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.'"

Comments

Superstition prevents congitive failures

[catbutt]

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.

Re:Superstition prevents congitive failures

[Maelwryth]

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.

Re:Superstition prevents congitive failures

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Or you could just get bored and quit thinking about it.

As an aside, people with unusual mental abilities often seem to have a defect in the boredom mechanism so that they obsess about one particular thing - often ignoring the practical concerns of life.

Slightly more on topic, religion tends to go far beyond making excessive correlations. Children need certain traits to survive to adulthood: love for and subservience to authority plus a lack of interest in sex. Religion provides a parental figure for those people who don't outgrow these childhood traits.

Essentially, religious belief is like a belly button: a trait that persists into adulthood even though it no longer has a useful purpose.

Jumping to conclusions

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Placebo effect

[AoT]

The placebo effect is when you get the effects of having taken a medicine when you didn't really take it, so it would be beneficial because you could cure diseases, or maybe just symptoms, without actually needing an effective agent, just an agent that you believed to be effective.

Isn't that kind of stupid to have a brain evolve a feature just to counteract another arbitrary feature?

Maybe, but evolution can be pretty stupid sometimes. It works pretty much by brute force, sometimes literally, so it ends up taking strange routes. Remember, evolution is not guided, not stupid or smart, just a natural process.

Re:Placebo effect

[AoT]

I don't know. If I could explain the placebo effect I'd be a millionaire. Again, evolution, which is how the placebo effect came to be, doesn't work as we would like it to. It doesn't take the most direct route and it doesn't make sense. So don't ask me to explain why it doesn't make sense.

Discworld Beat Ya To It

[coppro]

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.

Re:Ignorance pleaded - would have worked too

[Jason Levine]

Why not tell them right away: You may drown.

One day while driving, my five year old managed to unlock and open his car door. The door stayed mostly shut long enough for me to pull over and close it. I sternly warned him that if he did that again, he could fall out of the car and be seriously hurt. When he didn't seem phased by that, I told him that his toy could fall out of the open door and be lost. He got very frightened and promised not to do that again. (He hasn't.) Why the different reaction? I think that falling out of a car and being seriously hurt is an abstract concept to him. He just can't really imagine what it would feel like. But losing a toy that he likes, that he can easily imagine. Sometimes with kids the bigger threat isn't the one that they can wrap their minds around and thus isn't the scarier option.

Re:I don't understand

[duckInferno]

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.

I fail at breaks.

Re:Murhpy's law?

[overzero]

As a programmer I constantly refer to Murhy's law.

Are you sure it's not rational?

Re:Placebo effect

[obeymydog]

The placebo effect isn't really confined to subjective measures, at least not according to the results of modern neurophysiological investigation. The reason is that lots of the chemical activities involved with consciousness/thought have effects that extend beyond individual subjectivity, into immune and endocrine function, for instance (the field of psychoneuroimmunology is starting to identify some compelling examples).

Re:not the same - phobias

[Haoie]

If anything, fear evolved to help mankind survive.

For example, fear of snakes or spiders due to their venom. Natural enough, right?

But go overboard, or be irrational, and you've got yourself a phobia.

Re:Superstition can also cause great harm.

[corbettw]

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.

Superstition *IS* congitive failure

[SpaceLifeForm]

Superstition is just one facet of a 'belief system'.

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

Re:Superstition can also cause great harm.

[tnk1]

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.

I would like to point out that we made it through 8 years of Reagan and horoscopes and fortune tellers and whatever else he did, and not only are we all still here, but he's now gone.

Perhaps that's luck, but I know that Reagan himself mentioned that he woke up after 1982 and realized that there really could be a nuclear war by accident, and he moved forward from there. Maybe he had some good horoscopes.

Bear in mind, many of us are of the belief that fortune tellers and astrologers are entertainers at best, and more likely charlatans. But what imposter will find it in their own interests to start a nuclear war... or any war for that matter? Listening to someone else, even based on mumbo jumbo may be a way for someone to speak truth to someone who is otherwise too inclined to view himself as all-powerful.

As for cults, there's nothing inherently anti-survival about a cult, in general. One could argue that some people or whole cultures needed to operate under various religious cults to maintain order in times when the last remnants of secular authority was religious hierarchy. And if there is one thing a cult is good at... its keeping order within itself.

The case in point would be the Dark Ages. People may bristle at calling Christianity a cult, but it certainly mixed in with a lot of Celtic and Germanic superstitions in that time period. And yet we didn't face annihilation even though we were steeped in all sorts of superstition.

Anyway, I'm not sure that its useful to play up the similarities between superstition and science, because science has been most useful to humanity in removing certain superstitions and bogeymen from our path. While I believe that dogma and unproductive behavior can certainly affect the most dedicated of scientists, science is better viewed in regard to ways it differs from superstitious thought.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

superstition

[venicebeach]

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.

Re:Religion

[thermian]

As far as I'm concerned the same thing can be said of religion. Thousands of years ago, before we scientifically understood everything, we had religion to give us an inaccurate but constructive understanding of our world and our existence. However now religion has become obsolete and more accurate and scientific things are taking its place. This is obvious to me. I don't understand why all the Republicans don't get it.

Religion wasn't obsoleted by science so much as by disease, at least in the west.
Religion had a firm grip until the Black Plague hit Europe in the Middle Ages.

During that time people felt, with good reason, that the church should be doing its job and getting God to sort it all out.
This didn't happen, so there was a trend towards being less included to obey the church, and the first recorded attack on a monk by members of the public (an unbelievable event at the time).

It didn't help the church that the survivors felt, rightly, that they were entitled to make a lot more decisions on their own about work, pay, housing and such. No longer were they satisfied with doing what they were told and being content with what they had.

Following the plague, whilst religion regained some of its influence, especially in rural area's, its hold was never again universal, and has been in decline since.

Science doesn't help, that's for sure, but you can't shake a true believer with science. The only thing likely to turn them is the belief that God has let them down somehow.

Re:Superstition can also cause great harm.

[SwabTheDeck]

The most common harm I see is people developing a sense of apathy toward life because they believe there are supernatural forces that are actively controlling their destiny. For example, my mother is a devout Jehovah's Witness and she constantly talks about the time that they believe God will wave his hand and make peace on earth (Jehovah's Witnesses have a much different concept of heaven than most main line Christian sects. They instead believe in a "perfect" earth as the place where they'll spend eternity.) I often have heard her say things like, "Oh, none of this really matters. One day God will make it perfect," in regards to difficulties she might be having in her life. The harm that's caused here is that she doesn't make a great deal of effort to solve her problems because she believes that they will eventually be solved for her by a supernatural power. This expectation of assistance is fairly evident in their stance on higher education (which is basically "don't get any"). The harm is that there's lost opportunity in devoting one's time to something that could be false. Instead of living a full life and making meaningful contributions to society, the use of time is diverted to other areas.

Re:Placebo effect

[Mr. Slippery]

If I could explain the placebo effect I'd be a millionaire.

The problem is that there are several different things that get lumped under the label "placebo effect":

• Patient experiences no difference in their perception of symptoms, but feels compelled by social pressure to report an improvement. I.e., "It still hurts as much as ever, but I don't want to disappoint Dr. Smith, so I'll say it's better."
• Patient has no difference in symptoms, but perceives them differently. The pain signal arriving at the brain is unchanged, but comes to be processed differently.
• Patient believes in ability of the healer or treatment, gains confidence that they will recover, stress responses are reduced, and the immune and parasympathetic responses are improved.
• Patient gains feelings of acceptance into their tribe/social group as a result of being tended to by the healer. Stress responses are reduced, and their relationship to their community is transformed; a new psychological perspective may be adopted that changes their "will to live" and perception of their "quality of life". Humans are social animals, and I think the social aspects of healing have been tremendously underexamined.
• Patient comes to feel empowered over their own health because they are able to take simple actions, and so are eventually led to make lifestyle changes that lead to improvements.
• Patient benefits from non-specific aspects of treatment. For example, after placebo surgery, skilled nursing during recovery may well have benefits. (I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that every double-blind placebo-controlled study of a surgical technique, has found the surgery to be no better than a placebo cut. Yet many "skeptics" who demand rigorous double-blind studies of "alternative" treatments will go under the knife without a second thought.)

There are probably more things going on too.

Interesting article on the placebo effect by Ted Kaptchuk here. If you can find it, his book with Michael Croucher, The Healing Arts: Exploring the Medical Ways of the World, is an excellent read.

Re:I don't understand

[slew]

As Richard Feynman once said "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts"

He also had this comment in his classic speech "Cargo Cult Science"

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of -- this history -- because it's apparent that people did things like this: when they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong -- and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.

But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves -- of having utter scientific integrity -- is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

I don't think I'm as optimistic as Feynman that it's only a small group of scientists that don't have "that kind of disease"...

Simple food pyramid question

[aepervius]

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.

Re:Religion

[somersault]

You wouldn't understand unless you yourself had once believed in something. The religious types don't get why you discount all of their beliefs either. From their point of view they have 'evidence' of their beliefs (mostly based on feelings or circular/incomplete reasoning) and can make up even more stuff to discount the rest. I'm saying that from the point of view of someone who used to be religious and was trying to keep fooling myself as well, but eventually gave up on it. There were definitely benefits to being in a large group of likeminded and 'moral' people, but I'd rather live alone seeking the truth, than live a lie with a group of people who think they know the truth and therefore have stopped seeking*.

Religion is basically included in superstition btw, so I considered your post pretty redundant. It also seems pretty flamebait-ish with the mention of republicans. Being left or right wing doesn't necessarily mean being religious. The fact that you "don't get" how different people can believe different things and see the world differently shows that you need to learn more of the science of the mind. I'll give you a clue, logic doesn't always win in there. Quite often the opposite is true.

*Okay, so god created the universe - who created God? You say a watch can't appear fully formed, someone just created it - but a god who is even more complex than us can appear fully formed, or is more likely to have 'always existed' than the universe? Sure. Believing there is a higher purpose in life does make me feel nice and fuzzy inside, and curbs my nihilistic leanings. It also still is possible that there is some higher truth that we just don't have the capacity to grasp yet. But at the moment I don't think humanity has any clue what that is, nor can it be blamed for not being able to understand yet, in the same way that we can't blame fish for having to live underwater. BTW if we did all appear by chance, it doesn't matter how improbable the odds are. We wouldn't be here to question things if those odds had not paid off. I know that's circular reasoning, and I'm not saying that we are just an accident, but IMO it's even more foolish to assume that god always existed fully formed, then decided to create a bunch of people because he was bored.

Re:Religion

[somersault]

Science doesn't help, that's for sure, but you can't shake a true believer with science. The only thing likely to turn them is the belief that God has let them down somehow.

Mostly true. It's not so much the belief that God has let you down (there are plenty of excuses for that in Christianity), as a certain attitude of depression and a period in my life where everything was upside down anyway, and a combination of seeing some pretty decnt evidence for macro-evolution (species to species evolution by an organism evolving new abilities). A combination of a number of things are necessary for someone to change their beliefs without being brainwashed.

So I think science and logic helps, but you can't reason someone out of their beliefs. They have to doubt them for themselves, otherwise they will just get very defensive and even more entrenched. You can present some evidence to them and leave it with them to let them compare and decide. It's scary losing your faith, especially if you believe in hell or have a lot of friends with the same beliefs, but it's better than living a lie.

Re:Sometimes yes, sometimes no

[Dr_Barnowl]

Well, even if cats are carriers, they are also predators.

One cat will dispose of multiple rats, therefore even if cats are carriers, the total number of carriers diminshes. In the absence of predatory checks on the rat population, the numbers of carriers increases (esp. with all these scrummy corpses around to eat!).

I was able to find a charming letter from 1899 to the British Medical Journal on the subject of cats as plague carriers though.

Re:Placebo effect

[somersault]

Because stress and a negative attitude does somehow leave your body more defenseless and run down, in the same way that your immune system seems to relax when you go on holiday (not even to another country - I often have been ill over holidays but fine during term time - could just be superstition but I have seen other people online saying similar things). Having a more positive, stress free outlook can help to keep your body running well.

hunting for the superstition factory in the brain

[urIkon]

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.

Re:not the same

[focoma]

Many people explain their superstitions all the time. That's what all the myths and legends were for. Of course, Science is a rather useful superstition since its explanations are based on actual evidence. But then, that's the point of it: Science is the superstition that the gathering of evidence or data leads eventually to the discovery of truth, or some useful approximation of it. It would be a (silly) truism to say "There is a lot of evidence that evidence is good!", but evidence is not proof. There is no logical connection between evidence and truth. Therefore Science is a superstition.

And that doesn't decrease my affection for Science one bit.

Re:Fist

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

Re:Religion

[Dave Tucker Online]

I think that a lot of Christians have their 'morals' through a fear of punishment

Not just Christians. Fear of God/church has been replaced with fear of Government. Don't believe me? Look at the situation with hurricane Katrina in 2005. Law-enforcement was disabled and people went bat-shit-crazy. People shot at medical helicopters who were trying to rescue people for no reason other than nobody was there to stop them. People looted. Sure, food and beer and such I can understand. But DVDs? Really?

Civilization is extremely fragile. That guy you pass on the street is only refraining from killing you because there would be legal consequences.

Base your morality on reason. There are logical reasons for morality. Most people don't think about it. Ask someone if they think theft is wrong. If they say yes, ask why. Many won't be able to give you a reasonable answer.

Who is Wolfgang Forstmeier?

[sorak]

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.

Re:not the same - phobias

[Zixia]

That's harmful to the individuals but beneficial to the species.

Re:Not so sure

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's a perfect example of the way Evolution is so very often wielded by its Priests: Take any condition, and you can come up with an explanation as to why Evolution explains it. A species is tall? That's because Evolution favored it. A species is short? That's because Evolution favored it. Men favor polygamy? Evolution. Men favor monogamy? Evolution. Humans are selfish? Evolution. Humans are altruistic? Evolution.

Evolution explains everything.

An idea that can explain anything, explains nothing.