How come everyone is missing the obvious answer? The human ancestor that first developed attachment to babies may be an ancestor we share with rabbits.
(Edit, Also: Human babies may have evolved to be uglier for other reasons -less hair, bigger heads- and those features may have been selected for more than cuteness.)
Edit 2: Metaphorically, our cuteness program is like running Netscape Navigator 1.0 or something. It sort of does the trick but isn’t exactly adapted for modern uses
I agree with Jack: large eyes embedded in a small puffy face are general mammalian triggers for cuteness. Humans thinking that kittens are cute is just an accident.
Though ‘accident’ isn’t the right word. Mammalian mechanisms are simply very general among mammals and robust. I read this somewhere and assimilated it as obviously true. And then I experienced how true it was when I had kids.
We’re always ‘being mammals’ but I guess we’re somewhat desensitized to the mammalian things we do every day. During pregnancy, childbirth and raising a child, a whole slew of new behaviors are activated and it’s just amazing to realize the extent to which behaviors are instinctual and rely on physical mechanisms like tactile stimulation, visual cues and internal timers.
Breast-feeding of course. Did you know that breast-feeding is an interactive activity, where the baby has to suck of course, but also the mother needs to ‘let down’ the milk supply? Tactile stimulation (like sucking or kneading) will trigger ‘let down’, but also it can be triggered if the mother just thinks about her baby being cute. Women often have a lot of trouble ‘pumping’ milk for later use because the apparatus doesn’t mimic human babies very well. Even if it mimics the way a child sucks during the first 30 seconds, the longer scale 5-15 minute temporal dynamics are missing. There’s a difference between the milking patterns at the beginning and the end.
A few months before birth there’s the nesting behavior, and then the timing of labor is a very complex, oscillatory process with many false and half starts.
Other timing mechanisms include the biological clock that makes women more inclined to want children, ovulation, the multi-stage birth event itself, lactation rhythyms as mothers and babies fine-tune and adjust over weeks and months. One of the most amazing examples of this, for me, was that I noticed a 1-3 minute pattern in the way I attended to my children. Especially someplace where they were amused and relatively safe but possibly in and out of sight, like at the park. For 1 to 2 minutes, I would just think my own thoughts, possibly chat on the phone or look through a magazine. After about 2 minutes, I noticed a growing anxiety that would not be relieved until I spotted my child. found this very curious and played around with it, deliberately not looking for my child for small periods of time to determine how regular this mechanism was. It seemed very regular.
I agree with Jack: large eyes embedded in a small puffy face are general mammalian triggers for cuteness. Humans thinking that kittens are cute is just an accident.
Then I repeat my question: please give examples of non-primate mammalian behaviors that indicate the animal found an animal of a different species “cute”.
A second question: does your theory allows distinguishing between “cuteness” reaction and nurturing/baby-raising protective behavior?
A second question: does your theory allows distinguishing between “cuteness” reaction and nurturing/baby-raising protective behavior?
Mine doesn’t. I think that instinctual mechanisms for “nurturing/baby-raising protective behavior” is a really big deal for mammals, so much so that the mechanisms have a tendency to be overly robust. (E.g., some men lactate.) However, I would defer to an expert on this, and would ask one (read a book) if something rested upon the question.
please give examples of non-primate mammalian behaviors that indicate the animal found an animal of a different species “cute”.
I look forward to the day when we can scan an animal brain and see what they think and feel. Till then, I can’t comment on whether animals think their babies are ‘cute’. There’s no doubt though that nurturing/baby-raising protective behavior is triggered across species. However it seems context-dependent: the parenting animal must have reason to consider the baby part of the family. So domesticated animals are likely to show this behavior to other pets and babies. (My cat tried to teach my first baby how to hunt when she started crawling, but didn’t bother with the second.) Birds will take care of other birds if they’re in the nest, etc. And of course there’s Tarzan, which might have been based on some kind of observation of this kind.
I look forward to the day when we can scan an animal brain and see what they think and feel. Till then, I can’t comment on whether animals think their babies are ‘cute’.
I think ‘response-to-cute-stimuli’ can be usefully defined on a behavioral level too.
I suggest this definition: the animal is interested in the cute-animal, often despite being strangers; it spends time looking at it or touching it, plays with it or talks to it (depending on the animal’s species-typical behavior). But it eventually forgets about it, leaves it behind (or allows it to depart), and does not protect or feed it—as it would an adopted baby. Doing these last things goes beyond “owww it’s cute!” and constitutes parenting behavior.
The question is—do animals reliably exhibit non-parenting behavior of the sort described above, and towards what patterns of other animals?
There are a number of stories of mammals ‘adopting’ babies of other species in zoos. Here’s one example. There seem to have been some misleading emails including pictures related to this story but as far as I can tell it is true that there have been instances of both a pig raising tiger cubs and a tiger raising piglets.
That would explain how it is we can find rabbits cute at all. But to find them equally or more cute than human babies would seem to not be explained by your answer.
How come everyone is missing the obvious answer? The human ancestor that first developed attachment to babies may be an ancestor we share with rabbits.
Because I don’t consider it plausible. The ‘cuteness’ response is just far more malleable than the, you know, bit where you aren’t a rabbit. See, for example, all the other sensory preferences that are are finely honed per species.
EDIT: I will add that it is slightly more plausible to me that rabbits are cute because they look more like baby ancestral primates than baby humans do on some key features (little and fury). Even so I would be reluctant to assign too much confidence to such a theory.
For example, baby pinguins and other birds can be very cute; baby lizards usually aren’t. I think the theory goes that we’ve evolved from something that looks somewhat lizardy, but definitely not like a bird.
I just knew someone would come up with something like this :-) indeed it
looks cute. One could take it even a step further; look at the weird but
cute-looking space aliens in this Moby
video.
This actually supports the notion that cuteness is not necessarily
proportional to the likeliness to humans or to our ancestors.
Yeah, it definitely isn’t a perfect theory. It is obvious in the sense that it is the logical conclusion to come to if you held the Dennet theory and then had alicorn’s evidence presented to you. The main thing is that there is no reason to think that the cuteness instinct is a product of recent evolution.
Do we know whether adult non-primate mammals find anything cute? What’s a description of their behavior in such a case?
So far I’ve only seen descriptions of animals adopting other-species young to raise. I think child-raising instincts are separate from cuteness responses, in other animals as well as in humans.
From the comments on the article you linked, the cheetahs happily ate the impala. Go to http://www.biosphoto.com/ and search for “cheetah AND impala”. You’ll find these photos as well as the ones from a few minutes later...
Is your theory that cats playing with live food before killing it is, in general, an effect of the food’s cuteness?
Also in the comments, the assertion that the impala that was eaten was an adult eaten earlier. Once sated, the cheetahs were not interested in eating the younger impala.
True, it’s not clear which is the complete account. At the very least, photos of some impala(s) being eaten and of this one being played with were seemingly taken in one session.
Good question. It didn’t appear until here. The obvious answer is that cuteness does in fact serve purposes distinct from making people nurture every baby they come across.
Maintaining a food source until a better time to eat it seems like a somewhat better reason to find bunnies cute than because they look like babies. Particularly because eating or at least killing other people’s babies is a strategy that some of our near primate relatives use. Significant evidence could persuade me but I’m just not seeing it.
There may be reasons for experiencing “cute” besides stimulating parental care, but I’m skeptical about the food-source-theory because I think things are cute independent of their nutritive value. The only connection may be that adult herbivores tend be cuter than adult carnivores, and they also taste better.
Nevertheless, I was thinking about what kinds of food I think are cute. And this brought me in an entirely different direction. Anything miniature is cute. (Even a mini-paperclip.) Is this a different sense of cute again? Is our parental duty stimulated so broadly we can experience it in response to a mini-hamburger?
That’s an interesting take on it. I was going along a similar train of thought of ‘anything miniature is cute’. I just didn’t interpret it as parental. I took it as ‘Miniature things are barely worth it but are growing extremely fast. Throw it back and eat it when it is ten times the nutritional value in a couple of weeks!’ My surprise would then be that we experience even in response to things that are not a ‘mini-burger’. I’m not going to benefit from eating clippy unless I am iron deficient and I embed him in an apple for a while to rust before I eat it!
Maybe. It depends. The precise function our cuteness response had for ancestors might be fulfilled by some other feature or perhaps the ancestral environment didn’t select individuals that way. Or maybe the cuteness criteria did evolve a little… just not has fast as our physical features did. Actually, I think we should expect it to evolve slower than our physical features just because plenty less-cute individuals will survive.
But then shouldn’t we expect similar stuff to happen for rabbits? for them to evolve away from the primordial shared cuteness criteria?
Actually, wait… human babies are rather more helpless than the babies of most other mammals, right? Shouldn’t more helplessness, more (and longer) dependence on adults result in stronger perception of cuteness of them? (via shifts in their appearance and our criteria)?
But then shouldn’t we expect similar stuff to happen for rabbits? for them to evolve away from the primordial shared cuteness criteria?
They may have. Just not as much.
Shouldn’t more helplessness, more (and longer) dependence on adults result in stronger perception of cuteness of them? (via shifts in their appearance and our criteria)?
I don’t think the reason modern humans take care of their children is just about how cute they are. We’ve developed additional instincts to encourage child rearing (cultural pressure, some more specialized attachments that individual parents have with just their children and not with other cute things). This is what I mean by the function being fulfilled by another feature. This isn’t evidence of anything in particular but cuteness feels sort of cognitively primitive, doesn’t it? Like fear? I don’t know if associating qualia like that is a permissible inference.
I’ve actually ranked this hypothesis third behind “Babies are cuter after all.” and “Coincidental superstimulus”.
It’s not much of a coincidence if most mammals have similar parental care-inducing cues—including big eyes. Nor is it a coincidence that baby rabbits exhibit such infantile traits more than human children do—this post deliberately chose rabbits as an example because they have cute babies. I rate all this as not adding up to a coincidence at all.
That instincts are orders of magnitude slower to evolve than physical attributes at the scale of ‘people and bunnies’.
The instincts have to reference physical attributes to identify cute things. If physical appearance evolves so quickly, how can the instinct continue to apply to it?
IOW, to accept this theory, it is necessary to believe that the things we find cute are all similar to that shared ancestor (or shared-ancestral juvenile). Does anyone know if this actually makes sense within what we know of ur-Mammalian creatures?
Is ‘supermodels’ supposed to be shorthand for ‘highly sexually attractive’? Supermodels are not generally the women who are the most sexually attractive to heterosexual males but are selected for a variety of other attributes such as a ‘striking’ appearance, height and extreme slenderness.
That said, women who are considered very sexually attractive are not particularly chimpy either. They do share other traits that are not as common amongst supermodels however.
This pretty much convinced me that the fine variances of sexiness have much more to do with memes than genes. It shouldn’t be hard to test if it is the case with cuteness as well: just find a culture that hasn’t been exposed to Disney/Pixar films.
Not that hard to do. Look at woman representations in art. Until the last century, they were quite different from current photo-models. (I tend to think of most of them as “fat”, despite the fact that I know they’ve better reproductive characteristics.)
Yes. But there is no reason to think the cuteness attraction instinct and the sexual attraction instinct evolve at the same rate or even at a rate of the same order of magnitude. Finding offspring less cute than your ancestors did is far less likely to lead to genetic death than failing to mate with those with the best traits. That seems obvious to me anyway, I could be wrong.
How about, the closer something is to human, the more cute? Since there will be 2 million years of pressure honing ‘cuteness’ to primate needs, and counteracting the x million years of pressure about rabbits.
Not if the the cuteness effect was overwhelmed by selection for other traits. That is the part I added on edit. It might be that we’re still working with the cuteness criteria of rabbit-like ancestors.
‘other trait’? Unless you have a specific other factor in mind, it’s just a fully general counterargument. (I nullify your other traits with other-other traits!)
Huh? The traits in us that make babies less cute than bunnies. Hairlessness appears to be a popular example (most people think furry things are cute), there may be more. Maybe baby eyes are smaller relative to their head than bunnies because of selection for larger brains. It is true that you can’t disprove the hypothesis by finding trait that makes bunnies cuter than babies that I haven’t thought of. The argument is general in that sense. But we can evaluate the hypothesis in the case of each trait. Name a trait and then we can see if our explanation of that trait is the kind of thing that would be selected for over cuteness.
Well, an obvious explanation would be that it didn’t have time to. Since Jack’s theory claims it’s an old trait, it might be embedded deep in an old structure of the brain (IIRC at least some emotions are seated very deep), and it might be hard to change, in the sense that most mutations that would make babies seem cuter would have other deleterious effects. As long as people find babies cute enough, the selection effect from the bad effects would delay the change until the rare mutations that don’t have bad effects happen.
Also, note that our cuteness criteria don’t matter that much unless one has a baby. I’ve heard enough reports of (and had some first hand experience with) people that didn’t care much about babies before they had them, but then had a “revelatory” experience once they met them. This suggests there’s a separate effect (pheromones, hormones, whatever) that makes up for whatever inefficiency in human cuteness criteria, but that mostly activates just when it matters. This would also reduce the evolutionary pressure for any “general” cuteness criteria adjustment.
Note also that our “badly adjusted” criteria were not a big deal (in the sense of decreasing reproductive fitness) during most of human evolution. Animals tend to hide their young and protect them, so encountering a cute puppy or kitty would have been a rare occasion for almost all people.
Well, an obvious explanation would be that it didn’t have time to.
A bad one; it’s something like 2 million years back to our LCA with our nearest primate relatives, and I wouldn’t want to guess how many tens of millions back to our last common ancestor with the rabbits. What deep structure would be blocking decamillions of years of pressure? Again, you can hypothesize all sorts of outside reasons but without any specific reason...
Also, note that our cuteness criteria don’t matter that much unless one has a baby.
Everyone deals with babies at some point, from evolution’s perspective. You are a baby, you interact with babies, you have babies, you raise babies, etc. Mothers may be a good target for a massive dose of brainwashing hormones & chemicals (lord knows they’ll need it), but a love of babies and cuteness is valuable for dads as well (where there is no convenient set of biological triggers like giving birth) and other relatives.
Animals tend to hide their young and protect them, so encountering a cute puppy or kitty would have been a rare occasion for almost all people.
The domestication of dogs could have begun as long ago as ~100,000 years; and even so, this is just an argument for weak pressures.
I agree with most of this, but I think it’s not countering what I was trying to argue: With regards to a certain individual’s reproductive fitness, the “precision” of that individual’s cuteness criteria is not that important. The actual reproductive advantage is in caring for one’s young, thus raising the probability of perpetuating one’s genes further.
Thus, even a not-very-well calibrated “cuteness” factor might not be very important (in the sense of not causing much selective pressure) as long as something else causes the individual to actually care for zer young. In this case I (weakly) conjecture that the “something else” is a mechanism that “focuses” the “cuteness evaluation” on one’s young.
As an analogy, consider a myopic species. Selective pressure might be expected to cause it to develop better vision, to help it avoid predators and find food. However, if the same species happens to have, e.g., good (not dog-like, only good enough) smell — which brings it close enough to food for its myopic vision to work, and keeps it far enough from predators to not need eyes for defense, the selective pressure can be very diminished.
Consider vision: it is an extremely old feature, so it had ample time to evolve. In fact, I’m told it evolved separately several times on Earth. All current vertebrates come from a common ancestor, which as far as I can determine had eyes. However, their vision acuity varies greatly, even in species that share a habitat. Better vision is always an advantage wherever there is light, but it’s obvious from the world around us that the selective pressure exerted by that advantage is often not enough to cause evolution (sometimes, the reverse happens).
Hmm, I just had another thought, reading your comment about “[a] deep structure” blocking selection: It’s not blocking as much as making irrelevant.
It may be that we’re just wrong. It’s possible that the “cuteness” factor was useful, as we think, for causing us to like babies and thus propagate our genes by caring for them. However, another trait with similar final consequences (but better in some way) just happened to evolve with better efficiency, maybe some new hormonal pathway or something related to primate brains, or anything I can’t think of.
The “cuteness” factor might actually atrophy in such a case. If a species develops very good smell for finding prey, they might not actually need their eyes much. The selective pressure for better vision diminishes, and drift takes over. I’m told this happened with some races of dogs. In our case, it’s obvious that no matter how cute we think some things are, we actually do take care of our children a lot (and a visible majority of people, at least at the start, seem to quickly become very attached to their babies).
“Cuteness acuity” might simply be irrelevant. It might have become so a long time ago, and become re-purposed for something else (beauty, art, whatever; the brain mixes things from many evolutionary eras).
What komponisto said. Also, we should expect to find an extremely adorable common ancestor.
I don’t see how this follows at all. Either cuteness and baby look manage to converge over the lifetime of a reasonably long-lived species or they do not. If they do we should expect our own babies or at least those of the most recent long-lived ancestor species to look cuter than the cuteness originator. If they don’t , presumably because cuteness is difficult to fine-tune, there is no particular reason to think the cuteness originator achieved a higher conversion than more recent species. Instead the cutest species should be one with both long time to evolve to meet maximum cuteness and few evolutionary constraints that limit cuteness.
All that is right. But if indeed bunnies are cuter than babies it suggests that the ancestor you describe is a common one. It would be surprising if the ancestors of bunnies had diverged from this cuteness pattern and then returned to it (especially since we seem to think that the more dependent variable is our psychological reaction not the physical features that we call “cute”. Thus the prediction.
The cuteness originator being a common ancestor of all species that value cuteness doesn’t imply that it achieved particularly high cuteness. Suppose that the cuteness ideal is essentially invariant (e. g. changing our idea of cuteness to include long noses would be extremely difficult and pretty much require reinventing cuteness from scratch), and valuing cuteness has been originally selected for because the babies of the cuteness originator just happened to be cute enough for cuteness valuation to be an evolutionary advantage. Successor species to the cuteness originator have the same cuteness ideal, and many of them have even cuter babies, because greater cuteness is advantageous and they had more time to evolve it. If the cuteness ideal is hard to change there is no reason to think that it was a perfect match originally.
On the other hand, if the cuteness ideal is easy to change there is no particular reason to think that we still retain the original ideal.
All of this assumes that cuteness sensing and cuteness causing features are being selected for over other traits. But part of the original comment was that they weren’t- that for human’s cuteness is as much a legacy as anything else.
It only assumes that they weren’t much more strongly selected for originally than they are now, lack of selection is just a special case of cuteness matching being hard. You wouldn’t expect there to have been a perfect match between cuteness sensing and cuteness causing features unless it had been selected for, so expecting the commom ancestor to be exceptionally cute implies sufficiently strong selection then, but not now or in between.
How come everyone is missing the obvious answer? The human ancestor that first developed attachment to babies may be an ancestor we share with rabbits.
(Edit, Also: Human babies may have evolved to be uglier for other reasons -less hair, bigger heads- and those features may have been selected for more than cuteness.)
Edit 2: Metaphorically, our cuteness program is like running Netscape Navigator 1.0 or something. It sort of does the trick but isn’t exactly adapted for modern uses
I agree with Jack: large eyes embedded in a small puffy face are general mammalian triggers for cuteness. Humans thinking that kittens are cute is just an accident.
Though ‘accident’ isn’t the right word. Mammalian mechanisms are simply very general among mammals and robust. I read this somewhere and assimilated it as obviously true. And then I experienced how true it was when I had kids.
We’re always ‘being mammals’ but I guess we’re somewhat desensitized to the mammalian things we do every day. During pregnancy, childbirth and raising a child, a whole slew of new behaviors are activated and it’s just amazing to realize the extent to which behaviors are instinctual and rely on physical mechanisms like tactile stimulation, visual cues and internal timers.
Breast-feeding of course. Did you know that breast-feeding is an interactive activity, where the baby has to suck of course, but also the mother needs to ‘let down’ the milk supply? Tactile stimulation (like sucking or kneading) will trigger ‘let down’, but also it can be triggered if the mother just thinks about her baby being cute. Women often have a lot of trouble ‘pumping’ milk for later use because the apparatus doesn’t mimic human babies very well. Even if it mimics the way a child sucks during the first 30 seconds, the longer scale 5-15 minute temporal dynamics are missing. There’s a difference between the milking patterns at the beginning and the end.
A few months before birth there’s the nesting behavior, and then the timing of labor is a very complex, oscillatory process with many false and half starts.
Other timing mechanisms include the biological clock that makes women more inclined to want children, ovulation, the multi-stage birth event itself, lactation rhythyms as mothers and babies fine-tune and adjust over weeks and months. One of the most amazing examples of this, for me, was that I noticed a 1-3 minute pattern in the way I attended to my children. Especially someplace where they were amused and relatively safe but possibly in and out of sight, like at the park. For 1 to 2 minutes, I would just think my own thoughts, possibly chat on the phone or look through a magazine. After about 2 minutes, I noticed a growing anxiety that would not be relieved until I spotted my child. found this very curious and played around with it, deliberately not looking for my child for small periods of time to determine how regular this mechanism was. It seemed very regular.
Then I repeat my question: please give examples of non-primate mammalian behaviors that indicate the animal found an animal of a different species “cute”.
A second question: does your theory allows distinguishing between “cuteness” reaction and nurturing/baby-raising protective behavior?
Mine doesn’t. I think that instinctual mechanisms for “nurturing/baby-raising protective behavior” is a really big deal for mammals, so much so that the mechanisms have a tendency to be overly robust. (E.g., some men lactate.) However, I would defer to an expert on this, and would ask one (read a book) if something rested upon the question.
I look forward to the day when we can scan an animal brain and see what they think and feel. Till then, I can’t comment on whether animals think their babies are ‘cute’. There’s no doubt though that nurturing/baby-raising protective behavior is triggered across species. However it seems context-dependent: the parenting animal must have reason to consider the baby part of the family. So domesticated animals are likely to show this behavior to other pets and babies. (My cat tried to teach my first baby how to hunt when she started crawling, but didn’t bother with the second.) Birds will take care of other birds if they’re in the nest, etc. And of course there’s Tarzan, which might have been based on some kind of observation of this kind.
I think ‘response-to-cute-stimuli’ can be usefully defined on a behavioral level too.
I suggest this definition: the animal is interested in the cute-animal, often despite being strangers; it spends time looking at it or touching it, plays with it or talks to it (depending on the animal’s species-typical behavior). But it eventually forgets about it, leaves it behind (or allows it to depart), and does not protect or feed it—as it would an adopted baby. Doing these last things goes beyond “owww it’s cute!” and constitutes parenting behavior.
The question is—do animals reliably exhibit non-parenting behavior of the sort described above, and towards what patterns of other animals?
There are a number of stories of mammals ‘adopting’ babies of other species in zoos. Here’s one example. There seem to have been some misleading emails including pictures related to this story but as far as I can tell it is true that there have been instances of both a pig raising tiger cubs and a tiger raising piglets.
I have to admit, I wouldn’t have thought of this.
That would explain how it is we can find rabbits cute at all. But to find them equally or more cute than human babies would seem to not be explained by your answer.
Because I don’t consider it plausible. The ‘cuteness’ response is just far more malleable than the, you know, bit where you aren’t a rabbit. See, for example, all the other sensory preferences that are are finely honed per species.
EDIT: I will add that it is slightly more plausible to me that rabbits are cute because they look more like baby ancestral primates than baby humans do on some key features (little and fury). Even so I would be reluctant to assign too much confidence to such a theory.
I’m not sure the answer is so obvious.
For example, baby pinguins and other birds can be very cute; baby lizards usually aren’t. I think the theory goes that we’ve evolved from something that looks somewhat lizardy, but definitely not like a bird.
I rest my case.
I just knew someone would come up with something like this :-) indeed it looks cute. One could take it even a step further; look at the weird but cute-looking space aliens in this Moby video.
This actually supports the notion that cuteness is not necessarily proportional to the likeliness to humans or to our ancestors.
Yeah, it definitely isn’t a perfect theory. It is obvious in the sense that it is the logical conclusion to come to if you held the Dennet theory and then had alicorn’s evidence presented to you. The main thing is that there is no reason to think that the cuteness instinct is a product of recent evolution.
Do we know whether adult rabbits find baby rabbits cute? If not, that would count against the common ancestor hypothesis.
Do we know whether adult non-primate mammals find anything cute? What’s a description of their behavior in such a case?
So far I’ve only seen descriptions of animals adopting other-species young to raise. I think child-raising instincts are separate from cuteness responses, in other animals as well as in humans.
Do we know whether adult non-primate mammals find anything cute?
Very occasionally
And not for long.
From the comments on the article you linked, the cheetahs happily ate the impala. Go to http://www.biosphoto.com/ and search for “cheetah AND impala”. You’ll find these photos as well as the ones from a few minutes later...
Is your theory that cats playing with live food before killing it is, in general, an effect of the food’s cuteness?
I believe that’s a different sort of play, consisting of repeated chasing and catching.
Also in the comments, the assertion that the impala that was eaten was an adult eaten earlier. Once sated, the cheetahs were not interested in eating the younger impala.
True, it’s not clear which is the complete account. At the very least, photos of some impala(s) being eaten and of this one being played with were seemingly taken in one session.
Good question. It didn’t appear until here. The obvious answer is that cuteness does in fact serve purposes distinct from making people nurture every baby they come across.
I don’t get it. This other purpose is nutritive?
Maintaining a food source until a better time to eat it seems like a somewhat better reason to find bunnies cute than because they look like babies. Particularly because eating or at least killing other people’s babies is a strategy that some of our near primate relatives use. Significant evidence could persuade me but I’m just not seeing it.
There may be reasons for experiencing “cute” besides stimulating parental care, but I’m skeptical about the food-source-theory because I think things are cute independent of their nutritive value. The only connection may be that adult herbivores tend be cuter than adult carnivores, and they also taste better.
Nevertheless, I was thinking about what kinds of food I think are cute. And this brought me in an entirely different direction. Anything miniature is cute. (Even a mini-paperclip.) Is this a different sense of cute again? Is our parental duty stimulated so broadly we can experience it in response to a mini-hamburger?
That’s an interesting take on it. I was going along a similar train of thought of ‘anything miniature is cute’. I just didn’t interpret it as parental. I took it as ‘Miniature things are barely worth it but are growing extremely fast. Throw it back and eat it when it is ten times the nutritional value in a couple of weeks!’ My surprise would then be that we experience even in response to things that are not a ‘mini-burger’. I’m not going to benefit from eating clippy unless I am iron deficient and I embed him in an apple for a while to rust before I eat it!
Your comment made me wonder about the dietary availability of rust, which seems rather low—the paperclip might not even be useful then!
Hrm… with regards to your edit, wouldn’t there still then be the pressures for our “cuteness criteria” to evolve to prefer the new look of babies?
Maybe. It depends. The precise function our cuteness response had for ancestors might be fulfilled by some other feature or perhaps the ancestral environment didn’t select individuals that way. Or maybe the cuteness criteria did evolve a little… just not has fast as our physical features did. Actually, I think we should expect it to evolve slower than our physical features just because plenty less-cute individuals will survive.
But then shouldn’t we expect similar stuff to happen for rabbits? for them to evolve away from the primordial shared cuteness criteria?
Actually, wait… human babies are rather more helpless than the babies of most other mammals, right? Shouldn’t more helplessness, more (and longer) dependence on adults result in stronger perception of cuteness of them? (via shifts in their appearance and our criteria)?
Okay, now I’m just plain confused!
They may have. Just not as much.
I don’t think the reason modern humans take care of their children is just about how cute they are. We’ve developed additional instincts to encourage child rearing (cultural pressure, some more specialized attachments that individual parents have with just their children and not with other cute things). This is what I mean by the function being fulfilled by another feature. This isn’t evidence of anything in particular but cuteness feels sort of cognitively primitive, doesn’t it? Like fear? I don’t know if associating qualia like that is a permissible inference.
I’ve actually ranked this hypothesis third behind “Babies are cuter after all.” and “Coincidental superstimulus”.
It’s not much of a coincidence if most mammals have similar parental care-inducing cues—including big eyes. Nor is it a coincidence that baby rabbits exhibit such infantile traits more than human children do—this post deliberately chose rabbits as an example because they have cute babies. I rate all this as not adding up to a coincidence at all.
“An”. “An” obvious answer. There’s at least one other which has been proposed in other replies to this post: social conditioning.
I have to say that yours is quite interesting, however. What else does it predict?
That instincts are orders of magnitude slower to evolve than physical attributes at the scale of ‘people and bunnies’.
The instincts have to reference physical attributes to identify cute things. If physical appearance evolves so quickly, how can the instinct continue to apply to it?
IOW, to accept this theory, it is necessary to believe that the things we find cute are all similar to that shared ancestor (or shared-ancestral juvenile). Does anyone know if this actually makes sense within what we know of ur-Mammalian creatures?
If attraction instincts (cuteness or sexual) evolve much more slowly than physical attributes, then shouldn’t supermodels be chimpier than they are?
Is ‘supermodels’ supposed to be shorthand for ‘highly sexually attractive’? Supermodels are not generally the women who are the most sexually attractive to heterosexual males but are selected for a variety of other attributes such as a ‘striking’ appearance, height and extreme slenderness.
That said, women who are considered very sexually attractive are not particularly chimpy either. They do share other traits that are not as common amongst supermodels however.
This pretty much convinced me that the fine variances of sexiness have much more to do with memes than genes. It shouldn’t be hard to test if it is the case with cuteness as well: just find a culture that hasn’t been exposed to Disney/Pixar films.
Not that hard to do. Look at woman representations in art. Until the last century, they were quite different from current photo-models. (I tend to think of most of them as “fat”, despite the fact that I know they’ve better reproductive characteristics.)
Yes. But there is no reason to think the cuteness attraction instinct and the sexual attraction instinct evolve at the same rate or even at a rate of the same order of magnitude. Finding offspring less cute than your ancestors did is far less likely to lead to genetic death than failing to mate with those with the best traits. That seems obvious to me anyway, I could be wrong.
That lots of other animals should share our opinions about cuteness.
How about, the closer something is to human, the more cute? Since there will be 2 million years of pressure honing ‘cuteness’ to primate needs, and counteracting the x million years of pressure about rabbits.
In that case the fact that other animals are often much cuter than humans completely refutes the theory.
It sure does.
Not if the the cuteness effect was overwhelmed by selection for other traits. That is the part I added on edit. It might be that we’re still working with the cuteness criteria of rabbit-like ancestors.
‘other trait’? Unless you have a specific other factor in mind, it’s just a fully general counterargument. (I nullify your other traits with other-other traits!)
Huh? The traits in us that make babies less cute than bunnies. Hairlessness appears to be a popular example (most people think furry things are cute), there may be more. Maybe baby eyes are smaller relative to their head than bunnies because of selection for larger brains. It is true that you can’t disprove the hypothesis by finding trait that makes bunnies cuter than babies that I haven’t thought of. The argument is general in that sense. But we can evaluate the hypothesis in the case of each trait. Name a trait and then we can see if our explanation of that trait is the kind of thing that would be selected for over cuteness.
Why would our cuteness criteria have not changed to reflect baby traits (like small eyes which are selected for on non-cute grounds)?
Well, an obvious explanation would be that it didn’t have time to. Since Jack’s theory claims it’s an old trait, it might be embedded deep in an old structure of the brain (IIRC at least some emotions are seated very deep), and it might be hard to change, in the sense that most mutations that would make babies seem cuter would have other deleterious effects. As long as people find babies cute enough, the selection effect from the bad effects would delay the change until the rare mutations that don’t have bad effects happen.
Also, note that our cuteness criteria don’t matter that much unless one has a baby. I’ve heard enough reports of (and had some first hand experience with) people that didn’t care much about babies before they had them, but then had a “revelatory” experience once they met them. This suggests there’s a separate effect (pheromones, hormones, whatever) that makes up for whatever inefficiency in human cuteness criteria, but that mostly activates just when it matters. This would also reduce the evolutionary pressure for any “general” cuteness criteria adjustment.
Note also that our “badly adjusted” criteria were not a big deal (in the sense of decreasing reproductive fitness) during most of human evolution. Animals tend to hide their young and protect them, so encountering a cute puppy or kitty would have been a rare occasion for almost all people.
A bad one; it’s something like 2 million years back to our LCA with our nearest primate relatives, and I wouldn’t want to guess how many tens of millions back to our last common ancestor with the rabbits. What deep structure would be blocking decamillions of years of pressure? Again, you can hypothesize all sorts of outside reasons but without any specific reason...
Everyone deals with babies at some point, from evolution’s perspective. You are a baby, you interact with babies, you have babies, you raise babies, etc. Mothers may be a good target for a massive dose of brainwashing hormones & chemicals (lord knows they’ll need it), but a love of babies and cuteness is valuable for dads as well (where there is no convenient set of biological triggers like giving birth) and other relatives.
The domestication of dogs could have begun as long ago as ~100,000 years; and even so, this is just an argument for weak pressures.
I agree with most of this, but I think it’s not countering what I was trying to argue: With regards to a certain individual’s reproductive fitness, the “precision” of that individual’s cuteness criteria is not that important. The actual reproductive advantage is in caring for one’s young, thus raising the probability of perpetuating one’s genes further.
Thus, even a not-very-well calibrated “cuteness” factor might not be very important (in the sense of not causing much selective pressure) as long as something else causes the individual to actually care for zer young. In this case I (weakly) conjecture that the “something else” is a mechanism that “focuses” the “cuteness evaluation” on one’s young.
As an analogy, consider a myopic species. Selective pressure might be expected to cause it to develop better vision, to help it avoid predators and find food. However, if the same species happens to have, e.g., good (not dog-like, only good enough) smell — which brings it close enough to food for its myopic vision to work, and keeps it far enough from predators to not need eyes for defense, the selective pressure can be very diminished.
Consider vision: it is an extremely old feature, so it had ample time to evolve. In fact, I’m told it evolved separately several times on Earth. All current vertebrates come from a common ancestor, which as far as I can determine had eyes. However, their vision acuity varies greatly, even in species that share a habitat. Better vision is always an advantage wherever there is light, but it’s obvious from the world around us that the selective pressure exerted by that advantage is often not enough to cause evolution (sometimes, the reverse happens).
Hmm, I just had another thought, reading your comment about “[a] deep structure” blocking selection: It’s not blocking as much as making irrelevant.
It may be that we’re just wrong. It’s possible that the “cuteness” factor was useful, as we think, for causing us to like babies and thus propagate our genes by caring for them. However, another trait with similar final consequences (but better in some way) just happened to evolve with better efficiency, maybe some new hormonal pathway or something related to primate brains, or anything I can’t think of.
The “cuteness” factor might actually atrophy in such a case. If a species develops very good smell for finding prey, they might not actually need their eyes much. The selective pressure for better vision diminishes, and drift takes over. I’m told this happened with some races of dogs. In our case, it’s obvious that no matter how cute we think some things are, we actually do take care of our children a lot (and a visible majority of people, at least at the start, seem to quickly become very attached to their babies).
“Cuteness acuity” might simply be irrelevant. It might have become so a long time ago, and become re-purposed for something else (beauty, art, whatever; the brain mixes things from many evolutionary eras).
What komponisto said. Also, we should expect to find an extremely adorable common ancestor.
This would also explain the tendency to associate fuzziness with cuteness.
I don’t see how this follows at all. Either cuteness and baby look manage to converge over the lifetime of a reasonably long-lived species or they do not. If they do we should expect our own babies or at least those of the most recent long-lived ancestor species to look cuter than the cuteness originator. If they don’t , presumably because cuteness is difficult to fine-tune, there is no particular reason to think the cuteness originator achieved a higher conversion than more recent species. Instead the cutest species should be one with both long time to evolve to meet maximum cuteness and few evolutionary constraints that limit cuteness.
All that is right. But if indeed bunnies are cuter than babies it suggests that the ancestor you describe is a common one. It would be surprising if the ancestors of bunnies had diverged from this cuteness pattern and then returned to it (especially since we seem to think that the more dependent variable is our psychological reaction not the physical features that we call “cute”. Thus the prediction.
The cuteness originator being a common ancestor of all species that value cuteness doesn’t imply that it achieved particularly high cuteness. Suppose that the cuteness ideal is essentially invariant (e. g. changing our idea of cuteness to include long noses would be extremely difficult and pretty much require reinventing cuteness from scratch), and valuing cuteness has been originally selected for because the babies of the cuteness originator just happened to be cute enough for cuteness valuation to be an evolutionary advantage. Successor species to the cuteness originator have the same cuteness ideal, and many of them have even cuter babies, because greater cuteness is advantageous and they had more time to evolve it. If the cuteness ideal is hard to change there is no reason to think that it was a perfect match originally. On the other hand, if the cuteness ideal is easy to change there is no particular reason to think that we still retain the original ideal.
All of this assumes that cuteness sensing and cuteness causing features are being selected for over other traits. But part of the original comment was that they weren’t- that for human’s cuteness is as much a legacy as anything else.
It only assumes that they weren’t much more strongly selected for originally than they are now, lack of selection is just a special case of cuteness matching being hard. You wouldn’t expect there to have been a perfect match between cuteness sensing and cuteness causing features unless it had been selected for, so expecting the commom ancestor to be exceptionally cute implies sufficiently strong selection then, but not now or in between.