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byrnema comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong
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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!