I agree. Obviously, there's an evolutionary incentive to care for your offspring over someone else's offspring, but I don't think it's directly tied to people thinking that "my baby is [or will be] better than all the other babies in the world." I think that's an extension of us perceiving ourselves (and to a certain extent our family and friends) as more special than others because we know how we feel; our thought processes make perfect sense to us, so we must be right. Again, there's an evolutionary advantage if you take your needs over the needs of strangers.
Yet human psychology is fairly fluid. Some of us (not me) are capable of learling how to solve partial differential equations, even though our natural environment never favored people who wasted too much time on abstractions. Again, having your own kids is better for the alleles you carry than adoption would be (evolutionarily, it makes little sense for a bereft mother to steal a random baby to replace the one she lost, and yet it happens), but human thought processes aren't set in stone.
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Date: 2006-10-28 02:44 pm (UTC)Yet human psychology is fairly fluid. Some of us (not me) are capable of learling how to solve partial differential equations, even though our natural environment never favored people who wasted too much time on abstractions. Again, having your own kids is better for the alleles you carry than adoption would be (evolutionarily, it makes little sense for a bereft mother to steal a random baby to replace the one she lost, and yet it happens), but human thought processes aren't set in stone.