Joseph Heinrich has several examples along with a proposed theory to explain them in his two most recent books Weirdest People in the World, and The Secret of our Success . Roughly the theory goes that certain things cannot be rediscovered by trial and error quickly enough. For example, many indigenous people have myths that guide how they prepare food, for example casava. The South American stories tell them how to prepare it, based on their myths, and those instructions ensure they clear out the cyanide before eating it. In Africa where it was transplanted the locals have no such myths, and the toxin builds up very slowly over decades. By the time it kills you, you are unlikely to point the blame at the food everyone has been eating apparently safely. As a result the deaths in Africa are Many times higher than those is South America because of differences in preparation. Many stories and myths work like this.
He also describes several that exist to help people get past major cognitive biases. Like using the randomness of divination to avoid falling into a pattern of hunting (recency bias among others) which prey could learn and adapt to. There is always a myth that goes with the practice.
Astral Codex Ten has a good recent article on this.
While the debate is ongoing, the Cinderella effect may be an example. That is whether the percentage chance of abuse by a non blood relative is higher than by a blood relative. Arguments seem to revolve around lower absolute rates by step parents vs higher percentage rates; and issues with data reliability.
With things like casava I wonder how the SA people got onto the effect in the first place, if it’s so weak and hard to disentangle. We have trouble doing that sort of thing now with meta-reviews and double blind studies!
The hard way: Generations of death. One family does things differently and starts a superstition about it. They do it and it works, but they don’t know why so they start a superstition. That becomes a myth.
This is also why Africa doesn’t just copy them. There is no respect for the myth and no understanding of the science, because the people who brought it over also disregarded the myth and assumed the plant was safe so didn’t do science until it was too late.
Does that work? The effect is weak, the pressure is competing with a lot more significant causes of death. And myths spread horizontally too. They’re not single family things, there can’t be enough variability and isolation to have a full Darwinian selection because it’s not like you have the tribes with the wrong belief being completely exterminated by that mistake.
That said, reading up on it it sounds like cassava can also cause acute poisoning, and that sounds like a much stronger feedback signal for people to notice.
Generations of data, fewer differences in environmental factors between members (diets, lifestyle, diseases, etc) to obscure the effect. For long-term effects like this, ‘modern science’ hasn’t really existed long enough to get much data in comparison to centuries of generational trial-and-error
Edit: also, long-term effects measured now have a bunch of confounders due to lifestyle change and rapid technological and medical development, while their conditions were basically stationary. Scientists would kill for that kind of data now!
Do most myths serve purposes like this, or is it only a small minority of the myths?
While the debate is ongoing, the Cinderella effect may be an example. That is whether the percentage chance of abuse by a non blood relative is higher than by a blood relative.
The Cinderella story seems to me an awfully convoluted way to convey so little information...
It has a lot more, that is just the headline. There is behavioral norms, expectations, what punishments look like, do they work or not, etc all of that is telling you where the Overton window was for the people who shared that version of the story. It has morals, warnings, behavior to avoid and behavior to emulate. It shows class function and has the very subversive message that movement between levels of class is possible, even if the upper class don’t want that to be true. It also has the subversive message that the nobility isn’t particularly noble (Cinderell’s family), but some really do live up to the ideals (the Prince). So don’t judge people by their status, look closer.
This is a minefield of a topic however, as people get very touchy over things. Already in this thread there are accusations of misogyny in myth, but is that true or do some cultures value different things? Are the Igbo, the Sami, and the Dine woman haters because they tell stories about the power of motherhood? Are those stories holding women back and creating a patriarchy or are they recording and passing on something meaningful about the difference between men and women and what female power looks like? You will get a big argument whichever side you come down on. Same with the yin/yang myth and all it symbolizes.
Another minefield here are the people who cannot tell the difference between representing a thing and supporting/endorsing it. Thus the bowdlerization of myth over time. Cinderella used to have scenes where the sisters carved up their feet to fit into the slipper. Briar Rose/sleeping beauty was not always woken by a kiss but by giving birth 9 months after the Prince visited her. Acteon wasn’t transformed and murdered for gazing upon a goddess but for attempting to “grape” her. There are, however, some people who assume if you include content in a story, that story is endorsing the content, thus the myths were said to be misogynistic and normalize assault of women when to the Greeks it was a warning to men that bad behavior would not go unpunished. The gods were watching. This is still a very fraught topic and people just don’t want to wade into it.
With all that said, it does appear that almost all myth has value Imbedded in it. Some cultural, some scientific, some no longer relevant. But stories survive only because they are valuable.
I think that people often get overly caught up in the fanciful details. Take Cinderella, you are correct that it is a lot of words for that message, but we remember it because of those words. Just the sentence “non-blood relatives can be dangerous to kids” would be forgotten and would be disbelieved. Cinderella has lasted for almost 2,000 years being traced back to the Greek historian Strabo in the first century. Gilgamesh is over 4,000 years old. The oldest known story is over 100,000 years old and we can trace its movements across continents and through many languages.
Humans tell stories, humans remember stories, humans are motivated by stories. Stories have power. True phrases are as quickly forgotten as spoken.
There is a magnificent YouTube channel, creganford that distills the academic learning on ancient stories and myth. Here is a link to one of his videos on how we know what we know about unwritten stories.
Joseph Heinrich has several examples along with a proposed theory to explain them in his two most recent books Weirdest People in the World, and The Secret of our Success . Roughly the theory goes that certain things cannot be rediscovered by trial and error quickly enough. For example, many indigenous people have myths that guide how they prepare food, for example casava. The South American stories tell them how to prepare it, based on their myths, and those instructions ensure they clear out the cyanide before eating it. In Africa where it was transplanted the locals have no such myths, and the toxin builds up very slowly over decades. By the time it kills you, you are unlikely to point the blame at the food everyone has been eating apparently safely. As a result the deaths in Africa are Many times higher than those is South America because of differences in preparation. Many stories and myths work like this.
He also describes several that exist to help people get past major cognitive biases. Like using the randomness of divination to avoid falling into a pattern of hunting (recency bias among others) which prey could learn and adapt to. There is always a myth that goes with the practice.
Astral Codex Ten has a good recent article on this.
While the debate is ongoing, the Cinderella effect may be an example. That is whether the percentage chance of abuse by a non blood relative is higher than by a blood relative. Arguments seem to revolve around lower absolute rates by step parents vs higher percentage rates; and issues with data reliability.
With things like casava I wonder how the SA people got onto the effect in the first place, if it’s so weak and hard to disentangle. We have trouble doing that sort of thing now with meta-reviews and double blind studies!
The hard way: Generations of death. One family does things differently and starts a superstition about it. They do it and it works, but they don’t know why so they start a superstition. That becomes a myth.
This is also why Africa doesn’t just copy them. There is no respect for the myth and no understanding of the science, because the people who brought it over also disregarded the myth and assumed the plant was safe so didn’t do science until it was too late.
Read the book it is amazing.
Does that work? The effect is weak, the pressure is competing with a lot more significant causes of death. And myths spread horizontally too. They’re not single family things, there can’t be enough variability and isolation to have a full Darwinian selection because it’s not like you have the tribes with the wrong belief being completely exterminated by that mistake.
That said, reading up on it it sounds like cassava can also cause acute poisoning, and that sounds like a much stronger feedback signal for people to notice.
Once again, I will point to the source: Joseph Heinrich, the secret of our Success. Yes you are correct it is messy. It is debated.
Generations of data, fewer differences in environmental factors between members (diets, lifestyle, diseases, etc) to obscure the effect. For long-term effects like this, ‘modern science’ hasn’t really existed long enough to get much data in comparison to centuries of generational trial-and-error
Edit: also, long-term effects measured now have a bunch of confounders due to lifestyle change and rapid technological and medical development, while their conditions were basically stationary. Scientists would kill for that kind of data now!
Thanks for the answer.
Do most myths serve purposes like this, or is it only a small minority of the myths?
The Cinderella story seems to me an awfully convoluted way to convey so little information...
It has a lot more, that is just the headline. There is behavioral norms, expectations, what punishments look like, do they work or not, etc all of that is telling you where the Overton window was for the people who shared that version of the story. It has morals, warnings, behavior to avoid and behavior to emulate. It shows class function and has the very subversive message that movement between levels of class is possible, even if the upper class don’t want that to be true. It also has the subversive message that the nobility isn’t particularly noble (Cinderell’s family), but some really do live up to the ideals (the Prince). So don’t judge people by their status, look closer.
This is a minefield of a topic however, as people get very touchy over things. Already in this thread there are accusations of misogyny in myth, but is that true or do some cultures value different things? Are the Igbo, the Sami, and the Dine woman haters because they tell stories about the power of motherhood? Are those stories holding women back and creating a patriarchy or are they recording and passing on something meaningful about the difference between men and women and what female power looks like? You will get a big argument whichever side you come down on. Same with the yin/yang myth and all it symbolizes.
Another minefield here are the people who cannot tell the difference between representing a thing and supporting/endorsing it. Thus the bowdlerization of myth over time. Cinderella used to have scenes where the sisters carved up their feet to fit into the slipper. Briar Rose/sleeping beauty was not always woken by a kiss but by giving birth 9 months after the Prince visited her. Acteon wasn’t transformed and murdered for gazing upon a goddess but for attempting to “grape” her. There are, however, some people who assume if you include content in a story, that story is endorsing the content, thus the myths were said to be misogynistic and normalize assault of women when to the Greeks it was a warning to men that bad behavior would not go unpunished. The gods were watching. This is still a very fraught topic and people just don’t want to wade into it.
With all that said, it does appear that almost all myth has value Imbedded in it. Some cultural, some scientific, some no longer relevant. But stories survive only because they are valuable.
I think that people often get overly caught up in the fanciful details. Take Cinderella, you are correct that it is a lot of words for that message, but we remember it because of those words. Just the sentence “non-blood relatives can be dangerous to kids” would be forgotten and would be disbelieved. Cinderella has lasted for almost 2,000 years being traced back to the Greek historian Strabo in the first century. Gilgamesh is over 4,000 years old. The oldest known story is over 100,000 years old and we can trace its movements across continents and through many languages.
Humans tell stories, humans remember stories, humans are motivated by stories. Stories have power. True phrases are as quickly forgotten as spoken.
There is a magnificent YouTube channel, creganford that distills the academic learning on ancient stories and myth. Here is a link to one of his videos on how we know what we know about unwritten stories.
Thanks for the explanation.