Early this summer, I had lunch with a brilliant techno producer and historian at a Salvadorian restaurant on the edge of Detroit’s Mexicantown, Pupuseria Y Restaurante Salvadoreno. The food was authentic. The conversation with the techno producer was fascinating. But at the end of our engagement, he told something that completely shocked me. He explained that he, like many black Americans, has kept some Southern habits alive in the heart of Motown. To make his point, he explained that he has a taste for coons. I refused to believe my ears and asked, did he actually mean/say raccoons? He replied “Yes,” with pride. He loves their meat, and you can buy it at certain stores around Detroit. Nothing like raccoon stew, he insisted. I tried to make my mind imagine eating that particular animal, and it failed. Few things could be as disgusting as eating a “trash panda.”
Later that day, I was on the second floor of a house in the multicultural city of Hamtramck, which is surrounded by Detroit. I was supine on a living room sofa. A solar-powered fan hanging from the ceiling spun. And in the room’s only window, the day’s sun was setting. When I raised my head to adjust one of the sofa’s not-soft-enough cushions, I saw something in the window that utterly confused me. This something was in the gutter of the one-story house next to mine. I looked at it and looked at it and finally recognized it to be the eyes of a baby raccoon. I blinked and then saw more baby eyes. Eight in all. And all were adorably waiting for the sun to set. The night was their time to play. Once the sun was down, they all left, with their large and patient parent, the gap above the gutter and climbed the roof, which was beneath a brightening moon and the wandering stars.
I remembered the disgusting raccoon stew and the cute baby raccoons while thinking about the popularity of Baby Yoda.
The Verge reporter Julia Alexander says it like it is: Baby Yoda’s social media stardom has made Disney’s Star Wars– series The Mandalorian a hit (or, to use Alexander’s words, a TV event). It is clear that Baby Yoda is well on his way to reaching the same realm of fame as ET. But why do so many humans find this wee alien so adorable? And while we are thinking about it, why did those baby raccoons on the Detroit gutter melt me in that motherly way? If an answer is to be found, it’s certainly in a chapter (“Natal Attractions”) of a book (Mother’s and Other) by the sociobiologist Sarah Hrdy.
On page 222, Hrdy—with assistance from drawings of a human baby, a kit (baby rabbit), a pup, and a chick—writes that the ethologist Konrad Lorenz described infantile traits as kindchenschema (infant scheme): “a relatively large head, large low-lying eyes, pudgy cheeks.” Hrdy then explains that the discovery of this widespread animal attraction to infantile traits “is one of the early triumphs of ethology, and… [what] continues to provide an important source of revenue for Walt Disney.” If Mouse Corp knows anything, it is how to make money from “infant cues.”
In another section of the book, Hrdy explores across-species kindchenschema. She claims researchers have often observed predators in the wild who adopt rather than devour baby animals because their nature (“red in tooth and claw”) was overwhelmed by powerful infant cues. Humans are not special in this regard. We have the same weakness as lions, tigers, dogs, and other predators. We just melt when we see an infant in the reeds by the river or in a levitating pram. But if we were to obey our nature, and not break with what Hardy calls “the Darwinian logic,” we would not adore this alien at all. Instead, we’d want to know what it tastes like. Is its meat like chicken or like beef or like pork?
According to Wookiepedia, Yoda’s species (small, green, wrinkly, big ears) is a total mystery. Nevertheless, we can assume that Yodians evolved on a planet that’s much like Earth. This means life was only microscopic for much of the planet’s history. But at some late point, life on Yoda’s world made the incredible leap from the microscopic to the macroscopic. This transition probably required an abundance of oxygen in the atmosphere. How did the oxygen get there? This can only be determined with geological samples from the Yodian planet. However, we can determine this without samples: A Yodian is a highly ordered thing.
This alien must be made of trillions of cooperating microorganisms. Now, no matter where you are in this universe, the emergence and maintenance of a complex organismic order is not possible without the availability of high-grade energy. This is exactly what our star supplies. This is why worshipping the sun makes perfect sense. It’s constant flow of energy keeps living things on earth far from the normal state of the universe, which, in general, is ever-moving from order to disorder (or toward the heat death of the universe).
Baby Yoda is, in a word, a dissipative structure. High-grade energy goes into him, and heat (low-grade, useless energy) leaves him. We can put this another way. Adorable Baby Yoda is food. We could eat the alien in much the same way the Jawas eat/relish Mudhorn (a rhinoceros-like creature) eggs in episode 2, “The Child,” or, indeed, Yoda instinctively attempts to eat a blue frog on the paradiscal planet Sorgan in episode 4, “Sanctuary.” Given the chance, Yodians would eat humans (we, too, are food). This is one of the facts of life. “All societies require interplay with their environment;
and in the case of living societies this interplay takes the form of robbery,” wrote Alfred North Whitehead in his very difficult book Process and Reality. “The living society may, or may not, be a higher type of organism than the food which it disintegrates. But whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery.”
But Baby Yoda is adorable and so our instinct to care for and hug the little thing overwhelms our instinct to roast or fry it.
