Story-telling defeats truth – Scientific American

From Scientific American Weekly Review:

… we have evolved brains
that pay attention to anecdotes because false positives (believing
there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually
harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection
between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool. 

Our
brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and
find patterns. Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years
old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening
variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years
old. 

So it is that any medical huckster promising that A will cure B
has only to advertise a handful of successful anecdotes in the form of
testimonials.

Michael Shermer, How Anecdotal Evidence Can Undermine Scientific Results – Why subjective anecdotes often trump objective data, July 2008 (emphasis and extra paragraphing added).

And so it may also have been that reports of an empty tomb, and of post-mortem encounters with its occupant, quickly evolved into what has become one of humanity’s most long-lasting belief systems.