Free Hybrids by Robert J. Sawyer

believers who’ve never had a religious experience, and yet they still believe. That’s the hole in our work, the missing piece in a comprehensive explanation of why
Homo sapiens
believe in God. But this is the answer—do you see? It’s this psychology of reinforcement—this bit of the way our brains are programmed—that makes us susceptible to belief in God. If there really was a God, a rational species would expect rational, predictable behavior from him. But we don’t get that. Sometimes, it seems as though God protects certain people, and at other times, he’ll let a nun fall down an open elevator shaft. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, and so we say—”
    Mary was nodding, and she finished the thought for Veronica. “We say, ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.’ ”
    “Just so!” crowed Veronica. “Prayers aren’t always answered, but people go right on praying. But Ponter’s people aren’t wired like that.” She turned to the Neanderthal. “Are you?”
    “No,” said Ponter. “I do not need Hak to tell me that this is not the way we behave. If the result is not predictable—if a pattern cannot be discerned—we discard the behavior as pointless.”
    “But
we
don’t,” said Veronica, rubbing her hands together. Mary could see she had the same “Cover of
Science
, here I come!” expression Mary herself had worn years ago, when she’d succeeded in extracting DNA from the Neanderthal type specimen in Germany. Veronica beamed at Ponter, then at Mary. “Even if there is no pattern, we convince ourselves that there’s some underlying logic to it all. That’s why we don’t just make up stories about gods; we actually
believe
them.”
    The religious Mary had shifted entirely to the background; this was making the scientist in her have its own peak experience. “Are you sure about this, Veronica? Because if you are—”
    “Oh, I am; I am. There’s a famous experiment—I’ll e-mail you the citation. It had two groups of people playing a game on a grid, the rules of which hadn’t been explained to the players. All they knew in advance was they’d get points for good moves and no points for bad moves. Well, for one set of players, points were given for successfully marking every other space in the lower-right corner of the grid—and, of course, after enough turns, the players easily figured that out, and could win the game every time. But the second set of players were rewarded points
randomly:
whether they got points or not had no relation to what moves they made. But those players
also
came up with rules that they said governed the game, and they were convinced that by following those rules, they were likely to do better.”
    “Really?” said Ponter. “I would simply lose interest in the game.”
    “No doubt you would,” said Veronica, smiling broadly. “But we would find it fascinating.”
    “Or irritating,” said Mary.
    “Irritating, yes! Meaning it would bug us—because we just can’t accept that there’s no underlying design to things.” Veronica looked at Ponter. “Can I try another little test? Again, Mary, if you don’t mind, please don’t say anything. Ponter, do you know what I mean when I talk about flipping a coin?”
    Ponter didn’t, so Veronica demonstrated with a loonie she fished from a pocket of her lab coat. When Ponter nodded that he understood, the skinny redhead went on. “All right, if I flip this coin twenty times, and all twenty times it happens to come up heads, what are the chances it will come up heads again on the twenty-first try?”
    Ponter didn’t hesitate. “One-to-one.”
    “Just so! Or to put it the way we would, fifty-fifty, right? An even chance.”
    Ponter nodded.
    “Now, Mary, I’m sure you know that Ponter is absolutely right: it doesn’t matter how many times heads has come up in succession before the current flip, assuming the coin isn’t unbalanced. The odds that the next flip will be heads are always fifty-fifty. But