Surely it's even simpler than that. All we are, all intelligence is, is a peripatetic model of the world beyond our eyelids. We're not just addicted to building models, we just can't help it (listen to any piece of contrapuntal music if you doubt this). Just recently, we've got far enough off the ground to learn how to test our models rigourously; before that we tested them by repeated experience, let's call it "ritual".

To know that you get sparks from steel against flint is science, but it requires a few millennia of infrastructure before you can know that. To know that you often get sparks from a red rock against a glassy rock is superstition, but a damn sight more useful for any hunter gatherer. To recite a verse from an epic telling how a hero got sparks from a red rock against a glassy rock is ritual, but it helps you remember the useful stuff.

But you've got to hand it to NASA for designing an experiment that won't let the soil sample into the testing chamber until AFTER all the ice in it has sublimated away!