This reads as though you haven’t read the article. Alicorn is not arguing that evolutionary explanations should not be used.
No, she’s saying the cuteness explanation offered by Dennett fails (due to a single data point, no less, her opinion about the cuteness of an animal) and that it is a cautionary note about evolutionary psychology. My comment is relevant, because the fact that we find pedomorphic things universally cute, across cultures only means that our cuteness instincts are imperfect. The fact that our evolved minds misfire sometimes is not a surprise to evolutionary psychologists, and Dennett would likely have no problem with humans finding child-evocative things cute.
This completely ignores the main data point presented in the article; namely, that those things are more cute than babies, which seems to need explaining.
They’re called superstimuli,and it isn’t terribly surprising that they could exist in nature as well, as I further explain in Tyrrell McAllister’s comment below.
No, she’s saying the cuteness explanation offered by Dennett fails (due to a single data point, no less, her opinion about the cuteness of an animal) and that it is a cautionary note about evolutionary psychology. My comment is relevant, because the fact that we find pedomorphic things universally cute, across cultures only means that our cuteness instincts are imperfect. The fact that our evolved minds misfire sometimes is not a surprise to evolutionary psychologists, and Dennett would likely have no problem with humans finding child-evocative things cute.
They’re called superstimuli,and it isn’t terribly surprising that they could exist in nature as well, as I further explain in Tyrrell McAllister’s comment below.