There is no purpose of the scapegoat organ. This is one of the biggest fallacies people have with regards to natural selection and economics.
Standard neoclassical economics theory tells people that they have perfect foresight and know the configuration/structure of all future possibilities. In other words, there are no unknown unknowns. You know everything you don't know yet.
People have the same belief with regards to natural selection being efficient. It just seemingly chooses the most efficient organisms.
In reality there is a developmental process with no guarantee of optimality or progress toward optimality. It is possible to get stuck in local maxima and it takes activation energy to get out of it.
The scapegoat organ exists because the perceived marginal cost of fixing and investigating an incident or problem is considered more expensive than deflecting blame.
The Iranians destroyed their water supply with scapegoats so trying to find a purpose in the scapegoat organ seems pretty insane. It's more like a weakness that leadership does not have a complete picture of the problems that its people are facing. You could argue that scapegoating is an expression of a lack of power. You have just enough power to blame others, but not enough to solve the problem.
Standard neoclassical economics theory tells people that they have perfect foresight and know the configuration/structure of all future possibilities. In other words, there are no unknown unknowns. You know everything you don't know yet.
People have the same belief with regards to natural selection being efficient. It just seemingly chooses the most efficient organisms.
In reality there is a developmental process with no guarantee of optimality or progress toward optimality. It is possible to get stuck in local maxima and it takes activation energy to get out of it.
The scapegoat organ exists because the perceived marginal cost of fixing and investigating an incident or problem is considered more expensive than deflecting blame.
The Iranians destroyed their water supply with scapegoats so trying to find a purpose in the scapegoat organ seems pretty insane. It's more like a weakness that leadership does not have a complete picture of the problems that its people are facing. You could argue that scapegoating is an expression of a lack of power. You have just enough power to blame others, but not enough to solve the problem.