A cognitive module for cuteness only needs to make us find babies a nice thing and enhance the probability of parental care. It simply doesn’t matter if, besides doing that, the same cognitive module make us find bunnies or orthorhombic sulfur crystals at low temperature cute, so long this doesn’t have any deleterious effects. Probably a cognitive module that can find cute only human babies and not bunnies is more evolutionary improbable and developmental costly having the same relevant behavioral results of a more cheap and universal cognitive module for cuteness.
Evolution only needs to shape cognition in order to generate, more or less, the right type of behavior. It DOESN’T have to, and in most cases it doesn’t, shape cognition nicely, in a way we would look at it and say “nice work”.
Yes, and I would say finding bunnies cuter than human babies isn’t a strong argument against Dennett’s hypothesis. Supernormal Stimuli are quite common in humans and non-humans.
I think this argument could be analogously phrased: “The reason why exercise makes us feel good can’t be to get us to exercise more, because cocaine feels even better than exercise.” Seems wrong when we put it that way.
That’s kind of the whole point of ev psych, at least for me: our minds are kluges, and side effects hardly factor in if they have little survival disadvantage.
Bunnies exist in the ancestral environment. Finding them cute makes us less likely to hunt and eat them, and more likely to waste resources capturing and feeding them. It’s possible we don’t actually find them cute when we’re used to hunting them, though.
Or bunnies happen to take advantage of the evolutionarily useful baby-cute sense, and it was never maladaptive enough that evolutionary processes narrowed baby-cute sense.
Sort of like how humans seem to have an automatic mental process to recognize faces even when there are no faces.
Bunnies prevalence on EEA is uncertain, at best. There are few species so widely hunted as the bunny, but it might be the case that the cute ones were slightest less hunted and reproduced more. Or, we might have selected then for neoteny, as we do whenever we have a chance (dogs, cats, cows, donkey), it makes them more docile and easy to slaughter and enslave. We finding them cute would be then both a side effect of (1) evolutionary pressures for not wasting energy in building an excessively fine tuned cuteness-taste and (2) the fact the most easy way to select for easiness-to-slaughter-and-enslave is to select for baby-like faces.
Evolution is a nasty, lazy, immoral mistress.”Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.”
A cognitive module for cuteness only needs to make us find babies a nice thing and enhance the probability of parental care. It simply doesn’t matter if, besides doing that, the same cognitive module make us find bunnies or orthorhombic sulfur crystals at low temperature cute, so long this doesn’t have any deleterious effects. Probably a cognitive module that can find cute only human babies and not bunnies is more evolutionary improbable and developmental costly having the same relevant behavioral results of a more cheap and universal cognitive module for cuteness. Evolution only needs to shape cognition in order to generate, more or less, the right type of behavior. It DOESN’T have to, and in most cases it doesn’t, shape cognition nicely, in a way we would look at it and say “nice work”.
Yes, and I would say finding bunnies cuter than human babies isn’t a strong argument against Dennett’s hypothesis. Supernormal Stimuli are quite common in humans and non-humans.
I think this argument could be analogously phrased: “The reason why exercise makes us feel good can’t be to get us to exercise more, because cocaine feels even better than exercise.” Seems wrong when we put it that way.
Upvoted for a better understanding of ev psych.
That’s kind of the whole point of ev psych, at least for me: our minds are kluges, and side effects hardly factor in if they have little survival disadvantage.
Bunnies exist in the ancestral environment. Finding them cute makes us less likely to hunt and eat them, and more likely to waste resources capturing and feeding them. It’s possible we don’t actually find them cute when we’re used to hunting them, though.
Or bunnies happen to take advantage of the evolutionarily useful baby-cute sense, and it was never maladaptive enough that evolutionary processes narrowed baby-cute sense.
Sort of like how humans seem to have an automatic mental process to recognize faces even when there are no faces.
Bunnies prevalence on EEA is uncertain, at best. There are few species so widely hunted as the bunny, but it might be the case that the cute ones were slightest less hunted and reproduced more. Or, we might have selected then for neoteny, as we do whenever we have a chance (dogs, cats, cows, donkey), it makes them more docile and easy to slaughter and enslave. We finding them cute would be then both a side effect of (1) evolutionary pressures for not wasting energy in building an excessively fine tuned cuteness-taste and (2) the fact the most easy way to select for easiness-to-slaughter-and-enslave is to select for baby-like faces. Evolution is a nasty, lazy, immoral mistress.”Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.”