Turns out that we're wired for science. Feist, in "The Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind," explains that from our earliest days, people seek out patterns, classifying objects and events, looking for causes to effects.
"Finding such regularities or patterns lay the foundation for expecting the world to behave in a certain way, which is the beginning of hypothesis formation as well as causal thought," he says.
Certainly such thinking is an evolutionary advantage. If one of your cavemen buddies eats some berries and then gets sick, recognizing that it was probably the berries, and not the angry gods who caused the illness, helps ensure you don't make the same mistake. It provokes some interesting questions: Is the cause-effect approach to the world a neurological underpinning of conservatism? Not necessarily the formal, "big C" political type, but the skeptical, reticent type. Playing it safe keeps you, well safer than someone who doesn't.
So if conservatism has evolutionary roots then that could explain why people fear change generally, and of disruptive technology (sudden and big change) especially. Are innovations that are framed as the newest form of something old better received than innovations presented as the "latest and greatest thing?"