That instincts are orders of magnitude slower to evolve than physical attributes at the scale of ‘people and bunnies’.
The instincts have to reference physical attributes to identify cute things. If physical appearance evolves so quickly, how can the instinct continue to apply to it?
IOW, to accept this theory, it is necessary to believe that the things we find cute are all similar to that shared ancestor (or shared-ancestral juvenile). Does anyone know if this actually makes sense within what we know of ur-Mammalian creatures?
Is ‘supermodels’ supposed to be shorthand for ‘highly sexually attractive’? Supermodels are not generally the women who are the most sexually attractive to heterosexual males but are selected for a variety of other attributes such as a ‘striking’ appearance, height and extreme slenderness.
That said, women who are considered very sexually attractive are not particularly chimpy either. They do share other traits that are not as common amongst supermodels however.
This pretty much convinced me that the fine variances of sexiness have much more to do with memes than genes. It shouldn’t be hard to test if it is the case with cuteness as well: just find a culture that hasn’t been exposed to Disney/Pixar films.
Not that hard to do. Look at woman representations in art. Until the last century, they were quite different from current photo-models. (I tend to think of most of them as “fat”, despite the fact that I know they’ve better reproductive characteristics.)
Yes. But there is no reason to think the cuteness attraction instinct and the sexual attraction instinct evolve at the same rate or even at a rate of the same order of magnitude. Finding offspring less cute than your ancestors did is far less likely to lead to genetic death than failing to mate with those with the best traits. That seems obvious to me anyway, I could be wrong.
How about, the closer something is to human, the more cute? Since there will be 2 million years of pressure honing ‘cuteness’ to primate needs, and counteracting the x million years of pressure about rabbits.
Not if the the cuteness effect was overwhelmed by selection for other traits. That is the part I added on edit. It might be that we’re still working with the cuteness criteria of rabbit-like ancestors.
‘other trait’? Unless you have a specific other factor in mind, it’s just a fully general counterargument. (I nullify your other traits with other-other traits!)
Huh? The traits in us that make babies less cute than bunnies. Hairlessness appears to be a popular example (most people think furry things are cute), there may be more. Maybe baby eyes are smaller relative to their head than bunnies because of selection for larger brains. It is true that you can’t disprove the hypothesis by finding trait that makes bunnies cuter than babies that I haven’t thought of. The argument is general in that sense. But we can evaluate the hypothesis in the case of each trait. Name a trait and then we can see if our explanation of that trait is the kind of thing that would be selected for over cuteness.
Well, an obvious explanation would be that it didn’t have time to. Since Jack’s theory claims it’s an old trait, it might be embedded deep in an old structure of the brain (IIRC at least some emotions are seated very deep), and it might be hard to change, in the sense that most mutations that would make babies seem cuter would have other deleterious effects. As long as people find babies cute enough, the selection effect from the bad effects would delay the change until the rare mutations that don’t have bad effects happen.
Also, note that our cuteness criteria don’t matter that much unless one has a baby. I’ve heard enough reports of (and had some first hand experience with) people that didn’t care much about babies before they had them, but then had a “revelatory” experience once they met them. This suggests there’s a separate effect (pheromones, hormones, whatever) that makes up for whatever inefficiency in human cuteness criteria, but that mostly activates just when it matters. This would also reduce the evolutionary pressure for any “general” cuteness criteria adjustment.
Note also that our “badly adjusted” criteria were not a big deal (in the sense of decreasing reproductive fitness) during most of human evolution. Animals tend to hide their young and protect them, so encountering a cute puppy or kitty would have been a rare occasion for almost all people.
Well, an obvious explanation would be that it didn’t have time to.
A bad one; it’s something like 2 million years back to our LCA with our nearest primate relatives, and I wouldn’t want to guess how many tens of millions back to our last common ancestor with the rabbits. What deep structure would be blocking decamillions of years of pressure? Again, you can hypothesize all sorts of outside reasons but without any specific reason...
Also, note that our cuteness criteria don’t matter that much unless one has a baby.
Everyone deals with babies at some point, from evolution’s perspective. You are a baby, you interact with babies, you have babies, you raise babies, etc. Mothers may be a good target for a massive dose of brainwashing hormones & chemicals (lord knows they’ll need it), but a love of babies and cuteness is valuable for dads as well (where there is no convenient set of biological triggers like giving birth) and other relatives.
Animals tend to hide their young and protect them, so encountering a cute puppy or kitty would have been a rare occasion for almost all people.
The domestication of dogs could have begun as long ago as ~100,000 years; and even so, this is just an argument for weak pressures.
I agree with most of this, but I think it’s not countering what I was trying to argue: With regards to a certain individual’s reproductive fitness, the “precision” of that individual’s cuteness criteria is not that important. The actual reproductive advantage is in caring for one’s young, thus raising the probability of perpetuating one’s genes further.
Thus, even a not-very-well calibrated “cuteness” factor might not be very important (in the sense of not causing much selective pressure) as long as something else causes the individual to actually care for zer young. In this case I (weakly) conjecture that the “something else” is a mechanism that “focuses” the “cuteness evaluation” on one’s young.
As an analogy, consider a myopic species. Selective pressure might be expected to cause it to develop better vision, to help it avoid predators and find food. However, if the same species happens to have, e.g., good (not dog-like, only good enough) smell — which brings it close enough to food for its myopic vision to work, and keeps it far enough from predators to not need eyes for defense, the selective pressure can be very diminished.
Consider vision: it is an extremely old feature, so it had ample time to evolve. In fact, I’m told it evolved separately several times on Earth. All current vertebrates come from a common ancestor, which as far as I can determine had eyes. However, their vision acuity varies greatly, even in species that share a habitat. Better vision is always an advantage wherever there is light, but it’s obvious from the world around us that the selective pressure exerted by that advantage is often not enough to cause evolution (sometimes, the reverse happens).
Hmm, I just had another thought, reading your comment about “[a] deep structure” blocking selection: It’s not blocking as much as making irrelevant.
It may be that we’re just wrong. It’s possible that the “cuteness” factor was useful, as we think, for causing us to like babies and thus propagate our genes by caring for them. However, another trait with similar final consequences (but better in some way) just happened to evolve with better efficiency, maybe some new hormonal pathway or something related to primate brains, or anything I can’t think of.
The “cuteness” factor might actually atrophy in such a case. If a species develops very good smell for finding prey, they might not actually need their eyes much. The selective pressure for better vision diminishes, and drift takes over. I’m told this happened with some races of dogs. In our case, it’s obvious that no matter how cute we think some things are, we actually do take care of our children a lot (and a visible majority of people, at least at the start, seem to quickly become very attached to their babies).
“Cuteness acuity” might simply be irrelevant. It might have become so a long time ago, and become re-purposed for something else (beauty, art, whatever; the brain mixes things from many evolutionary eras).
What komponisto said. Also, we should expect to find an extremely adorable common ancestor.
I don’t see how this follows at all. Either cuteness and baby look manage to converge over the lifetime of a reasonably long-lived species or they do not. If they do we should expect our own babies or at least those of the most recent long-lived ancestor species to look cuter than the cuteness originator. If they don’t , presumably because cuteness is difficult to fine-tune, there is no particular reason to think the cuteness originator achieved a higher conversion than more recent species. Instead the cutest species should be one with both long time to evolve to meet maximum cuteness and few evolutionary constraints that limit cuteness.
All that is right. But if indeed bunnies are cuter than babies it suggests that the ancestor you describe is a common one. It would be surprising if the ancestors of bunnies had diverged from this cuteness pattern and then returned to it (especially since we seem to think that the more dependent variable is our psychological reaction not the physical features that we call “cute”. Thus the prediction.
The cuteness originator being a common ancestor of all species that value cuteness doesn’t imply that it achieved particularly high cuteness. Suppose that the cuteness ideal is essentially invariant (e. g. changing our idea of cuteness to include long noses would be extremely difficult and pretty much require reinventing cuteness from scratch), and valuing cuteness has been originally selected for because the babies of the cuteness originator just happened to be cute enough for cuteness valuation to be an evolutionary advantage. Successor species to the cuteness originator have the same cuteness ideal, and many of them have even cuter babies, because greater cuteness is advantageous and they had more time to evolve it. If the cuteness ideal is hard to change there is no reason to think that it was a perfect match originally.
On the other hand, if the cuteness ideal is easy to change there is no particular reason to think that we still retain the original ideal.
All of this assumes that cuteness sensing and cuteness causing features are being selected for over other traits. But part of the original comment was that they weren’t- that for human’s cuteness is as much a legacy as anything else.
It only assumes that they weren’t much more strongly selected for originally than they are now, lack of selection is just a special case of cuteness matching being hard. You wouldn’t expect there to have been a perfect match between cuteness sensing and cuteness causing features unless it had been selected for, so expecting the commom ancestor to be exceptionally cute implies sufficiently strong selection then, but not now or in between.
“An”. “An” obvious answer. There’s at least one other which has been proposed in other replies to this post: social conditioning.
I have to say that yours is quite interesting, however. What else does it predict?
That instincts are orders of magnitude slower to evolve than physical attributes at the scale of ‘people and bunnies’.
The instincts have to reference physical attributes to identify cute things. If physical appearance evolves so quickly, how can the instinct continue to apply to it?
IOW, to accept this theory, it is necessary to believe that the things we find cute are all similar to that shared ancestor (or shared-ancestral juvenile). Does anyone know if this actually makes sense within what we know of ur-Mammalian creatures?
If attraction instincts (cuteness or sexual) evolve much more slowly than physical attributes, then shouldn’t supermodels be chimpier than they are?
Is ‘supermodels’ supposed to be shorthand for ‘highly sexually attractive’? Supermodels are not generally the women who are the most sexually attractive to heterosexual males but are selected for a variety of other attributes such as a ‘striking’ appearance, height and extreme slenderness.
That said, women who are considered very sexually attractive are not particularly chimpy either. They do share other traits that are not as common amongst supermodels however.
This pretty much convinced me that the fine variances of sexiness have much more to do with memes than genes. It shouldn’t be hard to test if it is the case with cuteness as well: just find a culture that hasn’t been exposed to Disney/Pixar films.
Not that hard to do. Look at woman representations in art. Until the last century, they were quite different from current photo-models. (I tend to think of most of them as “fat”, despite the fact that I know they’ve better reproductive characteristics.)
Yes. But there is no reason to think the cuteness attraction instinct and the sexual attraction instinct evolve at the same rate or even at a rate of the same order of magnitude. Finding offspring less cute than your ancestors did is far less likely to lead to genetic death than failing to mate with those with the best traits. That seems obvious to me anyway, I could be wrong.
That lots of other animals should share our opinions about cuteness.
How about, the closer something is to human, the more cute? Since there will be 2 million years of pressure honing ‘cuteness’ to primate needs, and counteracting the x million years of pressure about rabbits.
In that case the fact that other animals are often much cuter than humans completely refutes the theory.
It sure does.
Not if the the cuteness effect was overwhelmed by selection for other traits. That is the part I added on edit. It might be that we’re still working with the cuteness criteria of rabbit-like ancestors.
‘other trait’? Unless you have a specific other factor in mind, it’s just a fully general counterargument. (I nullify your other traits with other-other traits!)
Huh? The traits in us that make babies less cute than bunnies. Hairlessness appears to be a popular example (most people think furry things are cute), there may be more. Maybe baby eyes are smaller relative to their head than bunnies because of selection for larger brains. It is true that you can’t disprove the hypothesis by finding trait that makes bunnies cuter than babies that I haven’t thought of. The argument is general in that sense. But we can evaluate the hypothesis in the case of each trait. Name a trait and then we can see if our explanation of that trait is the kind of thing that would be selected for over cuteness.
Why would our cuteness criteria have not changed to reflect baby traits (like small eyes which are selected for on non-cute grounds)?
Well, an obvious explanation would be that it didn’t have time to. Since Jack’s theory claims it’s an old trait, it might be embedded deep in an old structure of the brain (IIRC at least some emotions are seated very deep), and it might be hard to change, in the sense that most mutations that would make babies seem cuter would have other deleterious effects. As long as people find babies cute enough, the selection effect from the bad effects would delay the change until the rare mutations that don’t have bad effects happen.
Also, note that our cuteness criteria don’t matter that much unless one has a baby. I’ve heard enough reports of (and had some first hand experience with) people that didn’t care much about babies before they had them, but then had a “revelatory” experience once they met them. This suggests there’s a separate effect (pheromones, hormones, whatever) that makes up for whatever inefficiency in human cuteness criteria, but that mostly activates just when it matters. This would also reduce the evolutionary pressure for any “general” cuteness criteria adjustment.
Note also that our “badly adjusted” criteria were not a big deal (in the sense of decreasing reproductive fitness) during most of human evolution. Animals tend to hide their young and protect them, so encountering a cute puppy or kitty would have been a rare occasion for almost all people.
A bad one; it’s something like 2 million years back to our LCA with our nearest primate relatives, and I wouldn’t want to guess how many tens of millions back to our last common ancestor with the rabbits. What deep structure would be blocking decamillions of years of pressure? Again, you can hypothesize all sorts of outside reasons but without any specific reason...
Everyone deals with babies at some point, from evolution’s perspective. You are a baby, you interact with babies, you have babies, you raise babies, etc. Mothers may be a good target for a massive dose of brainwashing hormones & chemicals (lord knows they’ll need it), but a love of babies and cuteness is valuable for dads as well (where there is no convenient set of biological triggers like giving birth) and other relatives.
The domestication of dogs could have begun as long ago as ~100,000 years; and even so, this is just an argument for weak pressures.
I agree with most of this, but I think it’s not countering what I was trying to argue: With regards to a certain individual’s reproductive fitness, the “precision” of that individual’s cuteness criteria is not that important. The actual reproductive advantage is in caring for one’s young, thus raising the probability of perpetuating one’s genes further.
Thus, even a not-very-well calibrated “cuteness” factor might not be very important (in the sense of not causing much selective pressure) as long as something else causes the individual to actually care for zer young. In this case I (weakly) conjecture that the “something else” is a mechanism that “focuses” the “cuteness evaluation” on one’s young.
As an analogy, consider a myopic species. Selective pressure might be expected to cause it to develop better vision, to help it avoid predators and find food. However, if the same species happens to have, e.g., good (not dog-like, only good enough) smell — which brings it close enough to food for its myopic vision to work, and keeps it far enough from predators to not need eyes for defense, the selective pressure can be very diminished.
Consider vision: it is an extremely old feature, so it had ample time to evolve. In fact, I’m told it evolved separately several times on Earth. All current vertebrates come from a common ancestor, which as far as I can determine had eyes. However, their vision acuity varies greatly, even in species that share a habitat. Better vision is always an advantage wherever there is light, but it’s obvious from the world around us that the selective pressure exerted by that advantage is often not enough to cause evolution (sometimes, the reverse happens).
Hmm, I just had another thought, reading your comment about “[a] deep structure” blocking selection: It’s not blocking as much as making irrelevant.
It may be that we’re just wrong. It’s possible that the “cuteness” factor was useful, as we think, for causing us to like babies and thus propagate our genes by caring for them. However, another trait with similar final consequences (but better in some way) just happened to evolve with better efficiency, maybe some new hormonal pathway or something related to primate brains, or anything I can’t think of.
The “cuteness” factor might actually atrophy in such a case. If a species develops very good smell for finding prey, they might not actually need their eyes much. The selective pressure for better vision diminishes, and drift takes over. I’m told this happened with some races of dogs. In our case, it’s obvious that no matter how cute we think some things are, we actually do take care of our children a lot (and a visible majority of people, at least at the start, seem to quickly become very attached to their babies).
“Cuteness acuity” might simply be irrelevant. It might have become so a long time ago, and become re-purposed for something else (beauty, art, whatever; the brain mixes things from many evolutionary eras).
What komponisto said. Also, we should expect to find an extremely adorable common ancestor.
This would also explain the tendency to associate fuzziness with cuteness.
I don’t see how this follows at all. Either cuteness and baby look manage to converge over the lifetime of a reasonably long-lived species or they do not. If they do we should expect our own babies or at least those of the most recent long-lived ancestor species to look cuter than the cuteness originator. If they don’t , presumably because cuteness is difficult to fine-tune, there is no particular reason to think the cuteness originator achieved a higher conversion than more recent species. Instead the cutest species should be one with both long time to evolve to meet maximum cuteness and few evolutionary constraints that limit cuteness.
All that is right. But if indeed bunnies are cuter than babies it suggests that the ancestor you describe is a common one. It would be surprising if the ancestors of bunnies had diverged from this cuteness pattern and then returned to it (especially since we seem to think that the more dependent variable is our psychological reaction not the physical features that we call “cute”. Thus the prediction.
The cuteness originator being a common ancestor of all species that value cuteness doesn’t imply that it achieved particularly high cuteness. Suppose that the cuteness ideal is essentially invariant (e. g. changing our idea of cuteness to include long noses would be extremely difficult and pretty much require reinventing cuteness from scratch), and valuing cuteness has been originally selected for because the babies of the cuteness originator just happened to be cute enough for cuteness valuation to be an evolutionary advantage. Successor species to the cuteness originator have the same cuteness ideal, and many of them have even cuter babies, because greater cuteness is advantageous and they had more time to evolve it. If the cuteness ideal is hard to change there is no reason to think that it was a perfect match originally. On the other hand, if the cuteness ideal is easy to change there is no particular reason to think that we still retain the original ideal.
All of this assumes that cuteness sensing and cuteness causing features are being selected for over other traits. But part of the original comment was that they weren’t- that for human’s cuteness is as much a legacy as anything else.
It only assumes that they weren’t much more strongly selected for originally than they are now, lack of selection is just a special case of cuteness matching being hard. You wouldn’t expect there to have been a perfect match between cuteness sensing and cuteness causing features unless it had been selected for, so expecting the commom ancestor to be exceptionally cute implies sufficiently strong selection then, but not now or in between.