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Cute, sexy, sweet, funny

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    I’m going around the world giving talks about Darwin,
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    and usually what I’m talking about
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    is Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning.
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    Now that title, that phrase, comes from a critic, an early critic,
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    and this is a passage that I just love, and would like to read for you.
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    "In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer;
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    so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system,
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    that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine,
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    it is not requisite to know how to make it.
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    This proposition will be found on careful examination to express,
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    in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory,
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    and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin’s meaning;
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    who, by a strange inversion of reasoning,
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    seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified
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    to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in the achievements of creative skill."
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    Exactly. Exactly. And it is a strange inversion.
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    A creationist pamphlet has this wonderful page in it:
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    "Test Two:
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    Do you know of any building that didn’t have a builder? Yes/No.
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    Do you know of any painting that didn’t have a painter? Yes/No.
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    Do you know of any car that didn’t have a maker? Yes/No.
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    If you answered 'Yes' for any of the above, give details."
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    A-ha! I mean, it really is a strange inversion of reasoning.
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    You would have thought it stands to reason
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    that design requires an intelligent designer.
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    But Darwin shows that it’s just false.
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    Today, though, I’m going to talk about Darwin’s other strange inversion,
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    which is equally puzzling at first, but in some ways just as important.
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    It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet.
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    Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy.
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    We adore babies because they’re so cute.
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    And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny.
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    This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why.
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    Let’s start with sweet. Our sweet tooth is basically an evolved sugar detector,
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    because sugar is high energy, and it’s just been wired up to the preferer,
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    to put it very crudely, and that’s why we like sugar.
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    Honey is sweet because we like it, not "we like it because honey is sweet."
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    There’s nothing intrinsically sweet about honey.
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    If you looked at glucose molecules till you were blind,
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    you wouldn’t see why they tasted sweet.
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    You have to look in our brains to understand why they’re sweet.
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    So if you think first there was sweetness,
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    and then we evolved to like sweetness,
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    you’ve got it backwards; that’s just wrong. It’s the other way round.
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    Sweetness was born with the wiring which evolved.
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    And there’s nothing intrinsically sexy about these young ladies.
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    And it’s a good thing that there isn’t, because if there were,
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    then Mother Nature would have a problem:
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    How on earth do you get chimps to mate?
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    Now you might think, ah, there’s a solution: hallucinations.
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    That would be one way of doing it, but there’s a quicker way.
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    Just wire the chimps up to love that look,
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    and apparently they do.
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    That’s all there is to it.
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    Over six million years, we and the chimps evolved our different ways.
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    We became bald-bodied, oddly enough;
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    for one reason or another, they didn’t.
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    If we hadn’t, then probably this would be the height of sexiness.
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    Our sweet tooth is an evolved and instinctual preference for high-energy food.
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    It wasn’t designed for chocolate cake.
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    Chocolate cake is a supernormal stimulus.
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    The term is owed to Niko Tinbergen,
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    who did his famous experiments with gulls,
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    where he found that that orange spot on the gull’s beak --
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    if he made a bigger, oranger spot
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    the gull chicks would peck at it even harder.
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    It was a hyperstimulus for them, and they loved it.
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    What we see with, say, chocolate cake
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    is it’s a supernormal stimulus to tweak our design wiring.
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    And there are lots of supernormal stimuli; chocolate cake is one.
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    There's lots of supernormal stimuli for sexiness.
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    And there's even supernormal stimuli for cuteness. Here’s a pretty good example.
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    It’s important that we love babies, and that we not be put off by, say, messy diapers.
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    So babies have to attract our affection and our nurturing, and they do.
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    And, by the way, a recent study shows that mothers
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    prefer the smell of the dirty diapers of their own baby.
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    So nature works on many levels here.
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    But now, if babies didn’t look the way they do -- if babies looked like this,
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    that’s what we would find adorable, that’s what we would find --
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    we would think, oh my goodness, do I ever want to hug that.
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    This is the strange inversion.
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    Well now, finally what about funny. My answer is, it’s the same story, the same story.
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    This is the hard one, the one that isn’t obvious. That’s why I leave it to the end.
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    And I won’t be able to say too much about it.
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    But you have to think evolutionarily, you have to think, what hard job that has to be done --
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    it’s dirty work, somebody’s got to do it --
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    is so important to give us such a powerful, inbuilt reward for it when we succeed.
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    Now, I think we've found the answer -- I and a few of my colleagues.
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    It’s a neural system that’s wired up to reward the brain
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    for doing a grubby clerical job.
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    Our bumper sticker for this view is
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    that this is the joy of debugging.
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    Now I’m not going to have time to spell it all out,
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    but I’ll just say that only some kinds of debugging get the reward.
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    And what we’re doing is we’re using humor as a sort of neuroscientific probe
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    by switching humor on and off, by turning the knob on a joke --
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    now it’s not funny ... oh, now it’s funnier ...
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    now we’ll turn a little bit more ... now it’s not funny --
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    in this way, we can actually learn something
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    about the architecture of the brain,
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    the functional architecture of the brain.
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    Matthew Hurley is the first author of this. We call it the Hurley Model.
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    He’s a computer scientist, Reginald Adams a psychologist, and there I am,
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    and we’re putting this together into a book.
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    Thank you very much.
Title:
Cute, sexy, sweet, funny
Speaker:
Dan Dennett
Description:

Why are babies cute? Why is cake sweet? Philosopher Dan Dennett has answers you wouldn't expect, as he shares evolution's counterintuitive reasoning on cute, sweet and sexy things (plus a new theory from Matthew Hurley on why jokes are funny).
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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDTalks
Duration:
07:32
TED edited English subtitles for Cute, sexy, sweet, funny
TED added a translation

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