Pretty much everything you find aesthetically pleasing is a primal instinct. The high-and-mighty-ness of this comment really beggars belief. I hope that somebody like yourself could confidently say you’ve never wasted your time on something frivolous like companionship or sexual needs.
Saying we like lawns because our cave-dwelling ancestors saw them as good hunting ground is fine, but to extend that to saying that's a reason why we should have them is not. We can ignore that particular primal urge if giving up lawns is good for the environment. The same goes for every other "primal instinct" - we've evolved to the point where we can make a conscious decision about what we do regardless of what our cave-dwelling ancestors might have thought.
We can, and do, rise above our evolutionary biology if it suits us. It's a good thing too, or violence and rape would be far more prevalent.
Well the simple explanation of “because I like it” is a good enough reason to have something. If you look at it analytically enough, a lot of the things we end up liking can be traced back to some primitive leftovers of our evolution as a species, and may otherwise appear to be quite irrational. You obviously can’t act on every impulse you have, so the list of irrational resource allocation decisions any particular person makes will reflect their own personal priorities. But pretending you’re somehow above this is just downright absurd. Perhaps the aesthetic pleasures of keeping a nice green lawn don’t matter very much to you personally, but your life is most certainly full of your own personal collection of frivolous and irrational decisions that you made purely for your own satisfaction.
> Saying we like lawns because our cave-dwelling ancestors saw them as good hunting ground is fine, but to extend that to saying that's a reason why we should have them is not.
I don't see this claim in the comment you originally replied to. The poster gave a theory as to why people like lawns, they did not say that this means we should have them.
I don't either. That claim was made by AmericanChopper when he stated "I hope that somebody like yourself could confidently say you’ve never wasted your time on something frivolous like companionship or sexual needs." when we were talking about lawns. The "something frivolous" bit was sarcasm. He was effectively saying we need lawns in the same way we need sex - because our primitive cave brains tell us they're like the a perfect savannah. I was saying that even if that's true (which is a dubious claim) we can ignore that urge if we want to.
No, but you can consciously decide whether or not to act on finding something appealing. That's the point here - our ancient evolutionary instincts are real, but we have also evolved the ability to think rationally so we can ignore those urges if we want to. Consequently whenever someone argues "we do that because we evolved from cave people" the correct response is "but we're not cave people any more, and why are you ignoring the thousands of years of evolution that have happens since we left the caves?"
