Bunnies exist in the ancestral environment. Finding them cute makes us less likely to hunt and eat them, and more likely to waste resources capturing and feeding them. It’s possible we don’t actually find them cute when we’re used to hunting them, though.
Or bunnies happen to take advantage of the evolutionarily useful baby-cute sense, and it was never maladaptive enough that evolutionary processes narrowed baby-cute sense.
Sort of like how humans seem to have an automatic mental process to recognize faces even when there are no faces.
Bunnies prevalence on EEA is uncertain, at best. There are few species so widely hunted as the bunny, but it might be the case that the cute ones were slightest less hunted and reproduced more. Or, we might have selected then for neoteny, as we do whenever we have a chance (dogs, cats, cows, donkey), it makes them more docile and easy to slaughter and enslave. We finding them cute would be then both a side effect of (1) evolutionary pressures for not wasting energy in building an excessively fine tuned cuteness-taste and (2) the fact the most easy way to select for easiness-to-slaughter-and-enslave is to select for baby-like faces.
Evolution is a nasty, lazy, immoral mistress.”Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.”
Bunnies exist in the ancestral environment. Finding them cute makes us less likely to hunt and eat them, and more likely to waste resources capturing and feeding them. It’s possible we don’t actually find them cute when we’re used to hunting them, though.
Or bunnies happen to take advantage of the evolutionarily useful baby-cute sense, and it was never maladaptive enough that evolutionary processes narrowed baby-cute sense.
Sort of like how humans seem to have an automatic mental process to recognize faces even when there are no faces.
Bunnies prevalence on EEA is uncertain, at best. There are few species so widely hunted as the bunny, but it might be the case that the cute ones were slightest less hunted and reproduced more. Or, we might have selected then for neoteny, as we do whenever we have a chance (dogs, cats, cows, donkey), it makes them more docile and easy to slaughter and enslave. We finding them cute would be then both a side effect of (1) evolutionary pressures for not wasting energy in building an excessively fine tuned cuteness-taste and (2) the fact the most easy way to select for easiness-to-slaughter-and-enslave is to select for baby-like faces. Evolution is a nasty, lazy, immoral mistress.”Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.”