I don't think this is exactly what Shermer to say. He explained that our 'weird believes' are a by product of a pattern-recognition softoware in our brain. The weird things are believed because of the error type I, a false postive. His article explains WHY our brains tend to do such weird believing, but it doesn't state that this is a significant big-brain evolutionary advantage ITSELF, (since it would even be better without the errors), the real advantage is that we actually ARE able to recognize patterns. The fact that we sometimes overreact is not good, but better than the alternative, which would be a type II erorr (false negative). Type two errors are generally more hurtful, like Shermer showed with the following example of his article: "For example, believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind does not cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life." I believe that 'patternicity' IS a very very important mechanism, without it we wouldn't be 'intelligent'. It enables us to think in terms of causes and effects. Yes, sometimes we do spot wrong causes, but without the 'software' we wouldn't spot anything and that's even worse. And as Sherman himself said, the best way to verify one's believes is to test them with the self-correcting mechanisms of science, the scientific method and peer reviewing.