Dr. Gray’s mentioning the evolution of Mickey Mouse reminded me of a similar story that I read in Animal Behavior many years ago.   In 1985, R. A. Hinde and L. A. Barden (Animal Behavior, 33, 1371-1373) reported the results of their study of the evolution of teddy bears.   Their data were collected from teddies at an exhibition at the Cambridge Folk Museum.   They noted that teddies originated (around 1900) following the popularity of a picture of President Theodore Roosevelt.   Teddy Roosevelt was pictured in the Rockies, after a hunt, with a brown bear in the background.   The early teddies looked like bears -- they had a low forehead and a long snout.   Over the years, the teddy “evolved” to become the cute teddies that are popular now, teddies with infantile features, including a larger forehead and a shorter snout.

    It is obvious that the morphological changes that have occurred in teddies in the short span of a little over 100 years have contributed greatly to their reproductive fitness.   There seem to be teddies all over the place.   I have had to carry dozens of them to the landfill, having been unable to find good homes for them after they were abandoned by my children.   I must confess that there was one teddy with which I could not bear to part -- it was a very bearish, long- snouted bear that I found in a Jamesway store in upstate New York when my son was a baby.  My appreciation for the appearance of real bear faces may stem from two close encounters with feral bears in the Allegheny mountains -- close enough to feel the warm, angry breath on my face in one case and having the bear’s arm around my shoulders in the other.

    So, has the evolution of the teddy bear been adaptive?   A functionalist might mistakenly think that the purpose of the teddy is to please infants, for whom they are supposedly bought.   Young children, however, have told us otherwise.   Psychologists at the University>Portsmouth (Morris, Reddy, & Bunting, 1995, Animal Behavior, 50, 1697-1700) offered children between the ages of 4 and 8 their choice of eight teddies, four of which had adult features and four of which had infantile features.   Among the four year olds, the adult featured bear was almost two and a half times more likely to be chosen than was the baby featured bear (17/7 odds).   Among the older children (6 to 8 years of age), the infantile teddies were over three times more likely to be chosen than the adult featured teddies (41/13 odds).   It is unfortunate that even younger humans were not tested, but the data do seem to indicate that young children (and presumably babies) prefer teddies with adult features, not the cute baby-faced teddies that their parents buy.   This makes perfect sense -- what good does it do a baby to attach to other babies?   It is clearly in the babies’ interest to attach to adults.

    Has teddy evolution gone astray?   Has teddy selection produced a dysfunctional teddy?  I think not.  The evidence clearly suggests that the function of teddies is not to please babies, it is to please adults (and older children), who find infantile features cute.

    So how does pleasing adults enhance the reproductive fitness of teddy bears.  Allow me to consider, briefly, reproduction in teddies.  We have discussed both asexual and sexual reproduction, but teddies reproduce by a third means, capitalist reproduction.  Although the details of this sort of reproduction are beyond the scope of this essay, I can give you a brief description of the process.  By a means that might be likened to mutation, but with “intelligent design,” new morphs of the teddy bear are created and can be seen in internet catalogs and other sorts of displays.  The well designed teddy will stimulate humans to allocate resources towards the goal of helping this teddy migrate to the home territory of the human.   Such migration produces forces that actually promote the reproduction of additional teddies of this morph.

    When my son was born, I was fortunate to find, in Oswego, NY, a teddy bear that looked like the real thing.  It was on sale, cheap, because parents did not like how it looked.