Top Highlights

• The man who saw a false pattern lived to spread his suspicious genes; the man who failed to see a real pattern won the Paleolithic equivalent of a Darwin Award. People thus evolved to spot patterns, even when they weren't there, and so began our love affair with misinformation.
• Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine and author of The Believing Brain, termed this phenomenon patternicity, which he defined as “the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.”
• When we cannot trust ourselves to be neutral arbiters of information, when we're primed to contort evidence to fit our beliefs rather than adapting our beliefs to fit the evidence, it's in our best interest to spot misinformation before we adopt it into our belief system.