Complexity Digest 2008.38 - 06

18-Sept-2008

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The Evolution Of Superstitious And Superstition-Like Behaviour, Proc. Biol. Sc. Bookmark and Share

Excerpts: Superstitious behaviours, which arise through the incorrect assignment of cause and effect, receive considerable attention in psychology and popular culture. Perhaps owing to their seeming irrationality, however, they receive little attention in evolutionary biology. Here we develop a simple model to define the condition under which natural selection will favour assigning causality between two events. This leads to an intuitive inequality (...) that shows that natural selection can favour strategies that lead to frequent errors in assessment (...). (...) We conclude that behaviours which are, or appear, superstitious are an inevitable feature of adaptive behaviour in all organisms, including ourselves.