By MARY VALLIS, NATIONAL POST
Added: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Stephen for the link
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1739762&p=1


Not long ago, Hank Davis sat down for a chat with a friend. The conversation took an unexpected turn: Out spilled a story of her husband's infidelity, the breakdown of her marriage and the difficulties of raising a child alone. He nodded with sympathy as she told the tale. She concluded with a seemingly innocuous phrase. "But I guess everything happens for a reason. Don't you think so?"

Prof. Davis, an evolutionary psychologist, did not. While his friend was attempting to make sense of the events in her life by searching for a higher meaning, all the reasons Prof. Davis considered were much more concrete: The husband may have been unhappy, or simply attracted to someone else.

"She was ... none too pleased at the here-and-now approach I took to understanding her circumstances," Prof. Davis writes in his new book, Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World. "It offered little comfort, too much responsibility, and almost no social support."

A professor at the University of Guelph, Prof. Davis has spent the past 20 years paying attention to the use of such seemingly benign phrases: "It was a sign," "Thank God" and even "Good luck." To him, such phrases reflect a "caveman logic" that helped our ancestors survive the Pleistocene Age, but which is keeping our species from realizing its true potential. While we are well past the primitive age, he argues, we still happily shroud ourselves in superstition, magic and blind faith rather than burn the extra mental calories it takes to think critically and reach rational conclusions.
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http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1739762&p=1

TAGGED: PSYCHOLOGY