Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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
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.
"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.
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
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.
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?
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.
I would have thought it was a product of our society being unable to adequately explain (either through their ignorance or just a lack of language) why things were dangerous. Where does evolution come into it? Is the article saying that knocking on wood is hard wired into our brains? Being worried about rustling grass isn't a hard wired phenomena, it isn't even a superstition. It's the result of being told about bloody lions eating people. Fear is an evolutionary advantage. Superstition isn't.
I don't have a link, but at one point I heard of a study that tried to link dietary restrictions present in various religions with geography. For some reason (and again, I don't recall the details) not eating beef, in, say, India, actually turned out to be a more efficient way to produce calories for the entire society. (Something to do with fertilization from the dung, fats in the milk, and the use of otherwise un-arable land) And pigs were inefficient in the Middle East. Dietary restrictions have been enforced by superstitions (e.g., cows are sacred, pigs are unclean) rather than fear or anything else, and have proved to be useful in maintaining a population.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
Science, is thus something that can disprove something is is thought to be true. An example would be horoscopes. Science killed them long ago, yet some people (quite irrationally) still swear by them. Quantum Mechanics is strange and counter-intuitive, but none-the-less has mountains of experimental evidence to show its veracity.
Well, science has tried very hard to kill astrology, but after my years of studying the patterns of behavior in people with respect to their times of birth, I believe it is more accurate to say that many would simply really, really LIKE it if science would kill astrology, (for reasons I've never fully understood). --Especially these days. After all, the latter part of your statement above does much to throw into question the former.
There was another Slashdot article a few days ago wherein researchers were baffled to discover that certain radioactive particles decay at different rates depending on the time of year, (or as they assumed, the Earth's distance from the Sun). I wonder what force between the Earth and the Sun could affect the behavior of particles and if that force might not be related to the manner in which people's brains develop as they grow up? It would help to explain things.
Conventional wisdom is always growing for a reason; we don't know everything, and as such we should never be hasty to dismiss observable phenomenon just because we happen to find them objectionable for one reason or another.
-FL
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
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.
Or, they might have just had a smart guru. Or, perhaps all the people who ate the cattle died of starvation. If you read the definition of superstition, it would discount your theory as it would be based on the laws of nature. Of course, it just killed part of mine too. But, that's life.
Generally speaking though, grain production produces more food than cattle production.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
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.
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
studying the patterns of behavior in people with respect to their times of birth
Don't forget it can be a completely circular effect. For example Aries are supposed to be self confident and stubborn. By having people tell an Aries that he is supposed to have those traits, and expecting him to behave that way, it can in fact encourage and reinforce those traits in that person. Even if in fact that person was adopted and the paperwork was botched and we was never an Aries in the first place. It's the expectation that produces the result.
Take me for example. My sign is Neon. Neons tend to be arrogant and mock irrational bullshit.
See? It's a self fulfilling prophesy. It even worked on me.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
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.
""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".
Science is a mechanism for filtering superstition out from reality. In fact that's pretty close to a one-sentence summary of what science is for, and what the difference between science and other approaches to understanding the universe are.
What Wolfgang Forstmeier seems to be doing is noticing a tendency for scientists to fail to use the scientific method in situations where they should, and generalizing it to a general case. He's concluding that, since individual scientists may be superstitious, it follows that science is superstition.
This is of course a common superstition about science.
I 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
Religious belief is dogma .. unquestionable, unalterable, ineffable. Actions are set in stone until some random religious leader decides that too many people are leaving the church and changes it. Questioning by the masses is forbidden, and if someone presses it they can be kicked out of the church.
Reasoning is continuous examination of evidence as it comes in and adjusting one's actions because of it. There is no grand almighty scientist telling us what we have to do or think. The many scientists that are encouraged to argue with each other and refine their theories. The average person can even contribute to the furthering of scientific theory, there is no 'chosen one'. Unlike religion, discussion and refuting a theory is expected. Very few religions tolerate such discussions.
It is not conceivable to me that a deity exist. It is not necessary to prove one does not exist, lots of things 'don't exist' like the aforementioned Santa Claus, I don't belief there is no Santa Claus ... there is no Santa Claus. There are other things that fall into the 'might exist' category like Sasquatch and scientific principles are brought to bear against any evidence that arises.
Until evidence is brought forth to prove a deity exists, as far as I'm concerned there are none. I don't 'believe' there isn't a god, I don't have to because there is no reason to believe there is one.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
What a crock of bullshit. An atheists doesn't hypothesis about the non-existence of something, that is just an ignorant statement offered up by religious people trying to elevate their non-scientific methods of establishing religion to a credible level instead of the dogma and circular logic it really is.
There is no need to believe something exists if there is no evidence that it exists. The only reason religion exists at all is because people are unwilling to admit they are ignorant and don't know everything, such as where did we come from, how did that tree get there, how is it possible something like the human body could come about by random changes. True, science does the same thing, but science at attempts to truly explain something rather than just offer 'Oh .. I don't know. It must be because god wanted it that way. Now stopping asking such question.'
Religion provides fairy tale answers to those insecurities. Nothing more. They provide no true moral compass, since it appears all religious tomes are vague and subject to interpretation by whatever person needs to twist it to their current purpose, including the pope. Those all mighty deities have a terrible communication plan. Even the 10 commandments are vague and have been twisted and changed throughout history to suit whoever has an agenda.
Religion also provides a means for a central group to force a larger group to behave according to what they think is right. 'Don't have sex with your sister because you will go to hell' is easier to explain than 'Don't have sex with your sister because the risk of genetic mutation is greater'. 'Don't have butt sex because it's evil' is easier to explain than 'Ummm...that's an outie. Bad things will happen to it if you use it that way too many times and it increases the chance for transmitting diseases'. 'Don't steal because you will rot in hell' rather than 'If we all steal we fall into a state of anarchy and progress is forever halted'.
It's time for atheists to stop being polite and to start denouncing religion for what it is .. delusional behavior and petty superstition. It's time to let everyone know that they don't have to accept the dogma of the church, they can live their own lives perfectly well, with purpose and morals of their own choosing rather than from some reclusive group in Italy who never has sex or kids (talk about out of touch...), and without all the BS and tithing and wasted Sundays. Or Saturday. Or all that bending and praying all day.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.