Submitted by ali cat on
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Perhaps you've noticed that many of the people around you believe some pretty bizarre things. From spaceships following comets to psychic phone-lines to being able to solve the problem of people wanting to kill people by banning guns to wine turning into blood (that somehow you can drink). In fact, given a little thought, you and a friend could probably come up with a couple of pages each of stuff that each of you can't believe people believe...
...Then, while comparing your list to your friend's, you discover you both believe some of the things on the other person's list.
The question, therefore, is not so much which of these things you (and/or others) believe is true (I'd bet on "almost none," it's probably the best guess - including a lot of things I believe in), but why people "believe" anything in the first place.
Looked at dispassionately (not possible to do, I know), it's very strange and not a little bit, well, unbelievable that a species would develop the ability to accept as fact things they have absolutely no evidence for.
Why?
Here's my idea...
Somewhere in the last couple of million years, the evolution of humans hit a snag. Intelligence had been, up to this point, a real cool idea. With it, hominids could adapt in years (or even days!) to changed conditions that would have taken millennia (at least!) to adapt to by the more standard pure physical evolution.
However, at some point along man's evolutionary path, human's became bright enough to realize that this whole living and breeding thing was pretty pointless.
Go with me on this a second: Now, as far as I can tell, there are no gods, afterlives, "Grand Purposes", etc. (I know you probably believe otherwise, that's okay. That's what my theory here would predict). As such, this kinda knocks the supports out of any sort of "Meaning of Life."
(Again, this is my belief - obviously I don't have any evidence for it as you can't have evidence for a negative, just lack of evidence for it's positive. And, of course, what constitutes "evidence for" is subject to belief too...)
Well, creatures that feel it's pointless to go on don't really do all that well at, well, going on. They don't tend to breed as much, they probably tend more towards suicide, and in general have a lot of problems that don't make them all that evolutionarily fit.
But the hominid niche was pretty much being intelligent and it's kinda hard to turn back the clock on your evolutionary flight-path at such a late date, so evolution had to "come up" with a solution.
And it did: Gullibility.
As I said earlier, from an external, (impossibly) dispassionate viewpoint, belief in gods, afterlives, etc., is pretty strange. I mean, the vast majority of the believers have never "met" a god, and none of them have actually died.
(to my mind, "near death" experiences don't count. Another belief, of course, but as far as I'm concerned, "close" only counts in horseshoes and nuclear exchanges...)
Yet all these people believe most fervently that these things exist: usually on the word of someone who either starved themselves until they hallucinated, took lots of "sacred drugs" until they did the same, or were, by any rational standards, "not right in the head" 24/7 to begin with.
Heck, sometimes, they used all three processes at the same time!
In a court case, you probably wouldn't get past the hearing stage with witnesses like this (at least I hope so. Even current U.S. courts can't be that screwed up...a fervently hoped for belief!). In fact, it would probably be a good bet that whatever was the opposite of these witnesses' claims was the more likely.
Yet this total lack of viable evidence does not seem to deter most from believing - say - in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god who, none-the-less, seems surprised that his kids don't stay away from the Tree of Knowledge after he expressly forbid them from going there - the average mother of a two-year old is brighter than that!
The question now is: Why do people believe these things?
The suggested answer: Because people who believed these things - who were gullible - were more likely to pass on their gene/memes than those who didn't. "Gullibility" had become evolutionarily advantageous.
However, like many evolutionary adaptations, gullibility is pretty much a kludge. Humans have to walk a fine line between a) believing enough evidence-free stuff to continue to have a sense of purpose (and thus continue to breed) and b) believing so much stuff without proof that they start doing dangerous things like believing they can fly off the nearest tall building.
"B" here is generally called "insanity."
My theory here perhaps explains why insanity exists. On the whole, you wouldn't expect something like insanity to survive in the gene pool for long - it's definitely not a good adaptation.
The only reason you'd expect to see it's continued part of a human's makeup is that it's linked to something that is evolutionarily desirable.
In this case, gullibility.
(of course, it could also easily be linked to other things - intelligence, period, for one, but let's go with this one for now, it's less depressing)
As such, insanity is the equivalent of sickle-cell anemia to gullibility's "malaria-protection."
Note: No one in his right mind would design such a thing - but evolution has no mind, so this doesn't bother it at all. As long as it works for the moment, it's happy.
(Further Note: I'm anthropomorphizing evolution like crazy here - it's not an entity, it's a process - part of the process we call "nature," which is also not an entity, BTW. And thus, it has no desires, feelings, wants, thoughts, itches, bothers, etc.
It just is: Random and meaningless.
Human languages, however, don t seem to handle the "random and meaningless" very well. We always want there to be a reason. Look how much more upset we get about "mindless acts of violence" then about equally violent events that have a purpose we can see - even if it's a pretty cold-blooded, selfish purpose, and the victim is just as dead)
Furthermore, this theory seems to explain why human beings like fiction. If you were to tell a hypothetical super-intellegent, super-logical alien computer that you liked to hear stories about people who don't exist, doing things that never happened, in lands that never were, you'd probably get the alien equivalent of a "Windows Error Message" (or, if it was a Strek computer, you'd get lots of sparks, a cry for assistance from it's creator, and the freeing of an entire alien civilization from the colorless, stagnant tyranny of the machine. But I digress...).
However, if humans adapted to believing untrue things, they probably also adapted to desiring untrue things to believe in - it's the easiest way for evolution to insure they have these things to believe in (and thus retain a sense of purpose). Thus, mankind was pre-adapted to the existence of Norman Mailer, TV dramas, and campfire stories that end with a bloody claw hanging from the car door...
True - as some will point out - other uses for fiction exist: teaching life's lessons, inspiring deep thoughts about a subject, even "shouting" out to the world to point out a major, ignored problem. But to my mind, these are "add-ons" - they are no more the reason why man evolved the ability to like fiction than the Dodgers are the reason man evolved the ability to throw overhanded.
Anywho, I'm not saying this is the answer but it's certainly worth thinking about...
I got a lot of flack from one of my friends for calling this trait "gullibility." Basically, her complaints boiled down to stating that my only reason for using this word was to be insulting to people who believe in things I didn't.
I considered for a long time using a different term - even pulled this page for a couple of months. But in the end I couldn't come up with one that clearly meant "Capability to believe things without any evidence to prove them."
I did, however, remove the term "Theory" and replaced it with "Working Hypothesis" - this is no where near being a theory. Heck, how would you test it?
Anywho, you can take it as read, though, that I'm not using this term in an insulting matter - if for no other reason than I have this "capability" as well (and probably use it far more often than I suspect).
David Johnson
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