Rather than letting the evolutionary heritage from our Pleistocene past continue to dominate our behaviour today, Hank Davis argues, in his book Caveman Logic, that these instincts can and should be overcome.
Davis spends much of his book puzzling over humanity’s preoccupation with religions and the supernatural, criticising practices such as astrology, pseudoscience, psychics and creationists. He says there is no culture in the world without some kind of religious belief system, arguing, “We are drawn to Stone Age thinking as if it were some kind of gravitational force.”
He critiques the justifications we use for life’s mishaps, such as “everything happens for a reason”, or that certain things are “meant to be”, saying this harks back to our evolutionary need to believe in causality, where we or some other spiritual force is instrumental in what happens. Whilst such beliefs reduce anxiety and lessen ones personal responsibility, he argues that they are irrational and reflect primitive thinking, which should now be abandoned.
Davis puts this in biological terms, introducing the reader to the area of ‘neurotheology’. Through brain scans, neurotheologists have found that our propensity to believe in the supernatural is seated in the brains temporal lobes. When their so-called ‘God spot’ is activated, people describe out-of-body experiences, visions, long tunnels and feelings of ‘presences’. He also discusses controversial evidence that a belief in a god has been associated with errors in cognitive reasoning tasks and IQ scores.
That said, I found Davis’ book more philosophical than scientific, and after having seen him give lectures, slightly disappointing. It isn’t until the very end of the book that he extends our errors in logic to anything beyond belief and superstition. Our evolutionary background is no doubt responsible for much of our irrational behaviour – take our response to climate change (See Cosmos 29, “Stone Age brains”, p88), overeating or relationships.
Nevertheless, he makes a compelling case that “biology is not destiny” and that critical thinking and science must be used to re-evaluate our decision making in the modern world.
