Diseased humans and their corpses. I can’t believe this meme still gets posted regularly.
Not just humans - I think it's not unusual to see a sick animal, notice that it's "moving wrong", and feel a revulsion that motivates staying away from it. It's a very handy instinct if, for example, that animal might have rabies...
Edit: I agree with you, I'm just expanding on what you said.
Could also have been cannibals, a lot of folklores talk about people who aren't really people that kill and eat people. Some versions of the tale of the wendigo feature whoever encounters them in their human forms noting that they knew they must be wendigo because they looked like normal people but something just felt wrong about how they behaved.
Uncanny valley could be at play in the ick you feel when you can tell for no apparent reason that someone's a psychopath or dangerous in some other way, the unconscious response to the things your brain noticed that you didn't.
...they knew they must be wendigo because they looked like normal people but something just felt wrong about how they behaved.
Humans have a pretty good knack of recognizing things without understanding the cause. Wendigo sounds kind of like a cannibal who got a prion disease, with the unusual physical behaviors.
Pfffflt. The wendigo is an alpha ghoul. Good source of screws too.
IIRC Sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans coexisted for some time, so it could be not about things that aren't human, but humans that are different. To this day, xenophobia and ethnocentrism are common attitudes.
Yea but homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis definitely interbred. A lot. A measurable chunk of modern human DNA is neanderthal in origin. The uncanny valley being there to spot sick and dead people is more likely.
I just saw this meme, though it was funny. Showed it to my friend and he said almost exactly this.
It makes perfect sense now that I hear it.
Dead/sick people
And mentally ill / under the influence. You could say sick includes those. The danger was real.
Mentally ill people are far, far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.
Just a fact worth pointing out.
/thread
Maybe it was dead/sick aliens!
This gets posted a lot, but nobody ever seems to post what the thing was.
The answer is probably "other hominids". Humans (Homo sapiens specifically) co-existed with them for a long time and competed with them over resources.
Edit: and the genetically deformed (with whom it would be beneficial to not breed, at least from an evolutionary standpoint) and corpses or people with disease
Also corpses, I see it debunked pretty much every time it’s posted
So you're saying zombies used to be real? 😱
And the only reason they’re gone is because we stopped fucking them
It could be a rock formation. Nobody says uncanny valley when its a sexy looking knot on a tree.
See e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans
Corpses, illness, "bad genes" (asymmetry etc) seems like a more reasonable explaination in my ears, with interacting/breeding in mind.
Humans as a whole have never had any trouble killing other humans who looked just like them. I don't think such an instinct would have been necessary. And anyway the uncanny valley has more to do with revulsion than aggression.
Everyone thinks it was humans. Why not a remnant from that time Nature started doing deepfakes to kill
https://www.livescience.com/41604-animals-that-mimic-plants-photos.html
There were tons of humanoid species around before we killed them all. Neanderthals, etc. Wonder why they're dead? Could be this.
We did fuck with Neanderthals too, though. There's still traces of their DNA in modern humans, I think
As the distance between two species widens, viable (ie, not sterile) offspring become rarer and rarer (although not impossible), so there would be a biological incentive not to "waste time" banging something that looks too different from yourself
The original EEE
Literally rabies
...or it's just that requiring co-operative society for our survival wired us to pick up on very subtle facial and figurative signals and signs when it comes to human behavior and anything "off" about it sticks out like a sore and creepy thumb.
Not necessarily, it could just be a fear of humans or hominids that weren't the same as your own tribe. In that sense, ingrained racism and uncanny valley would be the same psychological effect.
Rabies
I dont think that's smart, I think it's just wrong.
I would say there's an evolutionary need to be afraid of things we don't understand. Lots more examples of that as well.
When it looks like something we think we recognize but it looks unfamiliar at the same time, we don't understand it, and we want to stay away from it.
Simple as that, in my mind. 🤷♂️
Not every trait has an adaptive significance, FFS
Being lactose intolerance implies that at some point there was some deadly form of milk and squirting shit out of your arse at 400mph is an appropriate way of dealing with it.
I mean, at some point humans and neanderthals coexisted and even interbred. I don't think it's a stretch that there could have been other similar species that we didn't get along with even earlier than that.
it could be a mammalian response, doesn't have to be just human
No, it doesn't.
I still don't understand what the uncanney valley is exactly. I've read the definition but not I don't experience it that way I guess? I don't know what people are talking about when they say something is uncanny valley.
I've always understood it as the perception that something isn't quite right (usually with a person, but I've seen it used in non-human contexts too) without being able to immediately describe why.
A great example is Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One - the actor who played him on the original trilogy died in 1994, so they just deep-faked him into the scenes he was needed. When I saw Rogue One initially, I didn't know that actor was dead, and didn't connect the dots that even if he wasn't dead, he'd look like a zombie this many years after filming the OT... but in Rogue One, he just looked like Tarkin. Mostly. The scenes that featured him gave a kind of uncomfortable "what the hell is wrong with that guy" feeling, but I still didn't connect the dots and couldn't put my finger on why it looked so wrong.
Then later I learned is was a deep-fake, and now it just looks like a deep-fake; the uncanny valley sensation went away once I finally understood why he looked the way he did.
The internet is full of creepy looking 'examples' of uncanny valley, but they're all shit imo, cuz they're all just blatantly creepy shit; well beyond the uncertainty that goes along with uncanny valley.
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