Frogs, Snakes, and the Things We Never Saw Coming

This starts, as these things sometimes do, with a very confident man carrying a glass tank full of frogs.

Years ago, when I was in the army, my commanding officer arrived at camp one morning carrying a fish tank full of frogs. He didn’t make a big announcement about it. He just set them down and let them loose. Frogs eat mosquitoes, we had plenty of mosquitoes, so naturally the frogs would eventually sort things out.

It turns out, frogs don’t do a great job of eating mosquitos. Go figure. They mostly just hang out in damp drains and tall grass. But you know what frogs are good at? Attracting snakes. Big ones.

Not only were the mosquitos still out for blood, but we were now up to our necks with rotting dead frogs (pancaked by passing jeeps) and large pythons who had found a new source of fast food. The situation got so out of hand that we had a ban on evening runs after one of the men nearly tripped over a snake one foggy night while out jogging. Poor guy.

This whole incident with frogs and “faulty” thinking always brings to mind another amphibian-related misadventure. Back in the early 1900s, American bullfrogs were brought over to Japan as a potential food source, and shortly after crayfish were imported from Louisiana to help feed them. Well, it didn’t take long for the US to realise that no one in Japan actually wanted to eat bullfrogs or crayfish. They weren’t part of the cuisine nor culture, and the whole thing just struck the Japanese as “weird”.

Needless to say, the idea never took off. Soon after, the crawfish clawed their way out, and the bullfrogs followed. Now they’re all over Japan’s riverways, and they are featured proudly on the invasive species list.

Another idea that made sense at step one… and then quickly, and spectacularly, fell apart at step two.

So why is it that we’re so terrible at thinking just one additional step ahead? It seems the answer is simply that our brains weren’t built for it. We’re very good at spotting the first link in a chain, “mosquitoes bad, frogs eat mosquitoes” and disastrously bad at noticing any links that come after.

Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky discovered that when we face uncertainty, our default instinct isn’t to build long, thoughtful in-depth chains of cause and effect. Instead, we gravitate towards the simplest story that feels intuitively true.

The more complex or ambiguous the problem is, the more we rely on these tidy little explanations. And that’s why we can’t help but fall for simple narratives time and time again. We’re simply wired for it.

According to evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, our minds weren’t designed to follow long, branching chains of cause and effect. Instead, they argue that the brain is built from “specialized inference engines” tuned for immediate, survival-relevant cues like detecting threats, reading social intentions, or remembering which plant made you violently ill.

To oversimplify, our ancestors didn’t need to think ten steps ahead. They needed to think one step ahead. Yet while our primitive ancestors didn’t have much use for second-order thinking, modern life does.

Which leaves us with this odd truth. We are creatures with fairly old wiring, trying to navigate our way through a world that’s grown spectacularly complicated. We think in straight lines in a maze-like world. And yet, somehow, we keep muddling through, with a bit of guessing, and trial and error.

I still think about those frogs. They’re my reminder not to stop at the first neat answer. Take one more look, or one more hop so to speak (pun intended). It’s not profound, but it helps.

P.S. The irony of offering a simple answer in a post about the problem with simple answers isn’t lost on me.