You have my word that the baby was the cutest baby in the first several pages of results for “cute baby” on a Google image search by my own lights, and the bunny was just the cutest bunny I happened to have on my hard drive.
Edit: Actually, I did reject one cuter baby because the picture was watermarked.
Hrm… that at least brings up a possibility… Any chance that there’s much higher variance in the appearance of baby bunnies than in baby humans? In that case “find the cutest” rather than “find average” might go rather farther with bunnies than humans.
Well, there was a supposed ~10000 humans bottleneck, not too far ago, evolutionarily speaking, so humans really do have less variance than many species.
I don’t know. I just looked at some bunny videos. Cute. But those babies are way more adorable.
There’s a selection effect—people take more videos of babies than they do of bunnies. That allows higher variance and better-quality high-end videos.
Fair enough. But the rest of our evidence consists of two pictures you selected! The selection bias potential there is way worse.
You have my word that the baby was the cutest baby in the first several pages of results for “cute baby” on a Google image search by my own lights, and the bunny was just the cutest bunny I happened to have on my hard drive.
Edit: Actually, I did reject one cuter baby because the picture was watermarked.
How long have you been collecting pictures of cute bunnies on your hard drive? :-)
Scratch that. The same picture is also first in google hits for “cute bunny”
Still, perhaps a larger data set makes sense.
I don’t know how long I’ve been doing it, but my “Lagomorpha” folder contains 14 images.
Hrm… that at least brings up a possibility… Any chance that there’s much higher variance in the appearance of baby bunnies than in baby humans? In that case “find the cutest” rather than “find average” might go rather farther with bunnies than humans.
Well, there was a supposed ~10000 humans bottleneck, not too far ago, evolutionarily speaking, so humans really do have less variance than many species.
Probably not variance that’s easily detectable to humans.
Why do people take more videos of babies than bunnies? Could it be because babies are cuter?
Everyone I know who has ever given birth to a bunny has taken thousands of video clips of their interspecies spawn.
Things other than cuteness are at work when people decide what to take videos of. Possible considerations here:
1) Babies live in people’s houses. Fewer bunnies do.
2) People are interested in babies as relatives, conspecifics, and insight into child psychology.
3) Babies—past a certain very young age, anyway—have a wider range of behavior than bunnies.
4) People like to document the lives of their children for future reference.
Babies are less prone to running away, and parents, being an extremely biased party, are probably responsible for a huge share of all baby videos.