An outline and some sketchy notes about a hypothesis suggesting a connection between the evolutionary milestone where living organisms first recognized and started seeking patterns in nature and our species' uncanny ability to manufacture non-existent patterns, substitute brilliant nonsense for reality and then deny that's what we're doing. 

the Original  Blank Slate
Somehow we've forgotten about the blank slate (not to be in conflict with Pinker's "The Blank Slate", which, though I have not read yet, I probably most likely will agree with when I do....this is a different 'blank slate' altogether).

I'm not saying that we, homo sapiens, started out with a blank slate (clearly much of what we have in our attitudes, our preferences, our opinions, etc was passed on to us from various ancestors along the way....attitudes, preferences and opinions that helped them survive got passed on to their offspring, and so on), but that our earliest ancestor (some lone, single-celled organism) certainly did.

They would not have had any previous genetic mutations that could have lead to one kind of attitude or preference or opinion or another. They were the first organism; no hand-me-downs in their genes.
Therefore, the only logical and reasonable, natural explanation is that all attitudes, preferences and opinions that exist in living organisms on Earth came into being after the beginning of the life of that first organism.

Still, as life evolved and eventually we came about, did we, homo sapiens, really start out with all of these beliefs? Not likely. More likely we probably made them up along the way.

One thing that's quite clear is the fact that many of our culture's currently held beliefs about life and the universe are not even based on anything from the realm of reality at all. I think the most reasonable explanation for these obvious skews in our thinking is that they are simply left-overs from pretending, imagination and creativity. 

Here's how I think it works...

We are pattern seeking. 
We are creative and imaginative.
We are very skilled in the art of pretending. 
We think that believing is the same as knowing. 
We are capable of great and massive amounts of denial. 

We are pattern seeking.
Our species might not be here today had some life form not eventually stumbled onto recognizing and then seeking patterns. Without that first step down this fork in the road of life's evolution, we most likely would not have survived this long. At least we certainly would not have come as far as we have already in so many areas of life. 

It's not magic and it's not even a mystery anymore. It's not as simple as just saying that we somehow acquired pattern seeking and leave it at that. We now know that pattern recognition would have had to have been an evolutionary accident just like other so-called adaptations which are now considered useful or necessary. Even though it's a bit more complicated, it is still quite simple... Those who recognized and then sought patterns survived. It's just that simple. 

We can even say with a high degree of accuracy what patterns were recognized and sought after. The most easily recognizable patterns in nature that we can pinpoint as reasons for a connection between pattern seeking and our species' survival (and our current domination) are related to sources of food and water, weather conditions, regional climate, seasonal changes, the behavior of other creatures, and yes even in our own thinking and in our relationships with each other. 

As ironic as this sometimes seems to me in light of where we sometimes tend to take it, pattern recognition and seeking are actually functions of critical thinking. Since we found water somewhere in a particular kind of location, and because we remembered certain details about it we then went to look for it elsewhere with those details in mind. So long as we remembered the information we had collected about it, it could help us later as we moved on from place to place, even in previously unvisited geographic locations. As a result, we continued to find water again and again, over and over and survived because of it. 

We are creative and imaginative.
In earlier ancestors, I don't know the extent to which the desire was attached to the skill. However, in homo sapiens, it is clear that having the skill of pattern seeking is closely related to (and was probably only successful because of) our desire to find patterns.

On down the line... I think that our desire to find patterns made it possible for imagination and creativity to succeed when they came about in the minds of our ancestors.

In homo sapiens, our sense of imagination and creativity helped our species figure out certain problems along the way. By brainstorming and trying different things, we could eventually find something that works, (even if the only options we came up with were at first only a shot in the dark). It didn't matter that we didn't know exactly what we were doing because by that time, we had grown smart enough to know that we didn't know exactly what we were doing and we were willing to try something anyway just to see what happened. 

It was creativity and imagination that enabled our first tool-making ancestors to conceive of things before hand and then go and make them according to the ideas they conceived in their minds. Imagination also helped them in planning for bigger issues. They could consider many different scenarios prior to taking any particular action. This afforded them the benefit of a certain amount of experimentation in circumstances where doing it live might have resulted in injury or death. 

The ones that had the skill of imagination were the ones that were more capable of thinking of ways to better deal with changing circumstances. The ones that survived because of their use of imagination in such circumstances were the ones that produced offspring and thus passed the skill of imagination on to future generations. In fact, our species still has the skill of imagination today simply because it helped our ancestors in their evolutionary journey. 

The down side (if I can call it that for the purpose of this point) of being so willing to be creative and imaginative is that when we can't understand a pattern that is really there, we sometimes make up something about it. Likewise, when we can't find a pattern to prove some other point, we sometimes make one up.

We are very skilled in the art of pretending.
When we choose to count our made up pattern or our made up explanation of a real pattern as real and actual it self, we are pretending. Not to say that pretending is always bad though... Pretending has often been a way that we can temporarily escape from reality for a moment (an hour, a day?) and have a chance to relax and possibly rejuvenate as we're distracted from the chores and trials of our real life. 

I suspect that it may even be true that sometimes pretending totally insane things for short periods of time is what keeps us sane for later. Pretending can even help keep us out of danger in certain circumstances. Like in the tiger behind every bush analogy *, we might be more apt to be prepared for possible danger if we simply pretend that it is there for sure before we go out into the jungle. 

Also, stories, fables, fairytales and mythology have long been one of our species' most effective ways of conveying ideas and concepts to others, keeping them alive in the community and passing them on to future generations. 

We think that believing is the same as knowing. 
In our culture, since most people are not comfortable being confronted with the fact that they are pretending, we tend to lose sight of the fact that we are pretending by calling it believing. This seems pretty effective in helping us avoid the reality of the nature of our own world view since believing has become synonymous with knowing, even though it is not. 

We actually think that some of these beliefs are based on something that's actually there. This is because we've so diluted the idea of knowing by blending it with believing that we don't even realize that we're pretending anymore.

We are capable of great and massive amounts of denial.
When someone discovers that our explanation of the pattern is no longer accurate or valid in light of known reality, or that our pattern was never really there in the first place, we sometimes ignore that discovery because of the pain of having been wrong. We choose instead to hold tightly to what we're familiar and comfortable with. 

"Don't confuse me with the facts. I don't care what scientists say is real...because I just know, that I know, that I know, that I know that the pattern is there and that my explanation of the pattern is true." ...and so on...
The evidence doesn't even matter to us when we get to this point.

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