I hadn't thought of superstition as an evolved way of thinking. I suppose we are so used to thinking of it as culturally backwards, that it requires a different perspective to connect it as you suggest, looking at it from the way we might imagine protohumans may have seen the world, as yet not evolved enough to connect natural phenomena with magic the way early civilizations did. Then at some point there arose a sense of magic.
I like to think of all modes of human interaction/behaviour as evolved or socially evolved modes. And yes I am a bit protohuman in my nuttiness
I'm not sure about how this contributes to survival, that is, whether it evolved as a trait per se, or whether it is a consequence of other evolved traits, such as the ability to form abstractions. Superstition invariably requires the drawing of inferences, albeit without proper regard to cause and effect, and certainly that is more than instinct. Yet the fear that accompanies superstition seems almost primal, so indeed it may be as old as, say, Homo Erectus.
Yes, the evolutionary path is open to interpretation. And I wouldn’t try to fix it down to any specific path, as it very possibly could have multiple memetic/genetic lines of ancestry. I would say that I see it as socially evolved as much as genetically.
Something hard to deny about the idea that it seems like a trait is the fact that it does seem that we come hardwired to jump to conclusions. This also serves as better characterization of human nature than the one religious people sometimes give - that humans are hardwired to believe in God.
I don’t so much buy into the idea that any hardwiring to believe in god was a naturally selected trait. I more see it as a feedback back into the population once the beneficial functions of communal living artificially selected god-belief traits into the populace. So it began as socially evolved memes that then pressurised host communities to allow/support avid believers to procreate more, and therefore pass on their traits. So a socially evolved mechanism, that caused certain genes to strengthen in the population which could then (given the right social pressures) aid uptake of belief/religious epiphany after sufficient generations of selection.
I would go so far as to speculate that the trait of jumping to conclusions may have been a survival mechanism insofar as it would have endowed early humans the ability to experiment with different wrong ideas before arriving by trial and error at the ones essential for survival. An example is the development of the proper method for selecting and chipping rock to produce a functional hand axe. The mental skills to keep guessing how a naturally chipped rock could be reproduced are remarkably advanced beyond the capacity of apes. And it does seem that these skills appeared with the ability to think symbolically, as in the development of speech. And the hand axe seems to have contributed to the proliferation of humans as they worked their way out of Africa. Similar hand axes can be found from Spain to Indonesia, among the oldest of protohuman fossils.
And while it is certainly possible that any individual in isolation can attribute magic to unexplained causes, the gathering together of superstitious ideation into coherent threads may simply be the inevitable consequence of earliest of cultures, sharing their individual ideas about magical causes. In the sense that social living had survival advantages then it makes sense to connect superstition to survival. At some point the belief in magic, the shared insights into magical causes, may have become the first pastime to form bonds that held early social groups together.
Definitely the mechanisms you describe occurred.
You know when you are walking down the street, and you get this strong feeling someone is watching you? Then lo and behold your vision, as if running on autopilot, snaps up to a second floor window with one lone observer who has their gaze fixed firmly upon you? Now some see this as a sixth sense. I see it as the subconscious mind piecing together unfocused upon retinal data and using said data to form a survival response.
This doesn’t necessarily apply to what I am suggesting.
But superstitious activities like my athlete example patently work, that’s why they are employed; athletes need to be in the comfort zone. Now whether we go back and apply this to a soldier fighting in battles for the defence of Rome, or go back further and apply this to a band of homo sapiens (not sapiens sapiens) who survived because they were able to get in the zone every time they went into skirmishes against their Neanderthal cousins (hypothetical of course): one marauder always has to wear his battle necklace, bad things may happen if he doesn’t wear his battle necklace.
How much of this is socially evolved and how much is genetically imprinted is massively unclear. I would say though, that any socially evolved behaviour, if found to be beneficial, will through pressure cause certain traits to feedback into the genepool.
If we are to conclude that we are hardwired to be superstitious, whether by some evolved tendency that contributed directly to survival, or whether it comes in tandem with other traits needed to survive, then I think we converge at the root source of religion. And in the same vein we can say people are probably wired to be religious.
Yes, it would seem we very well could be. But not to say reason can’t win out.
I would say the propensity or even possible weakness could exist in all of us. An analogy (only an analogy as we don’t know enough yet) would be chronological genes that switch on or switch off within the body during different phases of the human lifespan. Is it possible religion can be switched on (phenotypically expressed) once certain triggers are depressed/oppressed? I think religious belief goes hand in hand with the personal sense of the weakness of the body, the fear of the unknown. Some people need the psychological support belief in god offers. Maybe when a group of individuals feel so set upon by the world these triggers are set off and cause people to collect to support one another? A kind of group behavioural trait that has some hardcoding but also requires the variables: adversity (psychological or physical); idea/sense/feeling of god (socially evolved memes as precursors), a group of interacting people with lingual skills.
I must admit, I do love the fact the human mind is capable of reasoning its way around the propensity to believe an unproven. We would all probably be much happier, and lead more psychologically peaceful lives if we could just make the leap to believe in the fact someone is watching over all of us. But sadly, my mind will not allow it. I dearly hope that life will never deal me such god-awful cards to the point where my spirit is eroded down so much that I will get into bed with god belief. Who knows what is in store for an aging human mind, until it happens to oneself. At 32 years old I am still quite young, but I have had times where I thought my times was up, and the mind does tend to turn to the idea of god, just in case I think.
Is it such a potent socially evolved behaviour that it can eat into the most avid atheist’s psyche (though I will admit god is possible); or is it truly hardcoded into all of us and we will be lucky to escape its clutches within our lifetimes; or is it a combination of all and the above . . . (excuse the pun).
