[xabotage]

You are assuming that magical thinking is the optimal survival strategy as opposed to a lesser-evil byproduct of advanced cognition in a particular environment. This is like assuming that because all humans have appendices, having an appendix is necessarily a better survival strategy. It's not. It may have once served a purpose, but now the best it can do is kill you.

Nukes could wipe out the human race, but so could an asteroid. Coincidentally I'd be much less worried about having nukes if there was a lot less magical thinking in the world.

[williamtrask]

I don’t think magical thinking is optimal. But I do think strictly non-magical thinking is suboptimal. Despite being a scientist as a profession, I can’t ignore the empirical data across a million years that virtually all civilisations independently have magical thinking.

Your analogy of the appendix is a good one. Some things which were useful no longer are.

I feel religion in particular doesn’t fall into this category as it has known uses. Collective action in particular is something the exclusively scientific worldview seems to repel in practice.

I also think that we don’t yet fully see this because todays secular humanists have a tremendous amount of moral momentum inherited from 10 thousand years of non scientific society. But things are changing.