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JamesAndrix comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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Good question. It didn't appear until here. The obvious answer is that cuteness does in fact serve purposes distinct from making people nurture every baby they come across.
I don't get it. This other purpose is nutritive?
Maintaining a food source until a better time to eat it seems like a somewhat better reason to find bunnies cute than because they look like babies. Particularly because eating or at least killing other people's babies is a strategy that some of our near primate relatives use. Significant evidence could persuade me but I'm just not seeing it.
There may be reasons for experiencing "cute" besides stimulating parental care, but I'm skeptical about the food-source-theory because I think things are cute independent of their nutritive value. The only connection may be that adult herbivores tend be cuter than adult carnivores, and they also taste better.
Nevertheless, I was thinking about what kinds of food I think are cute. And this brought me in an entirely different direction. Anything miniature is cute. (Even a mini-paperclip.) Is this a different sense of cute again? Is our parental duty stimulated so broadly we can experience it in response to a mini-hamburger?
That's an interesting take on it. I was going along a similar train of thought of 'anything miniature is cute'. I just didn't interpret it as parental. I took it as 'Miniature things are barely worth it but are growing extremely fast. Throw it back and eat it when it is ten times the nutritional value in a couple of weeks!' My surprise would then be that we experience even in response to things that are not a 'mini-burger'. I'm not going to benefit from eating clippy unless I am iron deficient and I embed him in an apple for a while to rust before I eat it!
Your comment made me wonder about the dietary availability of rust, which seems rather low - the paperclip might not even be useful then!