The theory which makes some sense to me is that we humans (as social creatures) have evolved to anthropomorphise. This make sense for dealing with other humans, who might be competitors, or compatriots. And the modelling makes use of a remarkable trick - observe one's own mind, and use those observations to model somebody else's mind. This explains why we have self-awareness, if not consciousness.
The thing is, the same trick also works quite well with other animals, who may be predators or prey, irrespective of whether other species actually have minds or not. So it makes sense that when some relatively rare phenomenon occurs, perhaps a thunderstorm, that the alpha male stands up and makes threatening noises. And it seems to work when the thunder goes away eventually. And so the thunderstorm has been anthropomorphised. This got extended to other phenomenon, eg famines get blamed on angry gods who can be appeased by making the appropriate offerings. Eventually con-artists exploited this with ever more elaborate stories that leveraged this innate tendency to anthromorphise. I'm sure astrology started out as a cunning plan to garner research funds for early astonomers from ignorant kings. Like most evolutionary stories, this is a "just so" story. But I think it has a grain of truth. Cheers, Russell -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders [email protected] http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- --- .-. . .-.. --- -.-. -.- ... -..-. .- .-. . -..-. - .... . -..-. . ... ... . -. - .. .- .-.. -..-. .-- --- .-. -.- . .-. ... FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
