thomblake comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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This reads as though you haven't read the article. Alicorn is not arguing that evolutionary explanations should not be used.
This completely ignores the main data point presented in the article; namely, that those things are more cute than babies, which seems to need explaining.
No, she's saying the cuteness explanation offered by Dennett fails (due to a single data point, no less, her opinion about the cuteness of an animal) and that it is a cautionary note about evolutionary psychology. My comment is relevant, because the fact that we find pedomorphic things universally cute, across cultures only means that our cuteness instincts are imperfect. The fact that our evolved minds misfire sometimes is not a surprise to evolutionary psychologists, and Dennett would likely have no problem with humans finding child-evocative things cute.
They're called superstimuli,and it isn't terribly surprising that they could exist in nature as well, as I further explain in Tyrrell McAllister's comment below.
Needs explaining, yes. But personally, I would give evo-psych a chance to attempt an explanation before I decided that we need caution about the entire field.
There may not have been any danger of humans in the EEA taking care of cute animals in a way that hurt their reproductive success. If humans happened to evolve a notion of cuteness that (in at least some humans) was activated more strongly by other mammalian young (due to a common ancestor, or accident), there might not have been selection against it if that superstimulus didn't hurt human reproductive success.
And those things are artificial. As the OP says, it's not so surprising that something artificial is cuter than anything natural. The question is, why is anything natural cuter than babies?
Birds sometimes protect and nurture eggs of similar species but larger. This should obviously refute the hypothesis that super-stimuli cannot occur in nature. These eggs presumably inspire the same nurture-cuteness drives in birds that cute bunnies inspire in us. Our evolved feelings are imperfectly calibrated, this is truly no surprise to evolutionary psychologists.
What is the evidence that the birds are being super-stimulated by an egg from another species? They are being sufficiently stimulated to protect the egg, but are they being vastly more stimulated than they are by their own eggs?
I take it the birds are preferring a larger alien egg over their own. Is the idea that they act as though they are thinking, "Larger eggs are healthier, this looks like my eggs look, and I should invest my resources in my largest egg."? In which case, the alien egg only needs to be just barely larger than the bird's own egg for the bird to prefer the alien egg.
The mystery isn't that humans find rabbits sufficiently cute to be worthy of protection. The mystery is that many humans say that they find rabbits vastly cuter than babies.
You can't tell from the context I gave, admittedly. But in the original research it is quite clear that birds will prefer to take care of larger eggs in their own broods, and will neglect smaller eggs. If a similar but larger egg from another species is present, the birds will actually prefer to care for it, since it is larger and thus "seems" more viable.
Most humans would not go to greater lengths to protect a rabbit than a human baby, in this case cuteness does not correspond directly to the effort someone would be willing to expend to protect a rabbit vs. a baby. We can't get birds to report how 'cute' they find something, we can only infer from their behaviour how they respond to different stimuli.