Humans believe in many things, often with no solid evidence. So does belief give us an evolutionary advantage, or is it just something that survived regardless?
Gerard Buzolic Coolum Beach, Queensland, Australia
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The ability to believe in what others have discovered or seen provides an advantage. It enables us to work together, or to take the work of others and build on it. The same ability lets us take intellectual shortcuts, bypassing the hard work of gathering and evaluating evidence. Still, the species as a whole benefits.
Let鈥檚 not forget that some things are intangible. The experience of art, music and beauty is hard to prove with solid evidence, but these things put the reason to survive into life.
Nick Baker Colchester, Essex, UK
For a social species like humans, there probably is an evolutionary advantage in belief, because working everything out logically from evidence would take too long.
When I take a paracetamol tablet to alleviate toothache, I don鈥檛 have the evidence that it will work and not poison me, but I believe that this evidence exists. That involves trust.
We trust in our fellow humans鈥� experience, judgement and advice, and this can give us an evolutionary advantage.
But it can also lead us astray. What if we believe in something not because we think that evidence exists to support it, but just because we like the sound of it, or we like the unsubstantiated promises that go along with it, or we even see strategic advantages in being seen to believe in it?
Of course, we now have to question our interpretation of evolutionary advantage. Is the present situation, in which the planet is struggling for survival under the dominance of one destructive species, really to be seen as an evolutionary triumph?
Wade Miller-Knight London, UK
Evolution favours people and societies that hold that their environment is understandable and makes sense, because this facilitates useful decision-making.
When an experience doesn鈥檛 鈥渕ake sense鈥� as understood by a society, belief in luck, spirits, a customary practice, magic, chance and so on enables sense to nevertheless be made of that experience.
Francis Blake London, UK
The person who posed this question doesn鈥檛 specify belief in anything in particular, though I wonder if they had religion, or other supernatural beliefs, in mind?
When humans first became aware of their mortality 鈥� that is, of the inevitability of death 鈥� they may well have developed an idea of some sort of survival, perhaps an afterlife, as a form of consolation to avoid the bleak prospect of mere oblivion.
That would tend to make any present misery more bearable. You might expect the tendency towards such beliefs to be gene encoded eventually. This would account for the fact that almost all cultures (though not all individuals) support some form of supernatural belief.
There would be a real advantage in a belief that added purpose 鈥� or seemed to do so 鈥� to an otherwise harsh life, even if such belief wasn鈥檛 really supported with hard evidence.
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