alt Hacker NewsThat's the point of the comment, humans do things all the time that aren't part of some larger cultural-ritual-religious aspect. We spend a lot of time and resources doing things that seem cool at the time and only seem cool to a few people.
Someone spends a few hours doing a large tag mural under a freeway and it's not a painting to honor the gods because that spot on the freeway gets sun at a certain time of day.
There's often practical reasons people do things that anthropologists can incorrectly attribute to something larger.
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A deep curiosity is a behavior many people have (but not all). We try all kinds of things and some of them 'catch' socially. Many bird species have behaviors like this. Birds (especially things like corvidae) will pick up a new behavior in an area, and you can track the spread of the behavior radiating outward to new areas as more members of the species pick it up from each other.
The sentence "Survival of the fittest" isn't exactly true, the more accurate description would be "Survival of the fit enough". Curiosity itself is a means to explore the problem space of reality. If you're not curious then changes in your environment may leave you unable to adapt. If you're too curious then you can end up in situations where it removes members of your species faster than they can breed. Even after the point of the individual learning something new it doesn't do much for the existing members of your species. The most optimal outcome seems like some sort of cautious mimesis transfer. In the same idea as "monkey see, monkey do", there doesn't have to be a why, other than it doesn't harm the prime directive of stay alive, get more food, breed.
That is, these quartz arrowheads are a very early version of a meme.
Your example is cultural.
It may not be a painting to honor the gods, but if you ask the artist about it, I bet you’ll find a great deal of cultural significance.
Swiss watches are absolutely steeped in cultural significance. The phrase “Swiss watch” immediately conjures a whole bunch of related meaning beyond the literal meaning of a wrist-worn timepiece made in a certain Alpine country.
If you see somebody wearing a Rolex, is your only thought “that guy likes overspending on inaccurate timepieces” or “that guy enjoys old fashioned timekeeping technology”?
> it's not a painting to honor the gods
Cultural considerations aside, “ritual” also does not mean religious.
Someone pointed out that Americans ritually go to ballparks to consume hot dogs and the distinction between ritual and religion finally clicked for me.