Ceremonies and rituals are like stored procedures for humans. I wonder how much of the ritual contained in the major world religions today are fossilized remains of some guy just figuring out how to avoid some disease or make daily life a touch easier and having it catch on. "And thou shalt set thy dial for 2:40, not 2:35 unless thou then proceedeth to 2:40... 2:45 is right out."
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them" -- Alfred North Whitehead
I have been interested in the subject ever since I read the part of Code Complete dealing with the notion of abstraction.
If everytime you woke you had to think about the fact that a door is a bunch of atoms that together form different materials but together some of it being the doorknob you'd never be able to leave your bedroom.
It ties closely with the notion of affordance
A teacher told me that the reason for the banning of pork in the Quran and the Bible is to prevent some diseases. Straigth up banning pork for health reason solved the problem. It's probably some kind of myth.
That reminds me of the story of the woman who was taught to cook a roast by cutting off the ends. One day, her husband asks why do you throw away perfectly good cuts of meat, and she says her mother taught her that way. Questioning it, they go to the mother who says that's how grandma taught me. They go to grandma who says that's how great-grandma taught her. They go to great-grandma, who laughs and said "We couldn't afford a big pan so I had to cut the ends to fit it into the pan I had."
Well, reading the Old Testament sometimes feels like reading "health and safety manual". Like the rules about what's considered clean and not, how to quarantine people that were sick, but now seem to be healthy, etc.
I seem to remember that water in some agricultural regions of Indonesia was allocated based on a certain religious ritual called Subak. Apparently, although it appears to be an inefficient system, villages which experimented with supposedly more efficient, Western systems ended up harming their ecosystem and saw lower yields on subsequent years. Here's the Wikipedia article, though it doesn't have much:
