Within the circle of professional scientists who study the brain—neurophysiologists, cognitive psychologists, psychopharmacologists, and brain–mind philosophers—this is a very controversial subject. Some support the modular view of the brain, some reject it outright, while others fall in between. David Noelle, of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at the Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, informs me that:
Modern neuroscience has made it clear that the adult brain does contain functionally distinct circuits. As our understanding of the brain advances, however, we find that these circuits rarely map directly onto complex domains of human experience, such as ‘religion’ or ‘belief.’ Instead, we find circuits for more basic things, such as recognizing our location in space, predicting when something good is going to happen (e.g., when we will be rewarded), remembering events from our own lives, and keeping focused on our current goal. Complex aspects of behavior, like religious practices, arise from the interaction of these systems—not from any one module.
Most mental modules are thought of as quite specific, but some evolutionary psychologists argue for making a distinction between mental modules being “domain-specific” versus “domain-general.” Tooby, Cosmides, and Pinker, for example, reject the idea of a domain-general processor, whereas many psychologists accept the notion of a global intelligence, called g, that would most certainly be considered domain-general. Archaeologist Steven Mithen goes so far as to say that it was a domain-general processor that made us human: “The critical step in the evolution of the modern mind was the switch from a mind designed like a Swiss army knife to one with cognitive fluidity, from a specialized to a generalized type of mentality. This enabled people to design complex tools, to create art and believe in religious ideologies. Moreover, the potential for other types of thought which are critical to the modern world can be laid at the door of cognitive fluidity.”
Instead of the metaphor of a “module” to account for such cultural phenomena as religion, I would suggest that we evolved a more general Belief Engine, and that it is Janus-faced—that is, under certain conditions it leads to magical thinking while under different circumstances it leads to scientific thinking. We might think of the Belief Engine as a central processor that sits beneath more specific modules. How does this work?
Humans evolved to be skilled pattern-seeking creatures. Those who were best at finding patterns (standing upwind of game animals is bad for the hunt, cow manure is good for the crops) left behind the most offspring. We are their descendants. The problem in seeking and finding patterns is knowing which ones are meaningful and which ones are not. Unfortunately our brains are not always good at determining the difference. The reason is that discovering a meaningless pattern (painting animals on a cave wall before a hunt) usually does no harm and may even do some good in reducing anxiety in uncertain environments. So we are left with the legacy of two types of thinking errors: Type 1 Error: Believing a falsehood and Type 2 Error: Rejecting a truth. In some cases, neither of these errors will automatically get us killed, so we can live with them. And we do, on a daily basis—witness the aforementioned Gallup poll statistics of magical thinking. The Belief Engine is an evolved mechanism for helping us survive, because in addition to committing Type 1 and Type 2 errors, we also commit what we might call a Type 1 Hit: Not believing a falsehood and a Type 2 Hit: Believing a truth.
It seems reasonable to argue that the brain consists of both specific and general modules, and the Belief Engine is a domain-general processor. In fact, it is one of the most general of all modules since at its core it is the basis of all learning. After all, we have to believe something about our environment, and these beliefs are learned through experience. But the process of forming beliefs is genetically hardwired. To account for the fact that the Belief Engine is capable of both Type 1 and 2 Errors along with Type 1 and 2 Hits, we can consider two conditions under which it evolved:
1.
Natural Selection: The Belief Engine is a useful mechanism for survival, not just for learning about dangerous and potentially lethal environments (where Type 1 and 2 Hits help us survive), but in reducing anxiety about those environments; through magical thinking—there is psychological evidence that magical thinking reduces anxiety in uncertain environments; medical evidence that prayer, meditation, and worship may lead to greater physical and mental health; and anthropological evidence that magicians, shamans, and the kings who use them have more power and win more copulations, thus spreading their genes for magical thinking.
2.
Spandrel: The magical-thinking part of the Belief Engine is also a spandrel—Stephen Jay Gould’s and Richard Lewontin’s metaphor for a necessary by-product of an evolved mechanism. In their influential paper, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm,” Gould and Lewontin explain that in architecture a spandrel is “the tapering triangular space formed by the intersection of two rounded arches at right angle.” This leftover space in medieval churches is filled with elaborate, beautiful designs so purposeful looking “that we are tempted to view it as the starting point of any analysis, as the cause in some sense of the surrounding architecture. But this would invert the proper path of analysis.” To ask “what is the purpose of the spandrel?” is to ask the wrong question. It would be like asking “why do males have nipples?” The correct question is “why do females have nipples?” The answer is that females need them to nurture their babies, and males and females are built on the same architectural frame. It was simply easier for nature to construct males with worthless nipples rather than reconfigure the underlying genetic architecture.
In this sense the magical-thinking component of the Belief Engine is a spandrel. We think magically because we have to think causally. We make Type 1 and 2 Errors because we need to make Type 1 and 2 Hits. We have magical thinking and superstitions because we need critical thinking and pattern-seeking. The two cannot be separated. Magical thinking is a spandrel—a necessary by-product of the evolved mechanism of causal thinking.
If my hypothesis is correct—that humans evolved a Belief Engine whose function it is to seek patterns and find causal relationships, and in the process makes mistakes in thinking—then we should find evidence for this engine in our ancestors as well as ourselves. Superstitions do not leave behind many fossils, though Cro-Magnon cave paintings and flower-strewn Neanderthal burial sites may serve as a starting point. We can also consider the behaviors of indigenous peoples living today, to a cautious extent, as mirrors of our ancestral Belief Engine, as well as our immediate predecessors in the Middle Ages. Here are three examples that show the relationship between magical thinking and the environment, and how we might have evolved a Belief Engine.
1.
The Azande. In the late 1920s anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard studied magical thinking among the Azande people of Southern Sudan of central Africa, who were living in a transitional state from hunting, fishing, and gathering to farming. In his 1937 book, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, Evans-Pritchard outlined the magical use of medicines, including “medicines connected witch natural forces” (prevention of rain, delay of sunset), “medicines connected with hoe culture” (to ensure the fruitfulness of food plants), “medicines connected with hunting, fishing, and collecting” (for everything from making the hunter invisible to preventing wounded animals from escaping), “medicines connected with arts and crafts” (smelting, beer brewing), “medicines connected with mystical powers” (witches, sorcerers), “medicines connected with social activities” (sexual potency, wealth), and, of course, “medicines connected with sickness.” In all of these categories the Azande Belief Engine produced Type 1 and 2 Errors and Hits. They believed plenty of falsehoods and rejected plenty of truths, but they also rejected falsehoods and believed truths. Evans-Pritchard noted:
Earliest evidence of hominid magical thinking. In a cave 132 feet deep cut into the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq 60,000 years ago, the body o
f a Neanderthal man was carefully buried on a bed of evergreen boughs. The corpse was placed on his left side, head to the south, facing west, and covered in flowers (identified through microscopic analysis of the surviving pollens). Already in the grave were an infant and two women.
Some Zande medicines actually do produce the effect aimed at, but so far as I have been able to observe the Zande does not make any qualitative distinction between these medicines and those that have no objective consequences. To him they are all alike ngua, medicine, and all are operated in magical rites in much the same manner. A Zande observes taboos and fish-poisons before throwing them into the water just as he addresses a crocodile’s tooth while he rubs the stems of his bananas with it to make them grow. And the fish-poison really does paralyze the fish while, truth to tell, the crocodile’s tooth has no influence over bananas.
As ethnobotanist Alondra Oubré has demonstrated, these Type 1 and 2 Errors and Hits of indigenous peoples are very valuable because not only do they sometimes get it right, that knowledge can be used to our benefit in the treatment of diseases (and thus they should be so compensated for their magical knowledge that translates into life-saving medicines for us).
2.
The Yanomamö. In similar fashion, Napoleon Chagnon discovered in his years among the Yanomamö people of South America that in some villages magical plants are cultivated and used for a number of functions, including the seduction of young women (the powder of a plant is pressed against the woman’s nose and mouth at which “she swoons and has an unsatiable desire for sex——so say both the men and the women”); to make men tranquil and sedate (“it is thrown on the men especially when they are fighting”); the destruction of an enemy (“People allegedly cultivate an especially malevolent plant that can be ‘blown’ on enemies at a great distance, or sprinkled on unwary male visitors while they sleep”); and blaming your enemies for your own misfortunes (“All Yanomamö groups are convinced that unaccountable deaths in their own village are the result of the use of harmful magic and charms directed at them by enemy groups”).
According to Chagnon, such magical thinking serves a very pragmatic and useful purpose, as in the Yanomamö jaguar myths, which exist because “the jaguar is an awesome and much-feared beast, for he can and does kill and eat men. He is as good a hunter as the Yanomamö are and is one of the few animals in the forest that hunts and kills men—as the Yanomamö themselves do.” The Yanomamö Belief Engine has constructed these myths and superstitions for a very specific problem of survival in an uncertain and dangerous world.
3.
The Trobriand Islanders. From 1914 to 1918 the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski lived among the Trobriand Islanders off the coast of New Guinea. In Trobriand fishing practices Malinowski discovered that the farther out to sea the islanders went, the more complex the superstitious rituals became. In the calm waters of the inner lagoon, there were very few rituals. By the time they reached the dangerous waters of deep-sea fishing, the Trobrianders were deep into magic. In his 1925 essay, “Magic, Science, and Religion,” Malinowski concluded that this belief system served the function of dealing with the anxiety produced by uncertainty. Contrary to his fellow anthropologists of the time, who held a progressive “stage” theory of superstition—with so-called primitives and their superstitions on the bottom, and white Europeans with their science on top—Malinowski discovered that magical thinking derived from environmental conditions, not inherent stupidities: “We find magic wherever the elements of chance and accident, and the emotional play between hope and fear have a wide and extensive range. We do not find magic wherever the pursuit is certain, reliable, and well under the control of rational methods and technological processes. Further, we find magic where the element of danger is conspicuous.”
Enhancing magical thinking. The Yanomamö man on the left is blowing the hallucinogenic ebene powder into the nostrils of the other. According to Napoleon Chagnon, the powder will trigger “grimaces, chokes, groans, coughs, gasps,” followed by “watery eyes and a profusely runny nose … dry heaves are also very common, as is out-and-out vomiting. Within a few minutes, one has difficulty focusing and begins to see spots and blips of lights. Knees get rubbery. Soon the hekura spirits can be seen dancing out of the sky and from the mountain tops, rhythmically prancing down their trails to enter the chest of their human beckoner, who by now is singing melodically to lure them into his body where he can control them—send them to harm enemies or help cure sick kinsmen.” The Belief Engine is more susceptible to superstitions and magical thinking when such hallucinogenic drugs are used.
In fact, Malinowski argues, it is as natural for humans to think scientifically as it is for them to think magically: “There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic. Nor are there, it must be added at once, any savage races lacking either in the scientific attitude or in science.” The same could be said for modern humans. It all depends on the environmental circumstances. Evolution gave us a large, complex, and malleable brain with certain built-in modules that respond to changing environments. In order to be successful hunters, fishers, and farmers, not to mention spouses, parents, and community members, any group of humans—Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, Trobriand Islanders, or we—would need a certain understanding of and mastery over both the physical and social environments: “In all this they are guided by a clear knowledge of weather and seasons, plants and pests, soil and tubers, and by a conviction that this knowledge is true and reliable, that it can be counted upon and must be scrupulously obeyed.” Malinowski discovered that humans inhabit two worlds—the sacred and the profane—with a clear-cut division between the two: “There is first the well-known set of conditions, the natural course of growth, as well as the ordinary pests and dangers to be warded off by fencing and weeding. On the other hand there is the domain of the unaccountable and adverse influences, as well as the great unearned increment of fortunate coincidence. The first conditions are coped with by knowledge and work, the second by magic.” The Trobriand Islanders are a reflection of ourselves, our ancestors, and our common evolutionary heritage to think both causally and magically.
THE MEDIEVAL BELIEF ENGINE
The relationship between the Belief Engine and the uncertainties and vagaries of life is clear in examining beliefs in the Middle Ages. Consider the fact that in medieval times 80 to 90 percent of the people were illiterate. Most could not even read the Bible, particularly since it was written in Latin, guaranteeing that it would remain the exclusive intellectual property of an elite few. Almost everyone believed in sorcery, werewolves, hobgoblins, witchcraft, and black magic. If a noblewoman died, her servants ran around the house emptying all containers of water so her soul would not drown. Her lord, in response to her death, faced east and formed a cross by lying prostrate on the ground, arms outstretched. If the left eye of a corpse did not close properly, the soul would spend extra time in purgatory (leading to the ritual closing of the eyes upon death). A man knew he was near death if he saw a shooting star or a vulture hovering over his home. If a wolf howled at night the one who heard him would disappear before dawn (one can imagine a campfire conversation: “I didn’t hear anything, did you?” “No, not I.”). Bloodletting was popular. Plagues were believed to be the result of an unfortunate conjuncture of the stars and planets. And the air was believed to be infested with such soulless spirits as unbaptized infants, ghouls who pulled out cadavers in graveyards and gnawed on their bones, water nymphs who lured knights to their deaths by drowning, drakes who dragged children into their caves beneath the earth, and vampires who sucked the blood of stray children.
Given the uncertainty and tenuousness of life in the Middle Ages, such superstitions should come as no surprise. In 1662 in England, for example, sixty out of every one hundred children never saw their seventeenth birthday. Life expectancy at birth of boys born in 1675 was thirty. Food supplies were unpredictable and plagues decimated dense but weakened populations. In London alone, there were six ep
idemics in the one hundred years spanning 1563 to 1665, wiping out between one-tenth and one-sixth of the population each time. Devastating fires routinely destroyed entire neighborhoods. Houses were made with thatched roofs and wooden chimneys, candles were the only source of light, and there were no safety matches. Firefighting techniques consisted of nothing more than throwing buckets of water, usually too little too late. There were no insurance companies, banks for personal savings, or any of the other security measures we take for granted in the modern world. Life really was, in Thomas Hobbes’s apt phrase, “nasty, brutish, and short.”
For the medieval mind, magical thinking provided an understanding of how the world worked: It attenuated anxiety and allowed people to shed personal responsibility by blaming events on bad luck, evil spirits, mischievous fairies, or God’s will, and permitted one to cast blame on others through curses and witchcraft. Astrology, the most popular science of the day, invoked the alignment of the stars and planets to explain all manner of human and natural phenomena, the past, present, and future, and life’s vagaries from daily events to yearly cycles. Only religion could rival astrology as an all-embracing explanation for the vicissitudes of life.
How We Believe, 2nd Ed. Page 8