To be sure, many superstitions originate in overinterpreting coincidences, failing to calibrate evidence against priors, overgeneralizing from anecdotes, and leaping from correlation to causation. A prime example is the misconception that vaccines cause autism, reinforced by the observation that autistic symptoms appear, coincidentally, around the age at which children are first inoculated. And all of them represent failures of critical thinking and of the grounding of belief in evidence;
