Free Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World by Hank Davis Page B

another example; so is Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink . Gladwell introduces the concept of “thin slicing” to describe the cognitive strategy we use to evaluate new information. But he waits seventy-five pages before raising the problems associated with hair-triggered heuristics. Gladwell calls this section “The Dark Side of Thin Slicing.” Caveman Logic is also focused on the “dark side” of heuristics. Although I share Gladwell’s admiration for these mental shortcuts, I worry even more about their inappropriate application. Sometimes they leave us wallowing in ignorance and misinformation. One hundred thousand years ago, knowledge was in shorter supply and there were few ways to validate what we knew. Today, many of our fellow humans still inhabit an uninformed universe of magical thinking. Certainly, religion is born of and nurtured by the very kind of hardwired, uncritical, autopilot circuitry I am criticizing. But the problems are more widespread than religion. Politically correct or not, it’s time to call these beliefs and their consequences into question.

CREATIONISTS IN THE CRADLE
    Caveman Logic and prehistoric thinking are not simply written onto the blank-slate minds of uneducated people. It would be a big mistake to view these mental defects as the result of bad information that might have been replaced by alternative facts, if only they had been taught. It was never that simple.
    Two of our species’ foibles—the embracing of superstition and the wariness of science—do not stem directly from a lack of formal education. As we have already argued, the human mind is not an equal-opportunity consumer that will openly embrace rational thought, the scientific method, magical thinking, or religiosity, depending solely on which of these messages happens to cross our path.
    The mental predispositions to Caveman Logic are now being studied directly—not in adult humans, where their presence is well documented, but in young children. Perhaps not surprisingly, this research documents that the precursors to Caveman Logic are well entrenched in each of us long before we became educated, even before we acquired language. Certainly, our adult experiences, such as the lack of scientific education, may contribute to the problem. But, much as we may wish to blame ignorant politicians, conservative preachers, and poor teachers for the problem, the fundamental damage was done long before any of these blameworthy individuals came along. The mental circuitry we have inherited from our unnamed ancestors over the past 500,000 years has far more to do with the state of our species today.
    In addition to evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, another branch of human research has begun to contribute to our understanding of these issues. Within the past decade, the field of developmental psychology (once known simply as “child psychology”) has looked directly at the cognitive processes we discuss in this book. We tend to think of “human nature” as what ails your sister-in-law or the annoying guy sitting next to you at the movies. As old-time radio star Fibber McGee observed, “The trouble with human nature is that too many people have got it.” But “human nature” also describes how humans thought and behaved long before they became adults; indeed, long before they had a chance to learn much of anything from the world around them. Recent research shows that Caveman Logic and prehistoric thinking are part of what it means to be human—from our very earliest days of life.
    Writing in the journal Science , Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg 5 argue that the predispositions to the basest, most delusional, error-prone thinking are firmly in place in children so young that testing them cannot always involve language. The authors begin by noting that children as young as one year old are not blank slates. They possess both a “naive physics” and a “naive psychology.” These hardwired intuitions