Much has been made lately of the anti-science stance of a large segment of the US population. (See for example Chris Mooney’s book). The acceptance of anthropomorphic climate change or the theory of evolution is starkly divided by political inclinations. However, as I have argued in the past, seemingly irrational behavior can actually make sense from an evolutionary perspective. As I have posted on before, one of the best ways to find an optimal solution to a problem is to search randomly, the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method being the quintessential example. Randomness is useful for searching in places you wouldn’t normally go and in overcoming unwanted correlations, which I recently attributed to most of our current problems (see here). Thus, we may have been evolutionarily selected to have diverse viewpoints and degrees of rational thinking. Given some situation, there is only one rationally optimal response and in the case of incomplete information, which is almost always true, it could be wrong. Thus, when a group of individuals is presented with a challenge, it may be more optimal for the group if multiple strategies, including irrational ones, are tried rather than putting all the eggs into one rational basket. I truly doubt that Australia could have been discovered 60 thousand years ago without some irrationally risky decisions. Even within science, people pursue ideas based on tenuous hunches all the time. Many great discoveries were made because people ignored conventional rational wisdom and did something irrational. Many have failed as a result as well. However, society as a whole is arguably better since generally success goes global while failure stays local.
It is not even necessary to have great differences in cognitive abilities to produce a wide range in rationality. One only needs to have a reward system that is stimulated by a wide range of signals. So while some children are strongly rewarded by finding self-consistent explanations to questions others are rewarded by acting rashly. Small initial differences would then amplify over time as the children seek environments that maximize their rewards. Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt covered this in their book, Welcome to Your Brain. Thus you would end up with a society with a wide variety of rationality.
