How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [33]
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Spandrel: The magical-thinking part of the Belief Engine is also a spandrel—Stephen Jay Gould’s and Richard Lewontin’s metaphor for a necessary by-product of an evolved mechanism. In their influential paper, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm,” Gould and Lewontin explain that in architecture a spandrel is “the tapering triangular space formed by the intersection of two rounded arches at right angle.” This leftover space in medieval churches is filled with elaborate, beautiful designs so purposeful looking “that we are tempted to view it as the starting point of any analysis, as the cause in some sense of the surrounding architecture. But this would invert the proper path of analysis.” To ask “what is the purpose of the spandrel?” is to ask the wrong question. It would be like asking “why do males have nipples?” The correct question is “why do females have nipples?” The answer is that females need them to nurture their babies, and males and females are built on the same architectural frame. It was simply easier for nature to construct males with worthless nipples rather than reconfigure the underlying genetic architecture.
In this sense the magical-thinking component of the Belief Engine is a spandrel. We think magically because we have to think causally. We make Type 1 and 2 Errors because we need to make Type 1 and 2 Hits. We have magical thinking and superstitions because we need critical thinking and pattern-seeking. The two cannot be separated. Magical thinking is a spandrel—a necessary by-product of the evolved mechanism of causal thinking.
If my hypothesis is correct—that humans evolved a Belief Engine whose function it is to seek patterns and find causal relationships, and in the process makes mistakes in thinking—then we should find evidence for this engine in our ancestors as well as ourselves. Superstitions do not leave behind many fossils, though Cro-Magnon cave paintings and flower-strewn Neanderthal burial sites may serve as a starting point. We can also consider the behaviors of indigenous peoples living today, to a cautious extent, as mirrors of our ancestral Belief Engine, as well as our immediate predecessors in the Middle Ages. Here are three examples that show the relationship between magical thinking and the environment, and how we might have evolved a Belief Engine.
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The Azande. In the late 1920s anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard studied magical thinking among the Azande people of Southern Sudan of central Africa, who were living in a transitional state from hunting, fishing, and gathering to farming. In his 1937 book, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, Evans-Pritchard outlined the magical use of medicines, including “medicines connected witch natural forces” (prevention of rain, delay of sunset), “medicines connected with hoe culture” (to ensure the fruitfulness of food plants), “medicines connected with hunting, fishing, and collecting” (for everything from making the hunter invisible to preventing wounded animals from escaping), “medicines connected with arts and crafts” (smelting, beer brewing), “medicines connected with mystical powers” (witches, sorcerers), “medicines connected with social activities” (sexual potency, wealth), and, of course, “medicines connected with sickness.” In all of these categories the Azande Belief Engine produced Type 1 and 2 Errors and Hits. They believed plenty of falsehoods and rejected plenty of truths, but they also rejected falsehoods and believed truths. Evans-Pritchard noted:
Earliest evidence of hominid magical thinking. In a cave 132 feet deep cut into the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq 60,000