I Also Am A Fortune Teller (หมอดูฟันธง)*

I predict that Robert Axelrod will win a Nobel Prize for this work.

Well, he should anyway.

Now before you doubt my ability as a fortune teller, my Nobel prediction is currently 100% correct! In the late 1980's/early 1990's, I told my friends that Ahmed Zewail would surely win a Nobel prize in the future after listening to his talk about femtochemistry.

Well, one data point is probably a fluke anyway.

If you have not read "The Evolution of Cooperation", you should really take a look.

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*Of course, fortune tellers seem to know the future by doing these:

1. Predict dramatic things.
2. Predict often.
3. Ignore wrong predictions.
4. Focus exclusively on correct predictions.
5. Master cold reading.

The correct question we should ask ourselves is "Does the fortune teller performs better than chance?" not "Does the fortune teller predicts anything correctly?" I'm quite sure that all fortune tellers are fraud. However, if any of them is real, there are many Nobel prizes awaiting those who can deduce the nature of time from those real fortune teller's performance.

Superstition Is Not Limited To Human!

In 1948, there was an experiment by B.F. Skinner that showed that pigeons appeared to exhibit superstitious behaviors.


Full paper is here.


I think the result might be applicable to why human perform rituals, pray, bribe karma wheel, buy lotteries, etc. I also wonder whether animals have their religious thoughts too.


I like to collect these animal examples because, based on what we learn from animal and human behaviors, I believe that biology created human morals and religions through evolution of societal units and it's up to the us, not supernatural mechanisms, to make sure that bad deeds got punished and good deeds got rewarded. I don't believe that human require special treatment from nature in terms of mechanisms that shaped us.


A few books that shaped my thinking about this matter:

• Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes
• Peacemaking among Primates
• Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
• Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong
• Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration
• The Evolution of Cooperation

In the last book, bacteria show cooperative behaviors that might be examples of what we would call moral behaviors. That book, along with The Blind Watchmaker started my education in evolution.