The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [31]
Of course, organisms do not consciously make such calculations. Natural selection made them for us and imbued us with moral emotions that guide behavior. In The Science of Good and Evil I worked out the evolutionary advantages of being pro-social, cooperative, and altruistic not only to blood relatives, but to fellow group members and even strangers who have become honorary friends or relatives through positive social interactions. Examples include food redistribution and tool sharing among members of a tribe. In this context, evolution endowed us with a rule of thumb that says “be generous and helpful to our blood relatives and those who are nice and generous to us.” Even unrelated members of a clan who exhibit such positive attributes trigger in our brains a moral pattern: (A) Og was nice to me, so (B) I should be nice to Og; and (C) if I help Og, (D) Og will return the favor. In The Mind of the Market I demonstrated that this effect can be seen between clans and tribes when they participated in mutually beneficial exchanges, also known as trade. Even in the modern world, opening trade borders between two countries tends to lower tensions and aggressions between them, and closing trade borders—imposing trade sanctions—increases the likelihood that two nations will fight. These are both good examples of moral patternicities that have worked for and against our species.3
Foster and Kokko used Hamilton’s rule to derive their own formula to demonstrate that whenever the cost of believing that a false pattern is real is less than the cost of not believing a real pattern, natural selection will favor the patternicity.4 Through a series of complex formulas that included additional stimuli (wind in the trees) and prior events (past experience with predators and wind), the authors demonstrated that “the inability of individuals—human or otherwise—to assign causal probabilities to all sets of events that occur around them will often force them to lump causal associations with non-causal ones. From here, the evolutionary rationale for superstition is clear: natural selection will favour strategies that make many incorrect causal associations in order to establish those that are essential for survival and reproduction.” In other words, we tend to find meaningful patterns whether they are there or not, and there is a perfectly good reason to do so. In this sense, patternicities such as superstition and magical thinking are not so much errors in cognition as they are natural processes of a learning brain. We can no more eliminate superstitious learning than we can eliminate all learning. Although true pattern recognition helps us survive, false pattern recognition does not necessarily get us killed, and so the patternicity phenomenon endured the winnowing process of natural selection. Because we must make associations in order to survive and reproduce, natural selection favored all association-making strategies, even those that resulted in false positives. With this evolutionary perspective we can now understand that people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things.
The Evolution of Patternicity
Anecdotal association is a form of patternicity that is all too common and that leads to faulty conclusions. I heard that Aunt Mildred’s cancer went into remission after