How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [31]
A Gallup poll conducted in 1991 revealed that half of all Americans believe in astrology and almost as many believe in extrasensory perception, or ESP; a third believe in the lost continent of Atlantis and in ghosts; and a full two-thirds believe they have had a psychic experience. Do we really live in the Age of Science? We do, but we mostly partake of the fruits of science—technology—whereas fundamental principles of scientific thinking are often poorly taught and rarely employed.
One reason for this tendency to believe in the supernatural is that we may be hardwired to think magically. We have lived in the modern world of science and technology for only a couple of hundred years, yet humanity has existed for a couple of hundred thousand years. What were we doing all those long-gone millennia? How did our brains evolve to cope with the problems in that radically different world?
Evolutionary psychologists—scientists who study the brain and behavior from an evolutionary perspective—make a reasonable argument that the modern brain (and along with it the mind and behavior) evolved over a period of about three million years from the small, fist-sized brain of the Australopithecines to the melon-sized brain of modern Homo sapiens. Since civilization arose only about 13,000 years ago with the domestication of plants and animals, 99.99 percent of human evolution took place in our “environment of evolutionary adaptation,” or EEA. The conditions of the EEA are primarily what shaped our brains, not what happened over the past thirteen millennia. Evolution does not work that fast. The brains of 25,000-year-old Cro-Magnons appear to be no different than ours. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, codirectors of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have summarized the field this way:
Evolutionary psychology is based on the recognition that the human brain consists of a large collection of functionally specialized computational devices that evolved to solve the adaptive problems regularly encountered by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Because humans share a universal evolved architecture, all ordinary individuals reliably develop a distinctively human set of preferences, motives, shared conceptual frameworks, emotion programs, content-specific reasoning procedures, and specialized interpretation systems—programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability, and whose designs constitute a precise definition of human nature.
Steven Pinker describes these specialized computational devices as mental modules. Pinker’s “module” is metaphorical, however. Modules are not necessarily located in a single spot in the brain (although they can be, as with Broca’s area for language). He describes it as something that “may be broken into regions that are interconnected by fibers that make the regions act as a unit.” A bundle of neurons here connected to another bundle of neurons there, “sprawling messily over the bulges and crevasses of the brain” might form a module. Their interconnectedness rather than location is the key to the module’s function. The brain then is not so much a single organ as it is a system of specific organs evolved in the EEA to solve specific problems.
Within the circle of professional scientists who study the brain—neurophysiologists, cognitive psychologists, psychopharmacologists, and brain–mind philosophers—this is a very controversial subject. Some support the modular view of the brain, some reject it outright, while others fall in between. David Noelle, of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at the Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, informs me