Patternicity: Why I See Patterns

Image source: Matthew Hutson in Psychology Today Blog
re: Skinners superstitious pigeons

Michael Shermer writes the great "Skeptic" column in Scientific American. In the December issue he discusses "Patternicity", "the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise." Citing recent research he concludes

the evolutionary rationale is clear: natural selection will favor strategies that make many incorrect causal associations in order to establish those which are essential to survival and reproduction.

I would point out that there are many examples of evolution selecting strategies that are essential to reproduction and antithetical to survival; ask the black widow's mate or the salmon after spawning.

Too bad Shermer didn't have the December issue to read when he wrote his December column. Lizzie Buchen writes in "Patches for Faces":

For decades, scientists have debated the basis for our facility with faces: either human brains evolved specialized face-processing machinery, distinct from regions that deal with other objects, or they process all objects using an expansive, multipurpose network, merely developing an expertise for faces.

She cites research which indicates that the brain has evolved special areas and processes with the ability to recognize faces with a high degree of accuracy.

The point is that evolution has not produced a single facility to recognize patterns, but many. In the case of recognition of human faces, Homo sapiens evolution has been effective in evolving a system that avoids false correlations. Note however that humans are not able to distinguish gender in some species, even when the members of those species have no difficulty recognizing the other sex. So too, there are many sibling species that have defeated man's ability to distinguish one from the other (prior to DNA analysis) but which offer little problem to the members of those species. Different species have evolved different pattern recognition capabilities.

Still, of course, Shermer is right that the capacity to create and hold superstitious beliefs exists in Homo sapiens (and in other species), and certainly is a capacity that has resulted from evolutionary processes.

I would have liked Shermer to end his piece noting that superstitions may be "natural", they need not be dominant. Society too has evolved, and knowing our proneness to superstition we can take pains to avoid superstitious behavior on important issues and work to make evidence-based decisions.