effect of a randomly answered prayer is greater than that of consistently answered prayer followed by no answered prayer. The mind clings to the connections that are occasionally reinforced. It holds them in reserve to be brought out during the dry spell.
I'm pretty sure that were I a prehistoric man, and after the rustle of grass during which I hid, a pride of lions came by, I would cling to that as a basic tenet of life from that time on.
Thank God for inconsistency!
ps. posting as anonymous coward only because the level of effort involved in creating the account and logging in seemed too high.
I have been amazed by the large number of people who believe in conspiracy theories. I think that is because our brains are wired to detect patterns, even when they are not there.
""IF"? Much of the Bible IS historical fact. "
No, much of it is a mix of legend, allegory and myth. The actual historical facts in there are few and far between, especially when compared to the number of baseless assertions and statements that could be interpreted in such a great number of ways that they are meaningless.
"A materialist has decided that those sorts of things just can't happen at all:"
Strawman. What materialists demand is evidence. Let's try it again -
"How do you know the miracles are fake?"
"I don't, but that stuff is far fetched enough that I'm going to need proof"
"But here's an eyewitness account..."
"It's unreliable."
"How do you know it's unreliable?"
"It's thousands of years old, it's been translated and spun for political gain, and it's from an age in which we know most humans attributed a lot of things to deities that we now know are natural phenomena"
Sure, after a while people grow dismissive of miracles and the like. But that's because there are hundreds of examples of people claiming all sorts of things, most of which turn out to be either hoaxes or idiocy.
"I may have an *opinion* about it based on what I believe, but what do I know? Only God is omniscient. (that's what *I* believe, anyway.)"
That's up to you, but please recognise that there is not a shred of evidence for your belief, before trying to browbeat others with your "truths".
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.
Non-alternative "conventional" medical treatment is any remedy that is so potentially toxic or otherwise dangerous that it must be prescribed or performed by an MD. To me, it sounds like superstition or just plain ignorance when someone automatically assumes that the most dangerous course of treatment is the best.
I don't believe TFA makes a case that superstition is an evolutionary advantage; rather, it seems to support the idea that pattern recognition is an evolutionary advantage -- and that is not limited to the human species.
For example, our late cat noticed that sometimes we opened the refrigerator, then took out a bowl, and presented him with said bowl containing a blob of tasty ground meat. He was therefore frequently distressed when I would open the freezer, take out a bowl, and then go sit on the couch to eat ice cream instead of giving him a bowl of cat food. I don't think that his expectation that food would follow the opening of the refrigerator door could be superstition, it was simple recognition that sometimes these actions resulted in something he wanted.
Superstition is clearly something unique to our species, and the fact that it can be beneficial in some circumstances and not so in others doesn't mean it's a good thing or a bad thing. The final judgment on that will be if and when superstition is what finally kills off the species, and that judgment will be up to the rats and cockroaches.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
"There are also some coping mechanisms - people don't like to think of death as non-existence so the afterlife is invented."
I think that it's more a case of being unable to imagine non-existence that leads to ideas of life after death, because quite a lot of the myths surrounding it are notably unpleasant, whereas coping mechanisms tend to be based around comforting images, not horrible ones.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
That's it? That's all you've got? This is the basis on which you discard the Bible? Did I not just point out a great deal of 'no possible way they could have known' issues that the Bible gets right, and you counter it with this pseudo-misunderstanding?
Genesis 2:4 is a summary statement recounting that, before there was nothing. And this whole thing happened by only His hand. It doesn't say "He created all this, including man" and then turns around and contradicts it. Look again; it's there.
You really need to think about this a bit; you're throwing away an entire tome for one misunderstanding. Does the physics book get the same treatment? Optics textbook? Programming manuals? I'm sure _something_ in one of those books holds something you don' understand the first time through, or have mis-read. But those books you keep reading.
But point served: it can be hard to get through the Bible, It's a colossal book, bigger and more complex (at times) than the works of Shakespeare. Just reading it is one thing, noticing the interconnections is quite another. Things might not make sense with a book that's several thousand years removed from today's culture.
So do yourself a favor; there's a great guy called Hank Hannegraaff who loves to answer these things. ANY question about the Bible that you have, he's happy to answer. Nice guy, too- never raises his voice, never gets outta line, even with people you want him to. :) He's at (888) ASK-HANK or (888) 275-4265.
The guy has memorized the Bible, forwards and backwards. It's kinda scary when you listen to his radio show and he references things without a delay or without keystrokes. He's Dutch, but he learned English so as to understand the KJV. He also learned Greek, Latin and others for the same reason. Talk about a 'walking Bible', that's him.
And like I said- nice guy. Ask away. Heck it's even fun.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
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.
Like this kid?
Well there also came a time where people needed to hide from the truth. They use hearsay and superstition to hide from the Bible. They generated all manner of means to ignore, obfuscate or outright condemn the work, almost always without careful study. These times are part of those times. You're doing it right now.
You ignore the fact that, THOUSANDS of years before John Glenn orbited the Earth, the Bible said the Earth was "Suspended from Nothing". You're frittering away the fact that this reality was made by a singularity...a singularity that the Bible describes as "let there be light", and yet if any observer could see the singularity, he'd call it light, too. (See also e=mc2)
The Bible has been 'wrong' for centuries, as people have dug up remains, for exmaple of the Hittite capital city while 'everyone knew' there was no Hittites, ever. People's eyes glazed over the idea that "the land was divided" (paraphrasing) but today we have continents that were at one time all part of the same land mass, as a matter of scientific fact.
Tell me then, with this long list of things that turned out to be true...isn't it possible that there are more truths in there? Maybe those who taught us Sunday School just bored us and we didn't want to be a part of it, but that doesn't stop the truth from existing in there. I know I did: I tried several times to 'get with it', but didn't until I was 42. He was waiting for me all the time. And now I'm changed- I don't do things like I used to. My perspective has dropped right into place.
Ghosts, Sasquatch, Aliens (from other planets) are no longer a mystery to me, and they just don't matter. Life _with_ God is much better than _without_. Whatever you decide, I hope you, too, can find the peace and constant fellowship that I did. But that doesn't mean we turn off our heads, and stop being logical. Check and cross-check, sure. Christianity is historical and evidential. He wants it that way.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
That's harmful to the individuals but beneficial to the species.
"The precambrian lasted 4 billion years. Life starts around 1.2 billion years ago. Multi-cellular organisms start to appear about 500 million years ago.
yeah, life just ~sprung~ out of nowhere."
Ah, I love a good debate. Notice I said "Cosmologically speaking"? Before that time there was no life; I'm no expert, but I've been told there's not even moss/algae before that period. But the counter-argument has a problem in it: it says "little life mutated and became bigger life, through invertabrates then vertabrates, and eventually man." But that's not so: in this pre-cambrian era ALL phylum of life was created. Which is why the trillobite, the oldest- or one-of-the-oldest creatures has a spine.
Yeah, in long, long terms according to man, it sprung into life. The "tree of life" to which Darwin pointed isn't a tree- it's more like a lawn. Lots of little, 'short' journeys from what the animals were to what they are today, according to the fossil record.
Now, I know your teachers don't want you to believe this, you see Christians as brainless fools, but if you find this many, no-way-they-could-have-guessed-it truths in the Bible and you don't make an honest attempt to follow the data there, aren't you being foolish?
You might find that some of the 'nonsense' is actually on your side. Just how do you explain them 'accidentally' getting right:
- The lost civilization of the Hittites
- The non-suspended view of Earth
- That our reality started with light
- That our continents have been split
- That it recounts the development of plants, matching the fossil records?
There are those who can see, and there are those who _won't_ see. Either is your choice. I'm not going to labor the points. I'm just trying to defeat some of the "Bible is nonsense" that I keep seeing. Like how Hollywood only knows two kinds of believers: Non-repentant Roman Catholics and Witch-killing Amish. If you don't take the time to see that the Bible has truth, maybe you should look around at the world-wide fight against it.
When was the last time you saw/heard of anyone debating any other text? The last time anyone but Christians were being outlawed, killed for their faith in China or suffering a smear from the entire media? Why else would a religion that's based on acceptance, hating-the-sin-but-loving-the-sinner be something so reviled?
I think if you look a little deeper, you'll find some surprises.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
finally an explanation for global warming!
Aye, I know what you mean about really believing in something and then having someone shatter it for you.
I, for example, used to really believe in having another beer. Then some arsehole of a scientist type (a doctor, to be precise) showed me an echogram of my liver. Shattered that faith right there. Bastards the lot of them ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"You're forgetting that there's another creation story in Genesis 2:4b to 2:25, which has the following sequence of events:
1. The Earth already exists in the form of a misty, rainless desert."
Nope, I'm not. It doesn't say it was a rainless desert. It just says it didn't rain. That happens even today, with the rain comes down, but dries out before it hits the ground. "Desert" wasn't in there.
2. God makes a man out of dust, and constructs a garden to put him in.
Yeah, it probably wouldn't help to recount to primative people the entire story of RNA and DNA. Same reason there's not a lot of talk about dinosaurs that they'd never run into. The 'garden' is just one particular place on Earth, yeah. I don't see a problem here.
3. Animals are created in an attempt to provide a helper fit for his new man.
Actually no. The "helpmate" comes after Adam, the animals were created before mankind.
4. The animals prove to be unsatisfactory (i.e. God was in error!), so He makes a woman out of the man's rib."
OK, this doesn't come from the canon. The animals were never claimed to be unsatisfactory in any way.
"Which of the two is the true account, because they can't both be true unless God created everything including the Earth and everything on it, then wiped the slate clean only on Earth leaving a misty desert, after which he created exactly the same things (including the two people with the same names) that had displeased him previously, but in a different order."
Again, no desert. No wiping-clean of the planet. If this is what you want to take away from the Bible, feel free: I have a friend who thinks by leaving just one light on, the 'surge' of power when he turns on the morning lights will be smaller, and he took electronics class. But that doesn't make it so, now, does it?
Choose to look, or not to look- but by not looking, especially because of a misunderstanding is sad. I hope you find Him. I hope you find the peace that I have, with your logic and thinking as intact as it ever was. Christianity is historical and evidential- He wants it to be that way. That's why he's left so many clues, but it's up to you to choose.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
And this is a bad thing how?
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.
That's what science is all about... it's a mechanism for applying a filter to your assumptions and conclusions to increase the probability that what you conclude is actually true.
Since there's no way to test atheism, mind you, it's not a science any more than any other religion.
On the other hand, if ones goals include survival (at whatever level - personal up through planetary), using a brain evolved to increase your chances of survival is probably a good idea. So atheism is probably a more useful religion than most.
"Ah, I love a good debate. Notice I said "Cosmologically speaking"? Before that time there was no life;"
The pre-cambrian era lasted roughly 4 billion years. The cosmos is about 13.5 billion years old. The precambrian lasted somewhere around one third to one quarter of the life of the cosmos (so far).
"I'm no expert"
That much is clear.
"But that's not so: in this pre-cambrian era ALL phylum of life was created."
What do you mean by that? If you mean "that's when the ancestral forms of all life arose", then you are correct. If you think that suddenly creatures sprang fully formed from nowhere you are insane. Mammals didn't start to diverge from reptiles until tens of millions of years later.
"Which is why the trillobite, the oldest- or one-of-the-oldest creatures has a spine."
The trilobite was an invertebrate. No spine. Spines came later.
"Lots of little, 'short' journeys from what the animals were to what they are today, according to the fossil record."
FAIL.
"Now, I know your teachers don't want you to believe this, you see Christians as brainless fools, but if you find this many, no-way-they-could-have-guessed-it truths in the Bible and you don't make an honest attempt to follow the data there, aren't you being foolish?"
I left school along time ago. It was a christian school. My teachers didn't try to sell me on the crap you're spouting.
From reading the rest of your message it's obvious I've been trolled, epicly. Well done. On the off chance this isn't a troll I suggest you read a bit more about what actually happened and about the timescales involved.
this made me laugh -
"Why else would a religion that's based on acceptance, hating-the-sin-but-loving-the-sinner be something so reviled?"
because it's the truth!!?!?!? OMG!! Of course!!
This is an interesting topic. Richard Levi-Strauss was concerned with this as well, and had a similar set of methods for parsing data related to superstition and religion, how they relate, and how we can develop a system for understanding the interrelation of ritual and communicative behaviors which have their roots in emotional/instinctual/superstitious-type responses.
If you don't know what you're doing, you can't make mistakes.
"It's been spotted as one of the oldest non-plant ever found."
No it hasn't.
"Notice it has a spine?"
Trilobites are invertebrate. No spine.
"That's a problem for the tree of life, no?"
Nope.
"Isn't the template that micro-orgs ran the plant for millenia then grew up into something more?"
Yup.
"I understand the intent of the tree...but it's wrong. Fossils don't lie, right?"
You seem to though. Any elementary checking of your assertions would ytell you how wrong you are.
Also, explaining what you mean rather than just saying "that's a problem for the tree of life" might set you aside from the other trolls.
The bible has 2 purposes: explaining the history of God and the Jews, and Explaining the Sacrifice of Jesus. .
You missed one rather large purpose.
Explaining the fall of man.
Jesus died because Adam and Eve messed everything up. The reason Christians have such a problem with evolution is that it negates the original couples existance. Which negates original sin. Which negates the need for a Saviour. Which pretty much destroys the entire religion.
Go read some Milton
I haven't succumbed to superstition (knock on wood), nor will I ever (cross fingers)!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Wow! You just summed it all up, right there.
You asked two smart questions, the kind real science is supposed to ask, and then with your last line showed the world that you would ignore any answers which didn't agree with your existing beliefs.
Please don't pretend at science until you figure out the basement level fundamentals. Scientist cannot afford to walk into a lab while snorting, "This whole line of inquiry is bullshit." Only priests do that.
If you manage to put your emotions and ego back in their respective jars, then you can learn a bit more about my efforts and thinking on the subject by reading my response to one of the other posters who also asked a smart question, but who sounded as though he was closer to "thinker" than he was to "believer".
-FL
When you don't have information, intuition and guesses are the best things you do have, so you might as well use them as heuristics.
That our default wiring has evolved to use these heuristics to (roughly) maximize the average payoff, should be no surprise at all. That basic principle in ubiquitous in every aspect of our existence, from our behavior to our construction.
The usefulness of intuition fades, though, when you have actual knowledge with which to make rational judgments.
The trick is to know when you know, and know when you don't know. Then you can delegate to your head or heart. That seems simple enough, but it's harder than most of us admit. ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
But wasn't this all fairly obvious already? If you touch a fire and it burns you, 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.
Ah, excellent example. The scientist will experiment and realize:
* if you touch it for only a short period of time, the heat transfer doesn't have time to occur
* the heat transfer will be affected by many other factors -- is there a fine layer of ash (poor heat transfer) on the coals? Is your hand wet or dry (dry = slower heat transfer as well)? These all affect whether you are burned or not.
* When the "magical guru" walks on glowing coals, the non-scientist will be amazed -- MAGIC POWERS! --worship the con-man and give him money.
The scientist will know what's going on (or experiment more if not), and sell firewalking workshops to business executives instead.
See the value of the scientist's approach? Cause-effect relationship that seem simple (touch the glowing hot fire, get burned) are often not as simple as they seem. If you have no tools to get to the truth, you may suffer for your ignorance.
"if a group of lions is coming there's a huge benefit to not being around."
I can has cro-magnon burger?
Kudos for the "superstition is useful" argument, and it's easy to generalize these behaviors to non-human species, such as rats, too. To the best of my knowledge, rats do not worship science or Vulcan logic, but they succeed at avoiding EVERYTHING that reminds them of their last experience with rat poison. It was pink, nothing pink is safe. Bad logic, stupendous survival value.
Superstitions such as the Great Anthropomorphic Fallacy, which scientists of a peculiarly thick-headed stripe (Sigmund Freud, B. F. Skinner, et al.) insist on, are simply ignored by ethologists who have actually been observing nature (Konrad Lorenz, Karl von Frisch, et al.), since the human software which runs on brain wetware rather obviously had alpha, beta and version 1.0 antecedents in non-human species.
As mammals, humans belong to a superset of animals. We aren't the "best" animal, and we don't figure in William Blake's romantic speculations about our putative place above the apes, below the angels. Blake (and all the Romantics) was wrong, and all non-Darwinian speculation about how behaviors work and evolve is passing twee.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Prove that that statement or admit you pulled it out of your ass.
Now, what for me is the fun part. I can prove that if creationism is true, one can not trust one's own thoughts, nor can one trust in causality or anything else.
By definition, God is all knowing and all powerful.
Anything that happens has, at the very least, the tacit approval of God. After all, if God did not want it to happen, then it would not happen because God knows everything and can do anything. God can't "not know" something is occurring or God is not all knowing. If God doesn't want something to happen, then it can't, or God is not all powerful. So, every thought and action one takes, every action and reaction, every disaster and atrocity is a direct result of what God wants.
We also can not trust God to keep His word, because he claims to be a benevolent, loving, father-like God, but His actions show otherwise. He will burn one in a lake of fire forever for disobeying Him. He allows children, the innocent and vulnerable, to be tortured, raped, and murdered even as they pray for help. He ignores their cries for help and mercy. What kind of benevolent, loving, father does such things?
One can not trust one's own thoughts because God can determine what one's thoughts are.
One can not trust that for every action there is a reaction because God can simply will the reaction not to occur.
One can not trust the sun to rise in the East, things to fall to the ground, or pigs not to fly because all God has to do is will it so and it will happen.
If creationism is correct, then one can not trust one's own thought, feelings, or experiences.
If
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
BRAIN CAPACITY
"What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason!
How infinite in faculty,
in apprehension how like a god!."
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
The following is an extract from this site: Enchanted Mind, the article on Brain Capacity.
One question I am frequently asked is, "where is the empirical data that we use less than 10% of our brains?" This concept has been around for over 20 years and bandied about in psychological, sociological and scientific circles.
I have looked at all of the information I could find regarding this presumption and have come to the following personal conclusion. My reasoning may not satisfy those bent on empirical data, (for none exists) but it is the best my research can offer. I concur with the concept that we use only a fraction of our potential brain capacity and the following is my evidence.
Read the rest of this article on that website.
At the risk of repeating myself, that wasn't always so.
E.g., if you took your children to a doctor in the middle ages, there were basically 3 kinds that you could choose between:
- the barber-surgeon, which, as the title implies, was the town barber and also did a bit of surgery on the side. Often with the same instruments. And don't think they knew how to sterilize them. The _only_ treatment they knew was to draw a pint of blood.
(Or the other flavour of it, the smith-dentist. If you needed an abcessed tooth pulled out, well, the village smith already had tongs.)
- The alchemist. This guy had a single placebo: Aqua Vitae. (Which gave us the Swedish Aquavit.) Yep, it was distilled alcohol. They prescribed it so generously for everything, that the Black Death outbreaks also helped spread alcoholism in Europe. Needless to say, small children don't deal well with alcohol, and can be killed by doses which would barely get an adult to feel slightly warm.
Later the alchemists somewhat improved their repertory, to include treatments with mercury and other toxic stuff.
- The village witch, if the Inquisition didn't get her first. This one was rather hit and miss too, and most of the potions and spells fell squarely into the "toxic" and/or "placebo" categories too.
So basically praying instead of taking your kids to either of the first two, was usually the better choice. The third was a toss between getting something no better than praying, and getting something at least as toxic as the alchemist's concoctions. So maybe being superstitious actually got one _better_ chances of passing on their genes.
Sure, _nowadays_ superstition like that is bad, but nowadays natural selection and survival of the fittest pretty much stopped. Chances are you _will_ survive enough to reproduce (if you want to reproduce), no matter how genetically unfit you are.
Even if you don't take your children to a doctor, even just the better nourishment and sanitation give them more chances of survival than they'd have in the middle ages. Even in royal families it wasn't entirely uncommon to lose 3 or even 4 children out of every 5. Nowadays even if you're not just a dumbass, but the dumbest-possible-ass, they'll still have better chances than that. And you'll live enough to try again, if your first or second died while you were praying for them.
As I was saying, nowadays natural selection all but stopped, so it doesn't matter.
But back when it mattered, well, the superstitious ones might have actually had better chances.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Nah, I covet my neighbor's wife 'cause she is hot as hell.
Smelly Dogshind quarters. Oh! That was bad.
Do not, under any circumstances, mod that up.
I think this article explains the origin of superstitions much better:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE5DA1038F934A15752C0A967958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
In experiments with pigeons, Skinner showed that only one desirable result could lead to ritual behavior. When grain was offered to a pigeon at specific intervals irrespective of what the bird was doing, the pigeon seemed to conclude that a certain behavior would be rewarded and began repeating that behavior. Since the reward was always forthcoming, the behavior became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
For example, if a pigeon happened to be turning its head counterclockwise when the food appeared, it began to repeat the head-turning more often than other behaviors. Thus, head-turning was more likely to be reinforced by food, which prompted even more head-turning until a kind of ritual turning -- in effect, a superstition -- was established.
Skinner observed that "the bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food."
I remember a novel where a character used Taro. Not because he believed it, but because when you were looking for problems from A and B, the taro deck would pull a card and tell you to look at D
By Dr. Kevin Forster / Floyd Ferris
Send your spendthrift head of state this
You're a religious troll, whether you know it or not.
I was Catholic who went away from the religion because I read that damned book and started asking questions.
And every question I asked either fell into the category:
1: Bad translation
2: Allegory
3: Not Vatican Approved material
According to Catholics, the Genesis story, Soddom story, Noah's story are all allegories to explain yet another fall of Man.
It's a story, nothing more. We dont look at the stories of Greek mythology and explain that the sun IS carried by a chariot of the gods.
The problem is, we're no longer in the middle ages, but there are people who still hold to millennium-old superstitious beliefs. Worse, they are allowed to vote and even run for vice-president.
And the rest of us are supposed to act like that's perfectly OK.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The simple truth is that we live in a CRAZY universe, which we understand through a fundamentally limited mechanism which is our little brains. The funny thing is, if evolution is taken into account, our brains AREN'T machines that discover truth, they are machines that discover optimum survival strategies. The great question is, are they the same, truth and best strategy? I have suspected for a long time that the answer is probably not.
Example, suppose you have a bitmap that is too large to fit on a floppy disk. A completely true or accurate representation would only allow PART of the image to exist on the floppy disk. However, if you compress the image to JPEG format, you actually change colors and so forth due to the lossy compression, but you fit a good representation of the WHOLE image on the floppy, even though technically its "false", colors and things have been changed. Its the same way with our minds. To fit an optimal representation of reality, we use "lossy" reductions: myths, metaphors and superstition. Yet they give us the best chance at fitting the larger picture into our limited minds...
Example one: Tribe of proto-humans hear tall grass rattling, look over, see the grass rattling, and then a lion pops out. Two of their tribe are killed. Later on, the same thing happens but a mere rabbit pops out, but they take precautions due to the extreme circumstances of the last incident. Proto-humans realize that A doesn't always lead to B, but it can, so they take precautions for the remainder of their lives.
Example two: Ancient humans walk under a ladder. Shortly after, a stampede of spooked cattle crush several of their members. Thus the "walk under a ladder" superstition is born. (not really, but lets just pretend that's the origin)
Proto-humans were not stupid. There's a HUGE difference between superstition and carefulness/instinct based on a clearly defined sequence of events that occured in their past. That example is terrible. The other example is just describing a precursor the scientific method. A better way would have to gather every herb around, take a sample of 10 people with the illness per herb classification, give them that herb (or a combination of herbs) and study the results. But such methodology wasn't common back then...
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
This is really old news. I think I even read about in a Richard Dawkins book from the 80s. Daniel Dennette goes into it further in Breaking the Spell. You could say pretty much all of our beliefs have evolved and have some links, however minor, to our tribal origins. Religion and superstition are very closely linked. Religion is a group of superstitions that have been combined and given a back story. There are a lot of examples of how religious morality is linked to good evolutionary qualities, so it stands to reason that the superstitions that tribes had have turned into the modern incarnations of religion and other superstitions.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
If it were mere BS, I think that would have been clear several thousand years ago.
This has indeed been clear for the duration. But there s a problem; the Bible has a built-in flaw that immunizes it against even this, and you named it without realizing it:
Well, keep in mind, there's room for interpretation.
That's the problem. "Millions of researchers" (well, tens of thousands anyway) have spent a lot of time on it, but they were themselves Christian (or at least Abrahamic), and practiced apologetics rather than rational critique.
Most humans today are not Christian, and would rightly get a chuckle upon hearing the outlandish things Christians believe. They are not immunized against rational critique of Christianity, and its manifest falseness is obvious. Arguing from popularity is not only unsound, but it undermines the position of any religion: most of the people who have lived since the relgion's inception have not been adherents.
But it's incontrovertible that some of these major concepts were right
Your list is a Rorschach test, and I already gutted them in another post. I refer the reader to it and consider your assertion thoroughly refuted:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=960317&cid=24958951
Even with the story of the Great Flood, God hands Noah the size/aspect-ratio of a sucessful, sea-going vessel.
There is no evidence that any such vessel was conceived, let alone extant, at that time. But there is evidence that a king conscripted a commercial barge to escape a major flood on the Euphrates in about 2900 BC; hardly a "sea-going vessel".
At the time this was unknown to man.
And so they remained, but only just. The Egyptians(and Chinese, and later the Phoenicians) actually were building sophisticated sailing vessels around this time. We know this because there is evidence; actual remains, rather than the bald assertions of "holy scripture".
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
You really don't understand what Christianity means to Christians, do you? You see Christianity as the sort of a dogma that runs through your life in the same sort of a way that science and environmentalism runs through the life of a liberal or atheist but christianity hasn't been that aesthetic in 500 years.
Democrats are more the religious fruitcakes than Republicans will ever be. When Christianity held its sway over the Continent, when the Pope was it his height, virtually every aspect of medieval life was imprinted with the dogma of that religion, and, the reason wasn't just about power, it was that, there was a core belief in the leaders of the day that the whole of humanity needed to be organized in some fashion.
I used to think that Democrats were just about power, and maybe they are, but the thought has occurred to me that they are just hopeless neurotic and upon examining all the drunkent craziness caused by Republican free trade, that they just call it a mess and want to slot people and organize society as much as the middle ages were organized. You have the university, the company, the government, and people get slotted into positions in each and no one gets too powerful and no one gets too successful to really tip the cart or change the balance. It all should just fit together, and Republicans look at that whole vision, and just think it is generally a terrible way to live..
Seriously, look at how Democrats openly mock the "invisible hand". They argue against all the dynamism made possible by capitalism and all of the social upheaval that it causes. Democrats are the ones arguing too much, too fast, when it comes to technology. When the internet first came out, you could see a lot of Democrats wondering about the effects of technology and society and how it all needed to be understood, but Republicans via their corporate proxies just saw it as an enabler of trade and commerce and just pushed it out everywhere regardless of the consequences. Were Democrats in complete control of government, I doubt that the internet or the PC would have spread nearly as fast as it did. It would have been much more incremental and designed to be much more egalitarian as they would try to fit it in as part of the social engineering that they seek to do... the cries about a rising income gap, the need to manage the poor, all are really about a kind of people that aspire to place order on the whole of society.
Even "Change We Can Believe In" is essentially a statement that they cannot even believe that a society can exist without humanity, being, well organized. It's not even ultimately about the disparity of wealth, its that, ultimately, free enterprise is just too messy and too organized for them.
On the other hand, if anyone is a secular humanist today, it is in fact the Conservative Republican. Republicans see the chaos of humanity and then, after mumbling about traditions law and order, proceed to create even more chaos and more change than ever before.
The Republican goes for more consumption and more free trade, and in doing so having genuinely made billions of people richer and have completely turned the planet upside down... They generally want to have more goods and investment flowing freely and eschews the welfare state in favor of his or her own initiative. Some people get hurt, some people get rich, but all in all everyone gets to live a life by his or her own wits, with no promises and no guarantees (at least until they sell out to buy votes with).
This is my sig.
Well, I was just talking about passing one's genes on. Whether it's good for society _now_, that's a whole other question. Damn good one, too.
Now _that_ is what worries me more. The fucked up idea that all opinions are equally valuable and we should respect them all equally, and science is just such an opinion.
It's not even just religion or superstition that worry me there. Corporate PR trying to masquerade as science, or rewrite science, is doing far more damage. Someone who believes in the beardie-in-the-sky or wears a funky crystal as a luck charm, can still reconcile that with a scientific view of the world. (And lots of christians do, for example. It's only a minority of protestant bible-thumper, not even a majority of protestants or christians, who has a problem with science.) PR on the other hand, is undermining the very image and respect for science. John Doe is caught in an avalanche of headlines to the effect of:
"Scientists (funded by Mars) discover that chocolate is good for you!"
"Scientists say: no, it ain't, mate. Take it in moderation."
"Scientists (funded by Budweiser) prove that beer drinkers live longer!!!"
"Scientists (funded by a wine makers' association) say: yeah, well, wine is even better!!!"
"Scientists (funded by a coffee maker) say: forget wine and beer, coffee is better than both!"
"This just in: antibiotics cause autism!!! Use natural cures instead!!"
"Scientist calculates the perfect day to take a vacation!" (Except it adds different units and generally is a meaningless mockery.)
Half of those weren't even written by a real scientist, but by a PR agency. Then it fished around for someone with a Prof, Dr or Ph.D. title that'll sign it for 30 silvers, and sure enough they found someone who has nothing to lose, he has no good name to lose, and will sign anything for a price. Then it goes to the press as a "scients discover X" story.
But John Doe doesn't know that. He only sees a mess of conflicting "scientific" statements. One day beer is good for you, the next day it's bad, and next week it's good for you again. And a press which tells him that everything is a controversy. And is left with the impression that "science" just means a bunch of arse-clowns making wild claims of authority, but who really are no more knowledgeable than the local snake oil peddler.
And _that_ attack on science might one day bite us all in the arse worse than all other superstitions _combined_.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I can't believe that anyone would support a belief in superstition over science if they were properly educated about both. Sure, the results of scientific experiments can be disproved but that is not a weakness of science - that is it's ultimate advantage.
When I was growing up, a common idea taught in my science classes is that scientists are more excited about experiments where their theories fail. Why? because it means that there is something more to learn - something they are missing in their formulations. This is just a generalization but if people would understand the idea then I think we all could get along a little better.
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.
Nice way of maligning alternative therapies there.
We wouldn't have aspirin today (acetylsalicylic acid) today if nineteenth century pharmacists hadn't investigated "home remedies" like why chewing Willow bark made headaches go away.
A surprising number of patented drugs on the market come from research into communities using local flora and fauna to treat their ailments and finding out just what it is in those treatments that actually works.
When my grandfather was dying he was a bit upset about it and noone was able to talk to him about death until my mother showed up and went off about how wonderful heaven would be when he got there. Most of the time I find her superstition pretty annoying, but it worked wonders; getting the topic out in the open, calming everyone down, providing a framework to explain things to grandma. I'd like to think I can die gracefully without superstition, guess I'll find out...
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Not that I'm volunteering, but it's been done. The confusion is social, not biological.
http://www.unassistedchildbirth.com/miscarticles/milkmen.html
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Welcome to reality.
Even that assumption is invalid, of course: it would be less of a stretch to assume that they are consequences of some trait which, on average, helped those it applied to survive in some environment in which it was present, whether or not the thoughts (or even the trait which contributes to them) actually help you survive in your environment or not.
It did evolved to help us survive.
When confronted with two or more conflicting thoughts, beliefs, feelings, etc. we experience the psychological effect known as cognitive dissonance. We are driven (it is the first known "purely psychological" drive) to relive the dissonance by changing one or more of the conflicting data, to bring ourselves back into cognitive consonance. Sometimes that requires making up a false answer in order to prevent psychological stress from disabling our survival capabilities. And sometimes that false answer is fear inducing, to give as something to blame the continued stress on while we search for a better answer, or at least wait for the situation to sort itself out.
Failure to find a solution, even if a false one, can result in psychological crisis. We feel as if we're going crazy because we can't find a way out of the situation. If it weren't for false beliefs such as superstition this would happen far more often, and if enough of us had survived this long, we'd probably still be in caves since they're good places to hide in.
The answer more obviously has to be yes, because very few thoughts, beliefs, feelings etc. are entirely true. Our heuristically operating brain comes up with the fastest good enough answer to everything, rarely completely accurate and appropriate. Superstition is simply a subset of our error prone cognition.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I more or less agree with you on everything you said. However...
I don't have to have faith or belief in anything to be an atheist.
Related to the subject of this article, science (as the definitive form of observation like you mentioned) is basically a rigorous version of superstition. Real science deals with refutation or the inability to refute hypotheses. There is never "proof" and so we are still in the end either "believing" that what we have discovered is true, or saying "I still am not sure".
It certainly is conceivable that some deities exist in some form or another. Due to the circular nature of all-powerful beings however, no one has been able to think up a way to falsify one.
All that is to say that at it's foundation, atheism is still a "belief". The non-belief alternative is only "I'm not sure". And even that is arguable :)
Apparently the researcher did not do his homework. There is sufficient clinical data for the efficacy of both alternative treatment systems, modalities and homeopathy. His comment, "In modern times, superstitions turn up as a belief in alternative and homeopathic remedies." is a scientific slander and can not be justified on the basis of observed facts and research. Fist to sloppy research times 3! After all what goes around comes around three times... Capt. Cautious also an Alternative Physician
If you don't understand what the male nipple is good for, you have led an extremely unadventurous sex life.
Citing a philosopher who went insane before much of his work saw publication is not a good argument for evolutionary fitness.
And the brethren went away edified.
But religious people know from first hand experience that if you say "science is just another religion" often enough, the ignorant masses will believe you.
Article good, title sloppy or uninformed about the flaws of group selection.
1). The error here is another example of that in (2), but since the (2) deserves special attention, I'll treat it there only.
2) Oh the "proper meaning of 'dogma'"? Please see Merriam-Webster's online entry:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dogma
Even my printed modern edition, which is more complete than the online entry, makes no mention of "dogma" in the sense Crick used it, which was and is highly non-standard. Crick himself said freely that it was so:
I called this idea the central dogma, for two reasons, I suspect. I had already used the obvious word hypothesis in the sequence hypothesis, and in addition I wanted to suggest that this new assumption was more central and more powerful. ... As it turned out, the use of the word dogma caused almost more trouble than it was worth.... Many years later Jacques Monod pointed out to me that I did not appear to understand the correct use of the word dogma, which is a belief that cannot be doubted. I did apprehend this in a vague sort of way but since I thought that all religious beliefs were without foundation, I used the word the way I myself thought about it, not as most of the world does, and simply applied it to a grand hypothesis that, however plausible, had little direct experimental support.
and here:
My mind was, that a dogma was an idea for which there was no reasonable evidence. You see?! I just didn't know what dogma meant. And I could just as well have called it the 'Central Hypothesis,' or â" you know. Which is what I meant to say. Dogma was just a catch phrase.
Italics in original, bold emphasis mine. Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_biology
This was discussed on Slashdot only about a month ago:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=634067&cid=24448871
Yes, I am aware of Crick's usage. To avoid confusion from aliasing, I *never* use the term "dogma" to describe the process of scientific inference. But once in a while a (false) pedant comes along and sanctimoniously lectures on the "proper" meaning of the term "dogma" when I use it in the sense everybody (including the pedant; thus his falseness) understands.
Regarding (1): You're equivocating. The article treats the concept of "superstition" in the popular sense, but generalizes it (to evolutionary scope, and not merely some "inference engine"; bacteria "infer" only in an evolutionary sense). This is just a re-statement of the evolutionary fitness of defensive ("conservative") behavior. The article describes exactly this. The article is quite explicit in its misapplication of this in the article; there's a great, hand-waving leap. The subject of belief is very broad and very deep; there are many "kinds" of belief, and they are well-defined in the literature and thanks to neuroscience, better-understood now than even a century ago. Claiming "science is simply a dogmatic form of superstition" is an intellectual foot-in-bucket, and I'll be charitable to Forstmeier and attribute this to poor journalism.
3) You say this:
Science works because its methods are applied more often than not on average across all scientists.
So you're saying that science works because it isn't superstitious (that its [non-superstitious, by definition] "methods are applied more often than not"). I already said exactly that:
Science only works because it isn't superstitious!
4) Philosophically speaking, relativism (that is, as opposed to realism) is untenable. That is why science has proceeded so fruitfully by adopting realism, and *precisely* why the experimental results testing Bell's inequality are so disconcerting:
I think this is correct. Superstition helps us organize the world, in our own minds, in a way that is beneficial not only to us but to the surrounding society. The superstitions that survive time do so because of circumstantial reasons -- they seem to work even when you don't know why. Thus societies that have them become more prosperous and replace the ones that don't.
However, we do need to realize that they are only a psychological tool, similar to manners, and that they are not a true representation of reality.
Why the hell else would it have evolved?
The (not so recent) news is that someone figured out why it helped us survive. Incidentally, who figured it out? Neither Keving Foster nor Michael Shermer are credited for it in the article--though the latter certainly speaks like the one more likely to have thought of it.