= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Wei_Dai comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (823)
Our sense of cuteness may be tuned to respond optimally to young children, instead of newborns. (I'm guessing here based on the fact that humans look like young children for a much longer period of time than like newborns. My personal sense of cuteness is extremely insensitive for some reason.)
I'm not convinced that you should be "pretty sure", but I'm more interested in why you used the word "cheap". What does that mean in this context?
Mortality among ancestral newborns were rampant so caring for them was probably of less marginal utility than caring for young children, I think.
My "cuteness sense" responds that way. I find young children (2 - 4 years old) much cuter than newborns. I don't think I'm alone in this.
Young animals don't generally reach optimal cuteness until some time after birth. Given the slower rate at which human young mature relative to other animals your cuteness sense for humans is not necessarily inconsistent with the normal response to animals. It seems to me that the pictures used for comparison in the OP use a bunny at a relatively later stage of development than the human infant.
Newborn puppies, kittens and rabbits are peculiar little blind wriggling things and are less cute than slightly older young animals. Newborn rabbits appear to be hairless.
"Cheap" means the one you come up with if you think about the question "Why are babies cute?" instead of "Why are the things that are cute as cute as they are?"
But the originator of the explanation did have the second question in mind. From Wikipedia:
Unfortunately Lorenz's original article is not available on the Internet, but I'm guessing that he was aware that some people find certain animals cuter than infants, but given the superstimulus and perhaps other explanations, did not consider it fatal to his theory.