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spriteless comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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I though rabbits had to be cuter because more rabbits eat their children than do humans. They never stopped selecting for that.
That's very funny.
A particularly irreverent friend and I once agreed that babies are cute in a way that somehow, strangely triggers a desire to eat them! It's probably not a desire to actually eat them, but some grooming-thingy, but it's still a strange impulse to experience. (To explain it in case you don't know what I'm talking about, it's an impulse to do something like bite and nibble them all over, but maybe it doesn't work because they don't have fur or what not. )
Why would this make rabbits cuter to humans?
I'm guessing it's because cute rabbits get eaten less than non-cute rabbits, thus exerting selection pressure in favor of cuteness, which presumably is the same in all... something. Mammals?
Sounds a little strained to me, though.
The point is that cute is almost certainly a 2-place word.
Why would how humans feel towards rabbits effect how likely they are to be eaten by their rabbit parents?
It wouldn't. That's supposed to be a side effect.
Rabbits are herbivores.
Eating one's offspring is an adaptive strategy at times of scarcity, especially for species at the r end of the selection spectrum. Of course, still more adaptive would be to eat the offspring of other, genetically-distant individuals, but for herbivores that is usually much harder to arrange.
But the baby rabbits just look so tasty.