“Evolutionary pressure rewarded brains that saw patterns, even in randomness. When we heard a rustle in the grass, we could imagine it was a random breeze and ignore it, or we could hypothesize that it hid a waiting predator and try to escape it. For the many times it was a breeze, the wrong answer made us unnecessarily anxious, but it did not interfere with our survival. For the rare time that it was a predator, the anxious survived, and those who believed it to be random made a fatal error.”
