Well sure. Observing humans, I think there is plenty of evidence that we do a lot of those things.
Teenage boys spend how many hours of their lives poaching monsters in video games? Sure, some games are designed for them to grind, but they find this to be recreational why? Maybe they really would use all the animals as target practice if there weren’t some type of instinct to stop them.
We’ve all seen people taking out anger on others, or on the dog. No reason to think they wouldn’t do that to a forest full of animals.
We’ve seen humans do class signaling—a lot of poor people will spend $100 on shoes to make themselves look richer. Some people get stuck in the “keeping up with the Jones’s” cycle, spending ever more to look just as good. If killing animals was a way of class signaling for primitive people, there’s no reason to think that they wouldn’t be competitive about it like modern humans can be.
We know that humans sometimes hunt animals to extinction, so it’s not implausible to suggest that humans without cuteness might have wreaked havoc on ecosystems.
As for whether specifically cave people / tribes would do any of these things if specifically their instinct for cuteness were removed and whether they’d end up with such a dearth of animals as to interfere with their survival is obviously not testable, but the things I suggested are plausible based on the way that people behave.
Again, you have a hypothesis that sounds very plausible, but because it does sound so plausible, I’m instantly suspicious of it. Plausible things often turn out to be false.
Is there any quantitative test you can propose, or an experiment you could run, that would give you a number between 0 and 1, representing the probability of your hypothesis being true ? If the answer is “yes”, then perhaps someone had already done the research ? If the answer is “no”, then IMO it’s not thinking about.
Well sure. Observing humans, I think there is plenty of evidence that we do a lot of those things.
Teenage boys spend how many hours of their lives poaching monsters in video games? Sure, some games are designed for them to grind, but they find this to be recreational why? Maybe they really would use all the animals as target practice if there weren’t some type of instinct to stop them.
We’ve all seen people taking out anger on others, or on the dog. No reason to think they wouldn’t do that to a forest full of animals.
We’ve seen humans do class signaling—a lot of poor people will spend $100 on shoes to make themselves look richer. Some people get stuck in the “keeping up with the Jones’s” cycle, spending ever more to look just as good. If killing animals was a way of class signaling for primitive people, there’s no reason to think that they wouldn’t be competitive about it like modern humans can be.
We know that humans sometimes hunt animals to extinction, so it’s not implausible to suggest that humans without cuteness might have wreaked havoc on ecosystems.
As for whether specifically cave people / tribes would do any of these things if specifically their instinct for cuteness were removed and whether they’d end up with such a dearth of animals as to interfere with their survival is obviously not testable, but the things I suggested are plausible based on the way that people behave.
These things are not common knowledge?
Again, you have a hypothesis that sounds very plausible, but because it does sound so plausible, I’m instantly suspicious of it. Plausible things often turn out to be false.
Is there any quantitative test you can propose, or an experiment you could run, that would give you a number between 0 and 1, representing the probability of your hypothesis being true ? If the answer is “yes”, then perhaps someone had already done the research ? If the answer is “no”, then IMO it’s not thinking about.