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taw comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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This doesn't rule out the baby hypothesis (although I don't accept it as the best one, myself). The important thing is that we do consider babies somewhat cute. By the hypothesis, if babies weren't cute at all (if everyone recognized how ugly they are), adults would care for them less. If true, this would be a beneficial instinct despite the attention wasted on cute animals.
Since evolutionary adaptations are selected from chance mutations to begin with, it's not unreasonable for one to have mildly negative side effects. Can someone weigh in on how numerically probable it is that evolution hadn't improved this instinct further, to only work on babies, if we assume it has existed for X millions of years? We need hard numbers...
I don't find babies cute at all - the shitting crying obnoxious variety which really exists is strongly anti-cute.
On the other hand I haven't met a single person yet who wouldn't go awwwwww when interacting with my cat.
I wonder if we don't repress thinking that babies are cute to some extent. Before I had one, I never thought babies were cute. I just thought: eww, work! or, eww, delayed career plans! They represent responsibility, which isn't cute. (Similar to contents of this thread.)
But if you were walking in a forest and just happened to find a baby. If you didn't know it was a human baby, with various obligations and long-term ties, wouldn't you want to pick it up and snuggle it? Or not?
I'll also add here, though it could be added other places, that I don't know if most parents think newborns are cute. (I actually have a theory that children are born a few weeks earlier than evolution long-term conditioned us for.) Children are maximally cute somewhere between 6 months and 3 years and each parent differs in exactly when and why.
Unless the baby is likely to be a relative, isn't this actually vastly less adaptive behavior than picking up a cute bunny rabbit that you can eat later in times of famine?
Now this is an explanation I can accept as at least remotely plausible without doing mental gymnastics!
Probably not.
I don't have strong opinion if babies are above or below 0-cuteness level, it seems to vary from person to person - but they're definitely below mammal average baby cuteness.
Personally I agree, but many people report that they find babies cute. It's not universal.