What you just said fits in with my current “Theory Of Everything That I Think”.
Perhaps natural selection has given you the tendency to connect certain tendencies to natural selection, when there isn’t actually any connection between those tendencies and natural selection.
Oh, no, my happiness is ruined!
No, wait, a little club soda got it out. All better!
Sorry, but he’s right. Our brains are fantastic at drawing connections between disparate events. It’s worked on an evolutionary scale because it’s usually better to be safe than sorry. On the other hand it’s created side effects ranging from religion to naming the constellations to lucky socks.
You says that our brains are fantastic at drawing connections between disparate events because are brains are fantastic at making us say that our brains are fantastic at drawing connections between disparate events. You think it’s worked on an evolutionary scale because thinking that it works on an evolutionary scale has worked on an evolutionary scale. Obviously.
That is quite a point you have there, because you have made quite a point there.
Wow! I think you may have found the secret to happiness.
Runs off to the patent office.
If I get there first it’s mine.
Certainly disagree with the “arbitrary” label - that’s kinda the whole point of evolution. Besides, I suspect spider blood wouldn’t go very far in quenching the thirst of 7 billion humans.
Doubt it. My happiness isn’t quite that fragile. But go on…
OK.
Wait, where’s the problem?
If you truly believe that everything is absurd and arbitrary, then you are the most free person on this planet. But you don’t. You believe that everything is absurd and arbitrary and that it SHOULD BE SOME OTHER WAY. But it isn’t.
It is what it should be. It’s absurd and arbitrary. So go be absurd and arbitrary, in any way that makes you happy and doesn’t hurt people (without a safe word).
Exactly! But I’ll have a cider, thanks. Wanna make s’mores?
Hey! I did The Forum in '05! When was yours? Here, have a beer and a s’more. 
Why do you think so many people are still religious? There’s no meaning in the universe, so it is comforting to some that there may be meaning outside of it.
Just to cover my bases, I should say that there is no known meaning in the universe. Science may discover a meaning of life beyond atomic particles, but it has not done so yet.
Snarkiness aside, I take it your dispute is not that humans often see connections where there aren’t any — and it sure isn’t hard to think of examples of that — but rather that this tendency comes from our biology and evolution. (As opposed to maybe just being a widespread personality quirk? Or something cultural?)
I would point to these kinds of experiments though as supportive evidence. The “lesser” animals with their smaller brains can’t see the kinds of patterns we can, but on the other hand they don’t fool themselves into thinking they’ve figured something out when there’s nothing there to be figured out.
In the experiment, researchers flash two lights, one green and one red, onto a screen. Four out of five times, it’s green; the other time, the red light flashes. But the exact sequence is kept random.
When rewarded for correct picks, rats and pigeons quickly discover the best strategy is to always pick green, guaranteeing an 80 percent correct-pick rate. Humans, however, tried to anticipate when the red light would come on. This misguided strategy, on average, leads people to pick the next flash accurately only 68 percent of the time.
Stranger still, humans persist in this behavior even when researchers tell them the flashing lights are random. And while rodents and birds quickly learn how to maximize their score, people often perform worse the longer they try to figure it out.
Life is absurd and arbitrary and awesome. I live in a world with ice cream, champagne, puppies, books, orgasms, chocolate, music, and more than 20 seasons of The Simpsons. How could that not be awesome?
Think of life as a handful of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans. In a sea of cherry and marshmallow deliciousness you will occasionally come across a vomit-flavored one, but that is okay because it keeps things interesting.
A. If you drop a piano out of a skyscraper window, it crashes to the pavement.
B. But if you change just a few laws of physics, voila! It flies to the moon on gossamer wings.
Only B is absurd and arbitrary, not the universe I live in.
Sometimes human beings see connections where there don’t exist. Other times, human beings fail to see connections where they do exist. Why should be jump to the conclusion that the first phenomenon must be the result of natural selection, rather than the second.
Such experiments are certainly interesting, and I’m glad you brought them to my attention. However, establishing the existence of the phenomenon doesn’t prove that there’s a genetic cause of the phenomenon. To understand its cause we’d need to ask further questions such as, is this true for all people or only some? Is it possible for a person to change their behavior in this sort of experiment with effort? And most importantly, is there actually any gene or group of genes that causes this behavior?
It would be much more awesome if The Simpsons had ended after eight or nine seasons.
False positives are a small waste of time and energy. False negatives get you killed.
For example, if I freeze every time I think I see a lion in the grass, it’s better (in terms of my long term survival) to err on the side of caution. Lots and lots of false positives (“Is that a lion!? No … whew … just a branch.”) are better than one false negative (“No lions here … Aaaaaaagh! <tearing and rending sounds>”).
So humans … all creature with brains, really … are under constant evolutionary pressure to err on the side of seeing patterns where there are none.
Well, here’s John Cleese’s takeon the subject.
Well, you could argue that the concept of natural selection is in and of itself arbitrary. The science we use to explain it is also arbitrary. We are hurtling through space on a tiny speck of sand where we live for a relative nanosecond and then we die. Great, so we have the Big Bang to explain it. But how do you explain the Big Bang? You can go back for what seems like an eternity, but logic dictates that there had to be a primary cause.
I’m not arguing for the existence of a divine creator. I’m just suggesting that maybe this cherished thing we call reason is in and of itself an imperfect way of viewing the universe. Maybe science is some hack concept that would cause other sentient beings mock our ignorance. And maybe all of our theories are imperfect too. Maybe there *doesn’t * have to be a primary cause but we’re too dumb to know that. Maybe there are other explanations for our existence that will never, throughout the history of mankind, be uncovered. My husband once pondered that maybe consciousness is an accident of nature, a side-effect of natural selection. If so, why? Maybe there doesn’t have to be a ‘why.’
So here we are. On our little rock, with our stupid minds and our limited consciousness and enormous capacity for what we call '‘love’ and “suffering”, and there is no possible way to make sense of it. Of course it’s arbitrary.
But I mean, like, be a pragmatist, man. If we were all the time paralyzed by the strange nature of our reality, nobody would ever get any work done, and you wouldn’t have sex and rockets and babies and beer. If life gives you incomprehensible existence, make it comprehensible. Learn to live your pathetically short life on your own terms. It’s literally all you have.
There can be evolutionary reasons we fail to see some kinds of connections. One does not preclude the other, and in fact in some situations you can fail to see a correct connection because your impulses have already encouraged you to draw the wrong conclusion. But the initial point Bytegeist made was still correct.