“I can’t think of very many cases in which people endanger themselves or their reproductive chances for the sake of cute animals.”
A) Drivers swerving to avoid cats and bunnies etc.
B) All the warnings about leaving bear cubs alone.
I can think of non-cuteness explanations that probably cover some part of each but it seems idle to reject any role for cuteness in those survivability risks.
I think that any situation that could not have occurred prior to the 20. century can be discarded out of hand when discussing the evolutionary roots of human behavior.
In English it’s not idiomatic to write ordinal numbers by adding a full stop after the cardinal, as it is in German. Normally one writes “20th” (with the “th” optionally superscripted).
Interesting, I wasn’t aware of the German convention. It seems slightly better; formulations like ‘1st’ (1 stands for ‘fir’?) and ‘2nd’ (2 stands for ‘seco’?) and ‘3rd’ (3 stands for ‘thi’?) never made much sense.
Interesting, I wasn’t aware of the German convention. It seems slightly better;
As for me, I dislike stuff that looks like the end of a sentence but actually isn’t or vice versa, so I feel very uneasy when I have to use something ending with a full stop (e.g. “etc.”) immediately followed by something starting with a capital letter (e.g. “I” or a proper name), and I try to avoid that by reworking punctuation to make it clear whether or not I’m starting a new sentence. (Even in iii’s comment where “century” starts with a lowercase letter, some part of my brain alieves that there are two separate sentences.)
“I can’t think of very many cases in which people endanger themselves or their reproductive chances for the sake of cute animals.” A) Drivers swerving to avoid cats and bunnies etc. B) All the warnings about leaving bear cubs alone. I can think of non-cuteness explanations that probably cover some part of each but it seems idle to reject any role for cuteness in those survivability risks.
I think that any situation that could not have occurred prior to the 20. century can be discarded out of hand when discussing the evolutionary roots of human behavior.
Interesting, I wasn’t aware of the German convention. It seems slightly better; formulations like ‘1st’ (1 stands for ‘fir’?) and ‘2nd’ (2 stands for ‘seco’?) and ‘3rd’ (3 stands for ‘thi’?) never made much sense.
As for me, I dislike stuff that looks like the end of a sentence but actually isn’t or vice versa, so I feel very uneasy when I have to use something ending with a full stop (e.g. “etc.”) immediately followed by something starting with a capital letter (e.g. “I” or a proper name), and I try to avoid that by reworking punctuation to make it clear whether or not I’m starting a new sentence. (Even in iii’s comment where “century” starts with a lowercase letter, some part of my brain alieves that there are two separate sentences.)