Magic and empiricism in early Chinese rainmaking -- A cultural evolutionary analysis

Protocols aimed at rainmaking have been a recurrent sociocultural phenomenon across societies and back into history. Given the scientific understandings of precipitation indicate that such protocols were likely entirely ineffective, why did such rainmaking protocols repeatedly emerge and persist, sometimes over millennia even in populations with writing and record keeping? To address this puzzle, many scholars have argued that these protocols were not instrumental at all, and that their practitioners were not really endeavoring to bring them. Here, taking advantage of the wealth of historical records available in China, we argue to the contrary, that rainmaking is best viewed as an instrumental, means-end activity, and that people have always placed strong emphasis on outcomes of such activities. To account for persistence of rainmaking, we then present a set of cultural evolutionary explanations, rooted in human psychology, that can explain why people’s adaptive learning processes did not result in the elimination of ineffective rainmaking methods. We suggest that a commitment to a supernatural worldview provides theoretical support for the plausibility of various rainmaking methods, and people often over-estimate the efficacy of the rainmaking technologies because of statistical artefacts (some methods appear effective simply by chance) and under-reporting of disconfirmatory evidence (failures of rainmaking not reported/transmitted).