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soreff comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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The instincts have to reference physical attributes to identify cute things. If physical appearance evolves so quickly, how can the instinct continue to apply to it?
IOW, to accept this theory, it is necessary to believe that the things we find cute are all similar to that shared ancestor (or shared-ancestral juvenile). Does anyone know if this actually makes sense within what we know of ur-Mammalian creatures?
If attraction instincts (cuteness or sexual) evolve much more slowly than physical attributes, then shouldn't supermodels be chimpier than they are?
Is 'supermodels' supposed to be shorthand for 'highly sexually attractive'? Supermodels are not generally the women who are the most sexually attractive to heterosexual males but are selected for a variety of other attributes such as a 'striking' appearance, height and extreme slenderness.
That said, women who are considered very sexually attractive are not particularly chimpy either. They do share other traits that are not as common amongst supermodels however.
This pretty much convinced me that the fine variances of sexiness have much more to do with memes than genes. It shouldn't be hard to test if it is the case with cuteness as well: just find a culture that hasn't been exposed to Disney/Pixar films.
Not that hard to do. Look at woman representations in art. Until the last century, they were quite different from current photo-models. (I tend to think of most of them as “fat”, despite the fact that I know they’ve better reproductive characteristics.)
Yes. But there is no reason to think the cuteness attraction instinct and the sexual attraction instinct evolve at the same rate or even at a rate of the same order of magnitude. Finding offspring less cute than your ancestors did is far less likely to lead to genetic death than failing to mate with those with the best traits. That seems obvious to me anyway, I could be wrong.