Spirituality, the placebo effect and the biggest self-fulfilling prophecy ever

Some kind of spiritual totemic belief system has existed in human culture as long as humans have existed. It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to think the placebo effect is less old.

So let’s imagine a point of human existence where we are worshipping the Sun/Water/Nature but we have not yet developed the placebo effect.

It’s safe to assume that during this primitive time, we still performed basic rituals around said worship and used the rituals to ask for disease/evil spirits to be driven away from us.

Evolution teaches us that the humans that respond in some physical way to these rituals would be more likely to pass their genes on. Imagine if the baseless rituals actually made you feel better!

Well the placebo effect achieves that. We have tons of evidence that shows how successful the placebo effect can be. It can even work when you *know* it’s just a placebo!

So if a primitive human had a mutation which enabled their body to actively respond to the ritual to drive out disease, then that person’s genes are going to survive better than other peoples.

So in evolutionary terms, ancient rituals and spirituality became the biggest self-fulfilling prophecy the world has ever seen. Maybe hokey religion is truly holy given enough time. That time might be a few million years, but that’s a blink of an eye to evolution.