We simply have an instinct to copulate, with the consequence that we have enough babies and (evolutionarily speaking) way more than enough sex. For at least a century, psychologists and philosophers have suggested that our urge to explain the world is analogous to our urge to populate it. Like making babies, they argue, making theories is so crucial to our survival that we have a natural drive to do so—what William James called a “theoretic instinct.”* This is the impulse I gestured toward in the last chapter: the one that compels us to generate stories and explanations all the time, even at
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