We like to believe that reason is our pathway to truth. Yet from Popper’s demand for falsifiability to Darwin’s doubt about the mind’s origins, a more unsettling picture is emerging. Our brains were shaped not to perceive reality, but to survive within it. Evolution has optimized us for social cohesion rather than accuracy, leaving false beliefs not as evolutionary errors but as features of our survival. In an age that prizes truth, philosopher of science Samuel McKee argues that our greatest obstacle may be the very mind that seeks it.

Karl Popper’s famous demarcation criteria helped shape how we assess true and false beliefs. In deciding whether to give the prestigious status of “science” to ideas such as communism, astrology, and psychoanalysis, Popper asked if they were falsifiable: could they be proven wrong? If not, they weren’t scientific. 

Epistemological claims, their truth value, and how we assess the veracity of someone’s ideas would never be the same. Though specifically targeting science, Popper’s revolutionary approach can be applied effectively to everything from science to religion and everything in between. When someone states emphatically that theirs is the truth of the matter, we should respect the opportunity to probe a little deeper. The problem is, even when confronted with falsification, we are reluctant to let go. Though at any one time we can acknowledge that at least 20% of what we currently hold to be factual will sooner or later be let go by us, we still cling to it. Why we cling to false ideas may be the fault of evolution, for better and worse. In our post-Popperian age, we like to think of ourselves as optimized for reason, but, as social animals, we can often benefit from sharing false beliefs too.

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Our brains did not evolve to find the truth of the world; they evolved to help us survive.

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Charles Darwin was well aware of the implications of evolution for human perception, stating that it would be hard to trust the judgments of a brain that evolved from lower animals in his 1881 letter to William Graham. Even deeper than this problem is the challenge of the driving force behind natural selection: survival. Our brains did not evolve to find the truth of the world; they evolved to help us survive.

The argument which became known as the “evolutionary argument against naturalism,” was first proposed by Lord Balfour, a philosopher, scientist and statesman who went on to become Prime Minister between 1902-1905. He wrote in 1914 that our brains evolved for “convenience, not knowledge” by the direction of natural causes. Many thinkers developed the idea that to embrace evolutionary theory alongside reason and naturalistic assumptions was self-defeating, for our brains did not evolve for the purposes of truth or reason. C.S. Lewis discusses it in his book Miracles, and philosophers such as Richard Clyde Taylor and Stephen Clark took it further.

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There is considerable debate as to what Darwin himself meant, but regardless of the specificity, it seems to present a challenge as to how we form our beliefs about the world. This has been most powerfully articulated by the philosopher Alvin Plantinga of the University of Notre Dame. In his 1993 work Warrant and Proper Function, Plantinga took Lewis’ formulation of the argument and set Darwin’s “horrid doubt” against naturalism—the philosophy that all that exists is nature (as opposed to supernature) and formed by natural causes alone. An “evolutionary naturalism” can only lead to the deepest skepticism concerning our grasp of the truth about ultimate reality. How can our faculties possibly be reliable if they emerged through chance processes towards convenience and survival? Natural selection does not select for true beliefs but only for advantageous behaviors. In 2002 a collection of 11 responses to Plantinga was published called Naturalism Defeated? But this problem of why we should trust our brains to tell us the truth has many other incarnations.

Suppose I am an ancient hominid living in the African plains. If I see a bush moving near me, my instinct will tell me to flee to the nearest tree for my own survival. There is a strong chance that a predator inhabits the bush and is ready to pounce. My chances of survival greatly increase if I flee rather than stay, regardless of whether I was actually in danger or not. My brain can tell me a thousand tricks that lead to my survival chances increasing, and reality be damned.

In a recent interview with Professor Peter Atkins, he discussed the problem of solving the most complex problems of the cosmos. When considering String Theory and the challenge of multiple dimensions, our brains may simply be incapable of answering these seemingly intractable issues. This is because it is not what our brains evolved for, says Atkins. Our brains evolved to detect lions, tigers and bears; not to uncover the nature of ultimate reality. We have, therefore, imposed limitations by nature itself. Lord Martin Rees, likewise, suggests that this limit may restrict our human destiny without the assistance of artificial intelligence.

This presents an interesting dilemma for humanity going forward: our embracing of (and eventual reliance on) artificial intelligence may solve many problems for society, but it will greatly reduce the selection pressure on our brains. We may not need to strive so hard in mathematics, science and technology when AI can do it for us. Could humans in a thousand years find themselves with smaller brains and less developed mathematical capabilities?

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What this means for false beliefs is that humans may bond around entirely false beliefs, but this deep bonding becomes a tremendous boon to our survival.

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Regarding false beliefs, we find a bias in our evolution towards falsehood that keeps us alive, or at least a strong tolerance for false comforts and precautions that help keep us alive. Nature does not care if they are true or not. The problem is then compounded by our social behavior. Much like many other mammals, as well as the social insects, we live in highly complex social groups and form deep communal bonds.

There are a plethora of obvious evolutionary benefits to this. Pair bonding, kinship and living in groups will greatly enhance the survival of offspring. We have uniquely developed our education and play to involve multiple complex layers of bonding: we bond over leisure, interests, entertainment, and many other secondary characteristics.

Coupled with our neuroscience, we bond over meaning. Philosopher David McPherson has referred to us as a “meaning-seeking animal” with religious writer Karen Armstrong carrying this further; without meaning we die, just as without water we die. This is perhaps most famously demonstrated by Viktor Frankl in his extraordinary account of survival during the Holocaust Man’s Search for Meaning: those who discover and hold onto meaning will survive at greater rates and flourishing than those who do not.

What this means for false beliefs is that humans may bond around entirely false beliefs, but this deep bonding becomes a tremendous boon to our survival. Furthermore, we can bond over multiple fictions and falsehoods, which serve to give us a will to live and strive that could overcome true beliefs. Having the tools to test our beliefs doesn’t mean we have an incentive to test them. The immense growth of Flat Earthism has nothing to do with truth—it is false. Yet it is elevating and enriching the lives of those who take part because conspiratorial groups entrench their cause in clinging with passion to their false beliefs. This is unfortunately compounded further by our various biases coming into play that further affect our judgement such as confirmation bias, motivated reasoning and others. Our will to believe colors our assessments and leads us further into our desires for what we wish the truth to be, rather than what it is.

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It is of course conditional on application. Ritual cults with deep community bonding have enacted their false beliefs to tragic consequences, such as Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate. But our human evolution has conferred us with brains that don’t primarily seek truth and lend us towards finding community and meaning, whether it is rooted in justified true beliefs or not. If false beliefs keep us alive, then our behavior will naturally follow that direction. If they lead to our death then they will not progress. Interestingly, those with autism and similar conditions can be less swayed by social consensus and thus could be less susceptible to the social conditioning clouding objective truth. An aversion to social morays is a positive for truth-optimization.

Evolution has brought us thus far, but as Rees and Atkins have pointed out, it may take us no further. The question of whether human evolution has stopped due to the lack of selection pressure brought about by our use of technology is interesting, with Richard Dawkins and others querying if it may have stopped completely or at least slowed to a crawl. If our technology were to do all our thinking for us, it is hard to see how that ends well for our own physiological and neurological development.

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The human brain is socially optimised, not truth optimised.

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Evolution does not stop, but we may well regress. It is worth noting that more highly educated people tend to have fewer children. An interesting scientific avenue worth mentioning here is Directed Evolution. This is where we steer evolution through genetic engineering, probably with the direct application of tools such as CRISPR-Cas9, base editing or prime editing. Scientists can edit the germline of organisms to confer certain traits, with some able to be made in somatic cells too. The germline traits are then passed on to the next generation.

Whether we can edit ourselves out of an evolutionary regression is irrelevant to the claim that evolution favors false but advantageous beliefs. We will still bond over them, find meaning in them, and take the prudent or cautionary path of believing there are lions in bushes ready to eat us. Even though we have falsifiability as a tool, it doesn’t mean we always want to use it. We have social interests that are often opposed to truth. The human brain is socially optimised, not truth optimised. Having the tools to be more rational doesn’t always mean we want to be, or that it benefits us. The best remedy is wisdom and education. Popper gave us the tools to test our beliefs; the challenge is to summon the courage to use them when false beliefs seem safer or more meaningful than the truth. Thankfully, this also confers a strong survival benefit.