= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
djcb 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)
How come everyone is missing the obvious answer? The human ancestor that first developed attachment to babies may be an ancestor we share with rabbits.
(Edit, Also: Human babies may have evolved to be uglier for other reasons -less hair, bigger heads- and those features may have been selected for more than cuteness.)
Edit 2: Metaphorically, our cuteness program is like running Netscape Navigator 1.0 or something. It sort of does the trick but isn't exactly adapted for modern uses
I'm not sure the answer is so obvious.
For example, baby pinguins and other birds can be very cute; baby lizards usually aren't. I think the theory goes that we've evolved from something that looks somewhat lizardy, but definitely not like a bird.
I rest my case.
I just knew someone would come up with something like this :-) indeed it looks cute. One could take it even a step further; look at the weird but cute-looking space aliens in this Moby video.
This actually supports the notion that cuteness is not necessarily proportional to the likeliness to humans or to our ancestors.
Yeah, it definitely isn't a perfect theory. It is obvious in the sense that it is the logical conclusion to come to if you held the Dennet theory and then had alicorn's evidence presented to you. The main thing is that there is no reason to think that the cuteness instinct is a product of recent evolution.