When bad things happen, we want to blame someone. Our brains evidently struggle to accept that catastrophes might just occur on their own. In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins blames this determination to impute agency for the emergence of religion. A faulty bit of genetic wiring, he reckons, makes us see human involvement where none exists. Our remote ancestors could not believe that earthquakes or volcanic eruptions were nobody’s fault. Somehow, they must have been provoked by wickedness. Gods were a way to link natural disasters to human behavior.

You might think that modern human beings have outgrown that tendency; but our DNA is not easily escaped. Look at the reaction to the wildfires in Brazil last week. Running through the coverage is that they must have been someone’s fault.