Pseudoscience Alert! They’re Coming for Our Teddy Bears

Oxford Academic’s “Bioscience” produced some pseudoscience and presented it as a serious study by French “experts”. Dr. Nicolas Mouquet and colleagues analyzed over 400 Teddy Bears and discovered in their “expert” analysis that they don’t look like real bears! So observant. They concluded that this means children form emotional attachments to unrealistic mental models of animals.

I remember my first Teddy Bear because I held onto it until I was six and it disappeared one day after mean mom told me it was getting too dirty. She promised a new one after its disappearance but it never came. By that time, I was looking through the family National Geographics and knew my Teddy wasn’t the carnivorous Grizzly hunting food. I’m reasonably sure most people figure that out fairly early on. The fact that stuffing was coming out was a dead giveaway that it wasn’t real.

One has to wonder how much funding the pseudoscientists received for the analysis of 400 stuffed Teddy Bears.

Teddy Bears exploded on the scene when President Theodore Roosevelt spared the life of a bear, or so they say. We’ve been giving these adorable toys to babies and children for over 100 years.

However, according to the paper in BioScience by Dr. Nicolas Mouquet (CRNS) and colleagues, the humble Teddy Bear is much more than a mere plaything. Instead, the authors suggest that the beloved plushes play a pivotal role in our early conception of nature, potentially shaping the ways we interact with the natural world throughout our lives.

It’s an emotional bond that might never be broken.

At issue, then, is whether childhood toys are up to the task of fostering a realistic conception of nature. Unfortunately, say the authors, there may be serious downsides when they fall short: “If the bear that comforts a child looks nothing like a real bear, the emotional bridge it builds may lead away from, rather than toward, true biodiversity.”

Aha! It’s about true biodiversity. The radical left is now undermining Teddy Bears to spread their theories.

They say they want more realistic bears. Great idea. Let’s scare the bejeebers out of them.

We could even have it growl realistically.

Designers and educators should therefore reflect on the visual and tactile traits embedded in the plush toys we offer children. More generally, diversifying the plush palette to include ecologically grounded forms, species with more accurate morphologies and colorations, could help restore some alignment between emotional connection and biological reality. Enhancing the emotional relevance of biodiversity through tangible objects offers indeed a low-tech, high-impact complement to traditional conservation outreach.

For a complete analysis of the “study” by a sane individual, go to Legal Insurrection.

Who would have guessed that the left would target an innocent plush toy? Nothing lovely escapes their notice.

Don’t let them take his Teddy Bear.