As I seem to be on a roll with the anti-atheist stuff (I myself am an apathetic agnostic), I thought I would take the time tonight to talk about the adaptive benefits of superstition.
It works like this. We human beings are a very bright bunch, and highly adaptable. But we don’t always have all the information we need to make an informed and rational decision. Yet the decision still needs to be made.
And between rational decision making and totally arbitrary, stochastic decisions lies superstition. [1]
Superstition, as we all know, is a belief in false patterns. For example, there is no rational way that breaking a mirror can somehow warp the laws of probability against you, and we all know this.
And yet, who among us can truthfully state that even in the second right after the breaking of a mirror, the idea of the resulting bad luck did not cross their mind and give them a tinge of dread.
That’s who superstition works. And we are primed for superstition. We evolved big brains capable of not simply observing our surroundings, but drawing inferences about it. We can spot the patterns of the universe, and that has taken us from the days of noticing the tracks left by animals to today’s most cutting edge science, and will take us well beyond.
But as we all know, this creates many false patterns in our minds. We call these false patterns superstitions when they are something as obvious as thinking black cats are bad luck, but the phenomenon goes far deeper than a bunch of old wives’ tales. Even something as simple and incontrovertible as disliking a particular odor because you associate it with a traumatic event in your life is, when analyzed from the point of pure reason, a superstition.
After all, the odor didn’t do anything to hurt you.
But our minds make these associations anyhow, and there is little we can do about it. Knowing that these patterns of associations are false is of little help. To use a personal example, I know that my claustrophobia is completely irrational and that I am in no more danger in a small space than in a big one.
But close spaces of all sorts (like tunnels… yikes) still make me incredibly anxious. Reason alone cannot conquer such deep seated fears. And yet I am a pretty rational, reasonable fellow who is certainly intelligent enough to know what is rationally supportable and what is not.
Arguably, there is even a chance that my fear of small spaces might endanger my life some day. If I was in a situation where the only way to survive was to force myself into a small, tight space (I am sweating just thinking about it), I might well hesitate at a critical moment and end up dead from claustrophobia.
And yet still, I am saying that superstition is an adaptive trait. Clearly, at some point in the evolution of human consciousness, it was decided that having our pattern-seeking minds generate many false positives was worth it for the benefit derived from the genuine patterns we perceived.
And like I said in the beginning of this text, decisions need to be made. Those of our ancestors who froze in place when called upon to make a decision based on insufficient information did not survive to pass on their genes to us. We are all descended from a long line of people with very active pattern-seeking minds, and where there was no pattern to be gleaned from our existing knowledge, we took our best guess and acted upon that.
And it’s worked out pretty good so far.
Consider the problem of Buridan’s Ass[2]. The idea behind this thought experiment is that if you place a hungry donkey in the middle of equidistant and equally appealing stacks of hay, the donkey will starve to death because there is no rational basis upon which to decide which stack to eat.
That is precisely the problem superstition solves. And the patterns that form in our minds usually have at least a grain of truth to them. My claustrophobia is not entirely baseless. One can get trapped or stuck in small places, and my claustrophobia certainly makes it a lot less likely that such a situation will ever happen to me.
Similarly, the broken mirror might not be able to change your luck, but if it that is what it takes to remind people do be careful around mirrors (which used to be extremely expensive), what’s the harm?
I am not saying all superstition is harmless or beneficial. Far from it. The world is currently experiencing the effects of a superstition engendered by some very bad science and passed around like it’s the gospel truth in the form of the anti-vaccination movement. Superstition in the form of religion continues to be a source of strife in some parts of the world (but also a source of comfort and strength to the rest of the world). People’s irrational fears cause untold amounts of unnecessary
pain, fear, and confusion every single day, and the world would be, on the whole, better off if it were a little more rational and a little less superstitious.
I just wanted to use today’s column to remind people that everybody is superstitious, even you, and that we could not function as human beings without our ability to create unsupportable beliefs and act upon them.
If you claim to be free of superstition, you are basically claiming to always have enough information to make a fully rational, informed decision in absolutely every circumstance, and how rational is that?
Just admit that you are a superstitious human being like the rest of us, and learn to deal with it.
That’s all for today, folks! Talk to you again tomorrow.