Babies are edible too. Cannibalistic infanticide is a fairly common phenomenon throughout the animal world. It is widely practiced by chimpanzees, some of the closest evolutionary relatives of humans. (It’s mostly done by male chimpanzees, but sometimes also females; see the linked paper for more details and references.)
Unless some group-selection mechanism is in operation (and such explanations are always controversial), there is no straightforward reason why one should care about unrelated babies. Killing them may well be adaptive behavior. Infanticide is thus unsurprisingly a widespread phenomenon) in nature—and once you kill a baby, you might as well eat it too; hence cannibalistic infanticide. Even when it comes to one’s own kids and relatives, there are situations where killing them may be cost-effective in selfish gene terms, and parental and kin infanticide is also far from nonexistent among animals. All these behaviors are a regular subject of study in evolutionary biology, including evolutionary psychology.
Therefore, noting that babies can look less cute than other things whose only relevant characteristics are nutritional is hardly an argument against state-of-the-art evolutionary psychology. It is certainly a good argument against dilettantish dabbling in it, which is indeed all too common, even by otherwise formidable intellectual figures such as Dennett. Of course, the real academic evolutionary psychology has its own problems with sorting out well-substantiated theories from just-so stories, but they are at wholly different levels.
Alicorn:
Babies are edible too. Cannibalistic infanticide is a fairly common phenomenon throughout the animal world. It is widely practiced by chimpanzees, some of the closest evolutionary relatives of humans. (It’s mostly done by male chimpanzees, but sometimes also females; see the linked paper for more details and references.)
Unless some group-selection mechanism is in operation (and such explanations are always controversial), there is no straightforward reason why one should care about unrelated babies. Killing them may well be adaptive behavior. Infanticide is thus unsurprisingly a widespread phenomenon) in nature—and once you kill a baby, you might as well eat it too; hence cannibalistic infanticide. Even when it comes to one’s own kids and relatives, there are situations where killing them may be cost-effective in selfish gene terms, and parental and kin infanticide is also far from nonexistent among animals. All these behaviors are a regular subject of study in evolutionary biology, including evolutionary psychology.
Therefore, noting that babies can look less cute than other things whose only relevant characteristics are nutritional is hardly an argument against state-of-the-art evolutionary psychology. It is certainly a good argument against dilettantish dabbling in it, which is indeed all too common, even by otherwise formidable intellectual figures such as Dennett. Of course, the real academic evolutionary psychology has its own problems with sorting out well-substantiated theories from just-so stories, but they are at wholly different levels.