Or maybe it's just that we tend to grab shiny things, just like crows and monkeys, and a sense of singular certainty just seems particularly shiny.
Not remotely universal, and not even related to the desire to seek an understanding of the world. Everyone has an intuition about “free will”; for most people it’s whatever, a given. But then a small minority has a totalizing idea because X means that Free Will is impossible. Then they start this campaign to “disabuse” everyone of that intuition.
There’s very little desire to learn there—people who have the “free will” intuition already “understand”; likewise with the Determinism people. Everyone is certain about the way things are.
Sure, not everyone may care about esoteric questions like the origin of the cosmos, but nobody is free from seeking to understand causality. The former is an offshoot of the later.
An idea/debate that immediately and violently runs into contradictions when you query for its practical applications is not at all an offshoot of the latter.
I dont think humans could have to cognitive drive to discover practical applications of truth or causality without sometimes running into tough questions.
I think it is evolutionarily and culturally impossible for people to only make practical discoveries when the utility is not apparent until the discovery is made.
Knowledge is power, both socially and evolutionarily.
I am not a History of Ideas guy (or any guy). But,
1. Some people get very afraid of certain ideas because of the tenuous so-called implications. See Mindfulness (already mentioned): this is very bad according to some because if you believe in it then you necessarily (the monorail) stop fighting any kind of injustice against yourself and others. Because it is apparently impossible to both practice mindfulness as well as to not be a complete doormat to Circumstance.
2. Western thought is very ideas-oriented, to the point of becoming afraid of ideas as primary agents in themselves (what causes things (not as in intentional agents))
3. Western thought absolutely abhors contradiction. Or apparent contradiction. It can’t live with it. It can’t just say “ah, this is impossible for me to explain but it seems that this box can be green and orange at the same time”—nope
4. Related: One often mistakes “contradiction” with “there’s a gap here I can’t explain...” (see next point). This is equally insufferable. Many would rather “resolve” the apparent contradiction by way of some absolutely naive and idiotic theory rather than having to live with this gap of understanding or comprehension. See the popularity and interpretation of what the Turing Test is: Many would apparently rather believe that intelligence is a sufficiently advanced computer program even though they have absolutely no knowledge about the subject of intelligence whatsoever because simply not-knowing is too uncomfortable
5. I hate the “Death of God” idea but it is true now that it is harder to hide behind the God of the Gaps in a secular age; thus in turn apparent contradictions become harder to live with
6. Eventually you end up with very totalizing ideas like Determinism because you are a physicist or a biologist or something; you understand the “substrate” of everything important to humans and everything that seems “extra” to that is just complete idiotic, human-invented nonsense.