Do stories serve too many purposes? (3)

Here is a weird thing Tyler Cowen says: "We are biologically programmed to think in terms of stories."

Think of what that means. There have been millions upon millions of human beings who have lived and died and over those millions upon millions of cases thinking in terms of stories proved to be an adaptive trait. So much so that we are all biologically programmed to think in terms of stories.

If you set out to test the claim that thinking in terms of stories is a good thing, you could not come up with a better test. There isn't a computer on earth that could run a model to test that assumption as completely and convincingly as evolution has done for us.

Is it any argument at all to say—as Cowen has done—that stories can be wrong and provide examples of this? It might be if we could demonstrate that in some situations stories consistently and systematically mislead us. (Does Cowen deliver on that? I'll get to that later.)

But such an argument, if it could be made, could only apply to specific situations that would have to be carefully described. It would be like an optical illusion—"if I put a straight stick in the water it will appear to be bent because ...." An optical illusion that applied at all times would be more like the fact that we see things in terms of discrete colours instead of as a continuous variation of shades. You might even say, in some contexts, that seeing discrete colours is to see things "not as they really are." But, outside of a physics classroom, what possible practical use would such a move be?

Meanwhile, it's very useful to see colours. It's not just an accident that we are evolved to see the world in colours or in terms of stories.