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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

I feel like nobody is offering the obvious evolutionary explanation: you certainly don’t gain anything by wanting to kill/eat human babies, but it’s a completely rational impulse to want to kill/eat baby squirrels or rabbits or deer or any other thing a human hunter-gatherer might run into. “Cute” in this case means “defenseless”, which means “a free meal.”

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> you certainly don’t gain anything by wanting to kill/eat human babies

Actually, this is exactly what gorillas do. When there is a new alpha male, he will go and systematically kill all the baby gorillas who are still nursing. Why? So he can impregnate the mothers of these gorillas who are unable to reproduce while they are nursing. While human females can get pregnant while nursing a baby, they are less fertile during the first few months of breastfeeding.

Now I'm not saying this the reason why some people have this impulse. Just thought I'd share some interesting info with you. Happy new year!

Edit: I am not an expert on gorillas, just something I have recalled from reading Robert Sapolskys book, "Behave". I'm sure there is some nuance to this infanticidal behavior of gorillas which I have misrepresented. Apologies in advance to the primatologists who read my comment.

You shouldn't lose complete confidence like that just because of some superficial disagreement. History is filled with examples of groups being very wrong.

Ah, I wouldn't say I've lost complete confidence in my statement. Just wanted to add a disclaimer in case I didn't fully remember the details correctly (perhaps it isn't all gorillas, just certain species of gorillas. Perhaps the female gorillas aren't entirely infertile, just significantly less so. Etc), as I don't have the book handy to validate.

This is true of cats too. Stray mother cats will keep moving her kittens because tomcats would seek out lactating mother cats, but will first kill the kittens before mating with her. Nature is brutal.

Also in a way, the tomcat is making sure that his kittens won’t have to share resources with kittens from a different litter.

P.S: that’s a great book by Sapolsky. I read it fully and just last night, I went back to it for light selective browsing. Very well written. Thanks for mentioning it.

Well no, because if you regularly snack on immature prey you risk a future shortage of adult prey that can feed you for longer when the seasons change. In agriculture harvesting of livestock aims to balance supply and demand as consistently as possible, while in nature population sizes tend to demonstrate chaotic/hysterical behavior as a function of species' maturity cycles.

Animals in the wild are generally unable to plan ahead and let fruit ripen optimally since if demand is high enough, the only result will be another animal coming along to eat it first.

Also, it's well known that predators prey not just on old and sick individuals but also the young. Predators don't plan ahead, they eat whatever is available and accessible.

All true, but recall that attacking infant animals tends to be riskier, and that these pressures operate at the population rather than individual level. A population that's too good at targeting baby prey will go hungry later, all other things being equal.

maybe that is why, even when experienced, the least, certainly no whole population, do act on a cute aggression impulse?

No, because this has nothing to do with the desire to kill or harm. It actually invokes a desire to protect. It is motivated by the overwhelming adoration, if you will, for what is cute. The intensity is not "aggression" in the sense you or others seems to be thinking of. By analogy, think of two people who have not seen each other for a while, miss each other dearly, and meet one another. The hugs and physical expressions of affection are going to be more intense. I think this is similar. It is an experience of overwhelming joy.

The study seems to use pictures of humans: babies, adults, some of them manipulated for more/less cuteness.

It doesn't really need an evolutionary explanation. What is obvious is that babies and adults somehow coevolved in order to ensure that helpless babies are probably taken care of. But that mechanism doesn't have to be perfect. If a consequence is a few overly cute babies get hurt by a few overly sensitive adults, is not a really big deal.

Now you need to gather evidence to support your hypothesis.

falsify

"Obvious evolutionary explanations" by laymen tend to be just-so stories.

If I'm not mistaken, just-so stories were Lamarckian explanations, while OP's seems like a Darwinian one.

It's very easy to craft evolutionary just-so stories. That's why you need to look out for it.

But this is actually not a just-so story. It's a Darwinian hypothesis. OP needs to gather evidence if they want to prove their theory.

Said another way: A single Lamarckian example of evolution has yet to be proven, so they can perhaps be dismissed with a degree of confidence. OP's hypothesis is not Lamarckian.

A Darwinian just-so story may well be worse than a Lamarckian one. The latter might be immediately falsifiable while the former might be "not even wrong."

(Ugh. I just did a search for "Just So stories," only to discover that the anti-evolutionists have latched onto that term!)

>I just did a search for "Just So stories," only to discover that the anti-evolutionists have latched onto that term!

Well, that is my point. They are not evolutionary theories. Despite this being ultra downvoted, my pointing out the use of the term "just-so stories" is incorrect here seems to clearly be something you are even realizing while in the same breath disagreeing.

You seem painfully unaware that separating "just so stories" from worthy, testable hypotheses is actually a significant part of the process of coming up with a theory in evolutionary biology.

My argument is not even about the process of teasing out a testable hypothesis. What I said is that the phrase, "just-so stories" is misused here. You even discovered that yourself when you did a Google search on this phrase, as is evident from your last post. And your subsequently combative, insulting attitude in response to this development reflects poorly on your character.

What I said is that the phrase, "just-so stories" is misused here. You even discovered that yourself when you did a Google search on this phrase, as is evident from your last post.

My Google discovery has almost no bearing on the point I and everyone else trying to clue you in on this thread was making. So your response is actually a datapoint against you here.

Your responses come across not as explanatory or cooperative, but as having a combative and unproductive attitude

Anyways, whether you like to admit it or not, your Google discovery was 100% literally what my argument here is.

I have no ability to get you to change your tone or reevaluate this thread, even after you typed out the discovery yourself, showing that neither did you read my argument, let alone try to understand it. What I said was exactly what your Google discovery was.

There's not really anything else to say here. My argument was plain and simple. Just-so stories are Lamarckian theories that are not substantiated by evolutionary biology.

Since I'm already repeating myself, I'm going to stop responding now.

But I'm glad at least you learned something: exactly the point I was trying to make in the first place.

Your responses come across not as explanatory or cooperative, but as having a combative and unproductive attitude

Here's the thing. Your point seems to be that a "Just so story" is necessarily Lamarckian. In about a half dozen comments, people have been trying to disabuse you of this notion. Something that structurally and thematically resembles a "Just so story" could be written in a Rudyard Kipling Christian framework, a Jedi framework, or a Carl Sagan Cosmos framework. None of that matters.

Just-so stories are Lamarckian theories that are not substantiated by evolutionary biology.

So your theory is that, "Just-so stories are Lamarckian theories that are not substantiated by evolutionary biology." How could this theory be falsified? One way a careful scientist would try, would be to compose a just-so story entirely with Darwinian natural selection as a framework. Another way, would be to formulate a theory in terms of Darwinian evolutionary biology which no one knows how to falsify. There are countless examples of the above formulated by researchers in evolutionary biology all the time. They are as countless as failed ideas, because that is pretty much what they are.

For your point to stand, it has to deny the existence of the above.

But I'm glad at least you learned something: exactly the point I was trying to make in the first place.

Learning that makes me question whether you understand Darwinian evolution in the first place.

Look at you trying to save face, even willing to insult my intelligence to do so. In fact, nothing is complicated here. You just didnt know the meaning of "just-so" stories and refus to accept that you were wrong about that, even after you typed it out yourself. The funny thing is in the irony when you typed that point out yourself, it still managed to go over your head that: the phrase was misused, and that fact was my only point I was trying to make here.

This would make anyone question your own intelligence, not other's!

Have a good day. I'm not going to keep repeating myself or continue to interact with someone who has bad faith.

Whoa, no. Now you really sound like the typical anti-evolutionist troller. Go and listen to some of Bret Weinstein's lectures or YouTube videos. "just so stories" in an evolutionary biology context are precisely failed theories in evolutionary biology, and they can be Darwinian just as they can be Lamarckian or Rostaferian.

the phrase was misused

Basically, you were misapplying the phrase as used in a different context in the evolutionary biology context, which you yourself evoked by mentioning Lamarckianism.

Have a good day. I'm not going to keep repeating myself or continue to interact with someone who has bad faith.

I'm confident that 3rd party readers can tell the difference. I suspect you can correlate that with the sheer number of other people trying to disabuse you of the same notion.

A Darwinian just-so story is still a just-so story.

What I was trying to say is that just-so stories are not consistent with modern evolutionary biology. They are in fact Lamarckian. They are by definition, not Darwinian. The phrase here is not being used correctly in this thread.

What I was trying to say is that just-so stories are not consistent with modern evolutionary biology. They are in fact Lamarckian.

Now you're dissecting exactly what your position is, which is to your credit. However, you're also exposing the exact nature of your misconception quite starkly as well.

"Just-so stories," as used by the evolutionary biology community, can indeed be written entirely in an Darwinian evolutionary framework. All you have to do is to craft an evolutionary theory which is not currently falsifiable. Here's one. An explanation for why human babies have an unconscious proclivity for sticking things in their mouths. Infant mortality in non-technological human societies is rather high. This gives them an optimal emergent function as unwitting food tasters for their family and society. Infants represent a good cost/benefit as food tasters, since they contain almost no cultural investment in learning and knowledge, and represent a relatively small group investment in food and other resources given to them in their short lives, so if they should die, there are far fewer resources lost.

This theory is entirely Darwinian. It's a behavioral trait which can plausibly be passed down to descendants, and the mechanism for the increase of this trait is through the reproductive advantage which accrues to individuals living in groups which can discover edible foods and poisons for the least cost.

(Now, I can only imagine that you're going to try and spin what I've just said by imputing intention to entities in the theory, or some misunderstanding of evolutionary mechanisms of altruism. The persistence with which you don't understand that which is told to you resembles that of anti-evolutionists.)

OP's hypothesis isn't even falsifiable. It's just an idea.

So do the "obvious evolutionary explanations" by so-called experts, by the way. A useful exercise is to consider how you could possibly have an evolutionary explanation that is NOT a just-so story. It seems impossible to me; there is really nothing in our epistemology to justify our stories about evolution besides inductive inference, a.k.a a just-so story.

I would think if the story holds across all cultures over time, it is pretty good evidence it is not just a just-so story.

Maybe, or maybe you just insufficiently observed the variability across cultures or time, or ignored it, or pretended the outliers don't contradict your cherished thesis, or pretended your sample set is more representative than it is, etc., etc. Anyway "pretty good" evidence seems about the right standard for something to be labeled a just-so story.

Consensus is the best you can ask for with evolutionary stories. There is no equivalent of a mathematical proof in that field. Do you think we shouldn't bother with this field of study at all since we cannot definitively prove something?

In a world where the worst sort of racist dogmas proceed from exactly this sort of reasoning, and where natural selection is often made to stand in the place of God ("the fittest survive"), maybe we should.

Well, I was going to make a comment that this sort of "just so story" logic is prevalent amongst those who are anti-evolution (e.g. creationists) and would rather see the idea die, but it seems I do not need to.

Haha.. Nope, I'm not a creationist. I do have a Phd mostly earned studying evolutionary biology, though (sequence conservation). Thats why I detest this form of logic so, I understand better than most how limited our insight into adaptive cause is. When I started grad school I imagined I would be able to explain all of what made humans special by examining human-chimp divergence. It didn't take too long to disabuse me of that notion.

You could look at what the explanation predicts about the populations involved and their effect on the fossil record.

I'm not saying this is always done, but rather it shows such theories are falsifiable in the sense of Popper.

This is in fact rarely done; the fossil record is sparse. In general data on the evolutionary background is sparse.

Let's take an example I have been contemplating lately: pruny fingers. When my baby goes in the water, his fingerpads and toes turn wrinkly. There is a supposition, part of the "Aquatic Ape Theory" that is a famous example of an evolutionary just-so story, that this is an adaptation to allow better grips in the water. Sounds good to me - but how could we test this claim?

We could start with physical tests (does grip actually improve when your fingers are pruney?), but we immediately run into trouble. A grip on what? In what sort of conditions? Did these conditions exist in the adaptive context that produced this phenotype? We have no idea.

There might be rare circumstances where we can observe the coincidence of environmental and phenotypic isolation (e.g. cattle herders who are lactase persistent), but the vast majority of features will be lost against the general evolutionary background of our species (e.g. everything separating humand from chimps, both genetically and environmentally, is one confused ball). But even those rare cases are still inferential; the inference seems strong and parsimonious, but its still, at the end, "just so". We can never prove causality.

This comment adds nothing to the discussion. Instead please explain why you think it's not a potentially valid explanation instead of just attacking the OP for being a laymen(something you didn't verify).

I invite you to apply critical thinking as to why someone's declaration of the OMG obvious evolutionary explanation for a still dimly-understood psychological phenomenon is fundamentally dubious. Tossed-off evo-psych ideas like that are the playground of laymen geeks when it comes to biology. They contribute nothing except a false sense of understanding.

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