It is too easy to come up with a just so story like this. How would you rephrase it to make it testable?
Here is a counterstory:
Children have a survival need to learn only well-tested knowledge; they cannot afford to waste their precious developmental years believing wrong ideas. Adults, however, have already survived their juvenile years, and so they are presumably more fit. Furthermore, once an adult successfully reproduces, natural selection no longer cares about them; neither senescence nor gullibility affect an adult’s fitness. Therefore, we should expect children to be skeptical and adults to be gullible.
A child’s development is not consciously controlled; and they are protected by adults; so believing incorrect things temporarily doesn’t harm their development at all.
If you wish to produce a counterstory, make it an actual plausible one. Even if it were the case that children tended to be more skeptical of claims, your story would REMAIN obviously false; whereas Constant’s story would remain an important factor, and would raise the question of why we don’t see what would be expected given the relevant facts.
It is too easy to come up with a just so story like this. How would you rephrase it to make it testable?
Here is a counterstory:
Children have a survival need to learn only well-tested knowledge; they cannot afford to waste their precious developmental years believing wrong ideas. Adults, however, have already survived their juvenile years, and so they are presumably more fit. Furthermore, once an adult successfully reproduces, natural selection no longer cares about them; neither senescence nor gullibility affect an adult’s fitness. Therefore, we should expect children to be skeptical and adults to be gullible.
This counterstory doesn’t function.
A child’s development is not consciously controlled; and they are protected by adults; so believing incorrect things temporarily doesn’t harm their development at all.
If you wish to produce a counterstory, make it an actual plausible one. Even if it were the case that children tended to be more skeptical of claims, your story would REMAIN obviously false; whereas Constant’s story would remain an important factor, and would raise the question of why we don’t see what would be expected given the relevant facts.