Superstitions evolved to help us survive

Superstitions evolved to help us survive according to this New Scientist article.

Darwin never warned against crossing black cats, walking under ladders or stepping on cracks in the pavement, but his theory of natural selection explains why people believe in such nonsense.

The tendency to falsely link cause to effect – a superstition – is occasionally beneficial, says Kevin Foster, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

For instance, a prehistoric human might associate rustling grass with the approach of a predator and hide. Most of the time, the wind will have caused the sound, but “if a group of lions is coming there’s a huge benefit to not being around,” Foster says.

Foster and colleague Hanna Kokko, of the University of Helsinki, Finland, sought to determine exactly when such potentially false connections pay off.
Simplified behaviour

Rather than author just-so stories for every possible superstition – from lucky rabbit’s feet to Mayan numerology – Foster and Kokko worked with mathematical language and a simple definition for superstition that includes animals and even bacteria.

The pair modelled the situations in which superstition is adaptive. As long as the cost of believing a superstition is less than the cost of missing a real association, superstitious beliefs will be favoured.

Read the full article.

Random Quotes – 1

Some random quotes that I collected from the web:

Reflecting on the misinformation, half-truths, and weasel-words that form the bulk of political-campaign speecifying, I conclude that listening to politicians’ campaign speeches yields about as much information as listening to insects buzzing: in both cases you’re made aware that annoying, and possibly dangerous, pests are nearby.

Source: Cafe Hayek

“Faith is Hope given too much credit.”

— Matt Tuozzo

Source: Overcoming Bias

NBC Universal, which is trying to block a public bike path from traversing its property along the waterway…
One bike advocate said Universal executives told him they feared that people would use the path to lob unsolicited screenplays onto the studio’s nearby production lot — something that apparently happens at other spots when a Universal film scores big at the box office.

Source: boing-boing.

Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying.

Persistence is having the same goal over and over.

Source: Seth Godin.

As usual, the idealists are 100% right in principle and, as usual, the pragmatists are right in practice.

Source: Joel on Software

In a relationship, you are not meant to make someone else happy; you want to be happy *with* that someone else.

Source: Solitary Dreamer (3rd comment)

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How can the Chinese use computers, since their language contains so many characters?

Nàng, Image via Wikipedia

The Straight Dope tries to answer the question “How can the Chinese use computers, since their language contains so many characters?” and gives a very fascinating insight into the Chinese language:

(3) Enter the syllable into the computer phonetically using Roman (i.e., our) letters. This takes up to six keystrokes plus, in some programs, one more keystroke for the tone. Typically this pops up a menu of possible characters, six characters or so at a time.

(4) Page through the characters looking for the one you want. With 50,000 possible written syllables but only a few hundred possible spoken ones, each spoken syllable can have as many as 131 different meanings (average: 17), each with its own character. You could be paging quite a while, and you still might not find the character you want–no program includes all 50,000. (Answer to obvious question: in speech you figure out the meaning from the context. Never let your attention wander during a Chinese conversation.)

After reading the whole article I am amazed at how the Chinese have managed to be so computer literate!

Our own problems with Indian languages are similar, and if you have any interest in entering Indic languages into a computer, you should check out Lipikaar.com which is trying to use a similar technique.

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