Another evolutionary explanation for people?s magical thinking is the alleged benefit of self-deception.  In social species like ours, individuals sometimes use deception to gain advantage over others. However, people have also evolved ways to tell when others are lying.  Thus people who actually believe the lies they?re telling may be more successful deceivers than someone who is simply lying.  (Lots of room here to speculate about how this applies to the current presidential candidates, obviously!)  If the wealthy, and those funded by the wealthy such as some politicians and those in so-called think tanks, actually believe the magical thinking about lowest possible taxes for the wealthy leading to highest possible economic growth, they will be more successful in tricking the public to go along, thereby enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else. 
As I?m sure Ken Taylor knows, these evolutionary explanations are inherently speculative ? they have been justly stigmatized as ?evolutionary just-so stories,? like the Rudyard Kipling fables.  We can?t go back and see directly how any of this supposedly evolved.  However, if there is an inherited tendency for people to behave in these ways, there must evolutionary explanations for it, so why not go ahead and speculate! 
- Steve George

Sorry to pop anyone's balloon, but science is itself rife with 'magical' presumption and prejudice. The bias towards patterns inevitably leads to seeing them where they are not. Many abiding myths are sustained by this bias. Just try to explain to a gambling addict there is no such thing as a winning streak! But much of "science" is precisely seeing such patterns where there are none. But how then do we grasp the anomalous or random? Or even recognize them as such? Simply, by rigorously pursuing the "science" of the 'pattern' until there can be no doubt it does not exist. But what then? Have we learned anything? Absolutely! We have filled in the language of describing the otherwise indescribable. And language in this sense is more magical than science can ever explain or contribute to.

The above comment would be more convincing if it specified some of the alleged presumptions and prejudices, which should be easy to do if science is rife with them.  Maybe one person?s prejudices are another person?s values: science is certainly based on assumptions and values such as parsimony and predictiveness, and these are openly acknowledged.  As to patterns, it?s an excellent point that people can think they?ve detected a pattern where none exists, and the recognition of this is at the core of the scientific method.  Courses for science students on methodology or statistics sometimes start out with students being given a page of numerical data and asked to find patterns.  The students aren?t initially told that the ?data? are actually a page of numbers from a random number table.   They quickly find patterns: ?Look, here are four 6?s in a row ? the probably of that happening by chance is only 1 in 10,000, so it?s obviously a significant pattern.?  When they?re told that these are random numbers, they understand the issue: in scanning the page of numbers we?re unconsciously, or barely consciously, testing for thousands of possible patterns, so it isn?t surprising to find one that happened by chance.  In science it?s fine to do an exploratory study to identify possible patterns, but then one needs to collect completely new data and specify in advance what is being  tested for, e.g. finding an unusual number of 6?s at that exact point in the data.  If that follow-up ?hypothesis testing? study finds it, then it?s likely a real pattern.
Of course science is done by people, and sometimes enthusiasm or ambition get in the way of best practice.  Science is pretty good at dealing with this, through peer review and the replication of studies by different labs.

"Empirical" follies: Multiple universes, string theory.
"Formal" follies: The "law" of the excluded middle, the presumption of the "law" of contradiction that is formally valid only in reference to the quantifier. The use of the concept of infinity in the rationale for the calculus.
Photons get up to all sorts of bizarre antics. The description makes sense, but the explanation makes no damn sense at all. The behavior of a photon between air and glass, very weirdly, implies agency on its part, as if it were trying to stay within the law and break it too.

I'm not sure this is totally on-point, but had to share it anyway. On Saturday, September 17, 2016, I read the following in my local news rag, The Columbus Dispatch:

" WASHINGTON- The Obama administration has agreed to pay nearly $3 million to the family of an Italian aid worker who was killed in a CIA drone strike in Pakistan last year,but has yet to reach a settlement with an American who was also killed in the attack,(U.S. officials said.)" (emphasis mine)
 Now, then: Just how long will it take to reach a settlement with the American who was killed?
(to give the Dispatch due respect, this story was authored by two reporters for The Washington Post.)
Magical thinking or simply wishful thinking?
Neuman.

A negotiation is not, strictly speaking, a judicial process. And justice in America is not so swift as promised, in keeping with its contrary promise of due process. Italian law may make it easier to dicker, or maybe the litigants were simply more agreeable. But if anyone can find any reliable pattern in negotiation the knowledge would be valuable, and probably kept proprietary. I suppose, if we get really magical in our thinking, we could refer to The Art of the Deal.
Another common fallacy: "Once we have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth." This is only valid where there is a comprehensive list of possibilities, each determinate in its characteristics and truth conditions. That is highly improbable!

Responding to the post about "follies" in science: It?s reasonable to be skeptical about quantum phenomena and explanations such as what photons do, and the idea of multiple universes, if it means the ?many worlds? interpretation of quantum mechanics. None of it is at all settled in science.  Same with string theory which is controversial even among theoretical physicists.  From what was posted, however, it?s not clear exactly what ?presumptions and prejudices? are supposedly at work.  What might be an unjustified presumption or prejudice is assuming that phenomena that are 20 orders of magnitude smaller in mass and size than what any human being can observe directly should necessarily be like the macroscopic objects we?re familiar with.  Quantum mechanics courses sometimes start out with the prof. saying to the class, ?Right now I?m the only one here who doesn?t understand quantum mechanics.  By the end of the course, everyone here won?t understand it.?   Hardly a situation where presumptions and prejudices are being imposed.
The rules of logic cited are in common use in everyday thinking and in other fields of human endeavor, although I realize more clarity is needed to specify under what conditions the rules should apply.  (Thanks, philosophers, for working on this!).  What ?the quantifier? means I?m not sure ? I know it can mean a part of speech in English grammar, but probably something different is intended here.
The complaint about ?the concept of infinity? in calculus seems very wide of the mark.  In this context infinity is used in a situation where something has no definite upper limit.  If we ask, ?is it bigger than X?? the answer is ?yes? no matter what definite number X is brought up.  Math in general, not just calculus, would be very impoverished without this concept, and I can?t tell what the perceived problem with it could possibly be.

Magic and superstition are close relatives. And, yet, when people believe strongly in either or both, strange things happen---something like the placebo effect in medicine or the seeming miraculous accomplishments of eastern fakirs. There are so many things that rationality cannot explain---and never will.
Neuman