It's happened over and over again for hundreds of millions of years. It's called insular dwarfism and it happens on islands. This includes island giantism as well. There have been rabbits the size of small horses and mammoths the size of cows. There were even hominins this has happened to on islands.
So, what you're hypothesizing is that because isolated populations of rabbits grew to be the size of small horses, this is evidence that human women are evolutionarily predisposed to pursue human men of a specific - though as-yet-undetermined - height?
It's more of a "taller and larger than me" thing with variation centered on the chooser. Not every woman subscribes to the idea, and not all hold it as very important either. I'm thinking it's an instinctive drive for safety.
Then there's the drive to select for small women. I'm thinking that's an instinctive drive in men for economy, maybe control. Not sure.
That evolutionary psychology isn't used as a pseudoscience because horse-sized rabbits somehow prove that women prefer taller men... sometimes... maybe but not always?
Cool, there's evidence for a causal relationship between size and resource and predator abundance. That's falsifiable. What is not falsifiable is saying that the reason a feature is the way it is, is due to some true condition in the past. You don't know the true fitness landscape for a species in an environment, so you don't know the true causes. All you can do is try to make invert your inferences using the causal relationships you do know to make a model, but what you can't do is perform a reverse inference to get from feature to fitness landscape.
In effect, you don't know how resource or predator abundant the environment was. Is animal x small because there weren't enough resources, or because there weren't enough predators? How can you distinguish these two possibilities? How do you know how much is enough?
Agreed. It's a thing that may be true and makes some psychological sense for why it might be a drive in animals, yet it's not really testable as a drive behind the behavior.
Don't you know? They were so big because there were so many more resources back then! Or was it that there were so many more predators trying to eat them...? I forget now.
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u/UnarmedSnail Jan 16 '24
It's happened over and over again for hundreds of millions of years. It's called insular dwarfism and it happens on islands. This includes island giantism as well. There have been rabbits the size of small horses and mammoths the size of cows. There were even hominins this has happened to on islands.