Social evolutionists Kevin Foster and Hanna Kokko, in their recent paper in The Proceedings Of The Royal Society, set themselves the following problem:
“…under what conditions might a tendency for performing behaviours that incorrectly assign cause and effect be adaptive from an individual fitness point of view?”
It’s puzzling why the authors think there is anything to explain. Is superstitious reasoning an inheritable, evolutionary feature? Take woodcutting. Amateurs will work wood in incorrect and erroneous ways. That’s not to say there isn’t an efficient and systematic way to work wood that can be taught and encouraged. Do we really need an evolutionary explanation why we evolved to have babies who don’t know the difference between an adze and a maul?
Foster and Kokko’s real motivation is revealed, I think, in an earlier paragraph:
“In a world increasingly dominated by science, superstitious and indeed religious thinking typically take a back seat in academic affairs. However, superstitions play a central role in many small-scale societies, and indeed remain prevalent in the popular culture of all societies. Why is this? Can science rationalize this seemingly most irrational aspect of human behaviour?”
Needless to say, the authors’ rationalization is that superstitious reasoning may have some adaptive value. It’s a curiously Victorian attitude to human cognition; as if irrationality were somehow taboo, and town and manor had to be reassured that the phenomenon only appeared to be irrational.
One of my irrational habits, while reading papers on evolutionary models, is to substitute the key word– in this case, “superstitious reasoning”– with something else, say, “a fondness for weevils.” I’m glad to report that applying the technique to this paper produced an equally cogent explanation of why weevil-lovers roam the planet Earth.
