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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.'"
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
Science doesn't help, that's for sure, but you can't shake a true believer with science.
You can. Put a lightning rod on your roof and none of the roof of the church.
The Republicans in charge do get it, and get it very well. They know how easy it is to control people through religion, and it's one of the most powerful tools they have. They figured out that you can do pretty much anything you want in the name of God, and you will be supported by a lot of people because they can pretend to be following you in the path of God, whether they actually believe it or not. It comes back to the same question: Is it easier to just continue believing it, or to wake up and do something about it?
The current administration is about as anti-Christian as anyone can get, but all Bush has to do is tell people what a great Christian he is, and they believe it, while he murders innocent people, takes from the poor and gives to the rich, and pins medals on people for NOT helping tragedy victims nearby that are dying from lack of a drink of clean water. What Would Jesus Do? indeed.
Yet if you ask most people which party is more religious, most would say Republican. And one the arguments I hear a lot from Republicans about why the Democrats are so bad is that they spend too much money helping the poor.
I'm not saying Democrats are much better. Just that the Republicans have the religious thing figured out.
Funny, but I've often thought of the best Christians as having "humanist" morals. Perspective is a funny thing.
Somersault, as someone who spent a big part of my life as an academic, I've seen more than one "spiritual awakening" of a very religious person who learns to set aside childish superstitions.
It's not an easy road, but when you can start to see that your morals come from the person you are instead of the fear of punishment, you are truly "putting aside childish things" as a wise man said.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
IANAHistorian, but I've been given to understand that faith wasn't diminished by the Black Death, and you'd be hard pressed in the centuries that followed to find anyone in Britain who professed anything other than Christian faith. If anything people became more devout during and after the event - as tends to happen during any crisis. Consider that those who survived probably considered their survival a miracle in the first place...
My understanding is that the economic impact of massive devastation to the working population was the real cause of change. Church and State were almost one and the same during that time, and so the church wielded an incredible amount of power over the daily material lives of the commoners. All land was owned either by the church or by nobles who were closely tied to it, and all workers were essentially beholden to the land-owners to earn a living, grow food etc - and the land-owners pretty much dictated the law and punishment too.
When the population suddenly declined (about a third was lost), there were not enough workers to work the land and such. The balance of power shifted - not massively, but perceptibly - towards the workers. The iron grip was relaxed slightly, and this is what caused the increase in rebellion and unrest. Faith had not diminished, but the power to enforce arbitrary rule had.
It wasn't that the events had shaken people's faith and made them dissatisfied - no doubt they always felt that way. It was that the church/state was somewhat less able to repress their will.
Meta will eat itself
Science and Religion cover different aspects of human endeavors. Science didn't make religion obsolete.
Heck, I'm mostly an atheist and I'm not sure why you'd think that. I know someone with a BSc, two MSc's, and a PhD -- he's still a practicing catholic. He just doesn't rely on the bible to explain the structure of the universe (he's a computational astrophysicist). He also doesn't use science to inform his morality and understanding of how we find meaning in all of it.
They really are different disciplines, and they're not as fundamentally incompatible as people around here seem to think.
Cheers
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