The Cultural Evolution of Games of Chance : A Historical Investigation of Chinese Gambling

Chance-based gambling has been a recurrent cultural activity throughout history and across many diverse human societies. In this paper, I combine quantitative and qualitative data and present a cultural evolutionary framework to explain why the odds in games of chance in premodern China appeared "designed" to ensure a moderate yet favorable house advantage. This is especially intriguing since extensive research in the history of probability has shown that, prior to the development of probability theory, people had very limited understanding of the nature of random events and were generally disinclined to think mathematically about the frequency of their occurrence. I argue that games of chance in the context of gambling may have culturally evolved into their documented forms via a process of selective imitation and retention, and neither the customers nor the gambling houses understood the probability calculus involved in these games.

The Cultural Evolution of Medical Technologies : A Model of Sequential Treatments in the Medical Setting

When people get ill, they naturally want to restore health through medical interventions. Here I model a situation in which individuals can psychologically entertain multiple potential treatments at once: when illness occurs, individuals would attempt one treatment first, and if it fails to produce an observable effect within a particular time period, a second treatment is attempted, and the eventual recovery is attributed to the treatment that is temporally closer. This creates population dynamics wherein the therapeutic power of the superior/effective medical treatments is misattributed to inferior/ineffective treatments. Through both analytic formulation and agent-based simulation, I show that the equilibrium frequencies of different treatment variants depend on their natural variability in the effect timing, the level of individual patience, and the number of cultural models sampled by the naive individual. Both ineffective and effective medical treatments may stably coexist in the population under a range of parameter settings.

Ghosts, Divination, and Magic among the Nuosu: An Ethnographic Examination from Cognitive and Cultural Evolutionary Perspectives

I present a detailed ethnographic study of magic and divination of the Nuosu people in southwest China and offer a cognitive account of the surprising prevalence of these objectively ineffective practices in a society that has ample access to modern technology and mainstream Han culture. I argue that in the belief system of the Nuosu, ghosts, divination, and magical healing rituals form a closely interconnected web that gives sense and meaning to otherwise puzzling practices, and such a belief system is importantly supported and reinforced by individual's everyday experiences. Contemporary Nuosu people overwhelmingly treat these practices as instruments for achieving specific ends and often entertain considerable uncertainty regarding their efficacy, which may be overestimated for a number of reasons, including the following: (1) the intuitive plausibility of divination for ghost identification and exorcist rituals is enhanced by the belief in the existence of ghosts as a result of abductive reasoning, (2) negative instances (divinatory or healing ritual failures) are underreported, and (3) people's misperception of the probability of uncertain events' occurrence often prevents them from realizing that the efficacies of magical/divinatory practices do not outperform chance. I conclude with some comments on the generalizability of the psychological and social mechanisms discussed.

The ritual stance does not apply to magic in general

Contrary to the author's proposed classification scheme, I argue that most magical practices are better viewed as “instrumental” rather than “ritualistic.” Much ethnographic and historical evidence shows that magicians and ritual experts often have elaborate causal theories regarding how magic actions lead to the putative outcome, and the “physical/mechanical” versus “supernatural” distinction in causal mechanisms needs serious reconsideration.