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Complexity Digest 2008.38 - 06
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18-Sept-2008

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









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.
Source: The Evolution Of Superstitious And Superstition-Like Behaviour[
http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/v61648mh87863528/?p=4b9f83bfcc794f98bdccd55f2aae6760&pi=7
], K. R. Foster, H. Kokko, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.0981, Proceedings B:
Biological Sciences, 2008/09/09
Contributed by Pritha Das - prithadas01yahoo.com

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