Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
user-inactivated · 4138 days ago · link · · parent · post: The Belief in Intelligent Design is an adaptive behaviour?
If you rewrite this more generally to say that looking to a higher power is a trait that evolved in humans, then I completely agree.What Shermer is saying in the quotation above is that the need to believe in creationism is possibly a trait that evolved.
I agree. Shermer calls it adapting to find patterns in nature -- and a further adaptation would be the brain's need to interpret phenomena so that they are explainable. He also implies that as soon as you find patterns in nature, you stop seeing the phenomena that do not fit the pattern. Sometimes, rather than looking for what fits a pattern, I look for what doesn't - but my brain starts to melt when I do that.