Different explanation from what I saw in the comments:
Maybe it isn’t that cuteness causes us to care for children, but that it stops us from destroying all other life in the vicinity. Considering that a lot of males have an aggressive instinct (testosterone is connected with violent behaviors in both genders, but males are more likely to have high levels), what would uncivilized people with no sense of cuteness do to animal populations? I have practically no aggressive instincts myself, being female and having the stereotypically low testosterone, but here’s how I think that might go:
They might think it’s a good idea to practice hunting skills by killing everything in sight.
When they’re angry would they shoot the first thing they see even if it’s a baby deer? In contrast, if they go out into the forest to shoot something in anger a few times and encounter cute baby deer, which calms them down and makes them feel bad for wanting to shoot them, this may condition them not to develop a habit of shooting things when angry.
When a cave person with no cuteness instinct feels ambitious, do they set out to kill everything they see for a week as a way of showing dominance over the jungle?
If a non-cute experiencing cave person sees a family of bears, do they launch their spear at the mother, not caring whether all of the cubs die or do they feel concern about orphaning cubs and wait to find a lone male? This is very important because if the cave person allows the first scenario, their hunting practices will reduce the edible bear population substantially. In the second, the cave person has minimized their impact. (Few male bears are can impregnate many females, meaning that the bears can reproduce at a similar pace even after losing most of them, while fewer female bears will certainly mean less reproductive capacity for the bears.)
When a cave man meets a cave woman he finds sexy, does he catch every animal he can find to show her how good he is at catching animals? Do the other men kill even more in order to compete? If she has an instinctive respect for life, then lots of dead bunnies and baby deer will upset her. This may encourage them to channel their urges to compete for her into a “quality over quantity” strategy by finding one really good trophy instead.
I might question here whether cuteness was necessary if they had empathy. However, empathy is triggered for things like verbal explanations, tears and certain facial expressions—behaviors that animals are very disadvantaged at accomplishing. Also, these would be difficult to detect from the distance at which you’d start stalking them, and they would be very brief, as they’d start running as soon as they notice you, so after that, all you’d see was the back of them. Also, cuteness works even after the animal is dead—it can trigger “Oh no! I killed something cute!” remorse when an empathetic equivalent might not be triggered because expressiveness isn’t a likely characteristic of an inanimate face.
This might also explain why babies are less cute—we spend enough time close up to them to notice their facial expressions and empathize with them, and they have various advantages in being able to trigger specific empathetic reactions, so since empathy is frequently triggered, cuteness is less important.
Though, a much simpler explanation is also possible: Maybe your notions about how common it is for humans to find animals cuter than babies is based on a biased sample. I bit, just now, not even thinking about it, because I agreed with your idea that most people find animals cuter but then it dawned on me: maybe it’s not that common for people to find babies less cute than animals. There could be some other reason our cuteness websites seem to focus on animals—parents don’t like putting up pictures of babies for security reasons, they’re concerned they’ll look like braggarts, and on a website dominated by animals they don’t want to upload pictures of a child because it makes the dehumanizing implication that their baby is just an amusing little animal.
Also, it could have to do with the supply and demand of cute little animals to cute human babies. There are 300 million Americans and probably only a few million of them are babies. To contrast, Americans probably have millions of cats and dogs and gerbils, etc plus there must be many times more bunnies and squirrels and such that they might see in their lawns than there are human babies. Also, animals are cute for longer—many of them are cute as adults—whereas cute babies are, by definition, only cute while they’re babies.
And we can add goofy words to animal pictures without worrying about it humiliating them, or take dozens of videos of them jumping into boxes (like with Maru cat, my personal favorite) without anyone worrying about it damaging their future reputations or near-term mental health. That we can take more pictures of animals and do more things with them may increase the ratio of animal pictures to baby pictures by quite a bit.
Come to think of it, how often do you see cute animals in real life vs. how often do you see cute babies? I work in front of a window that looks out into a garden. I see cute birds and squirrels all day. I probably see at least a hundred times as many cute animals as babies in my daily life. Multiply this by a lot because I think bumblebees are cute. When I see people carrying their babies around at the supermarket, I might smile at them, but I don’t stare at them the way I might watch a cute birdie because that’s rude. I spend a lot less time appreciating cute babies than animals for this reason.
If my mind fills with images of cute animals and leaves me at a loss when coming up with cute baby images when I think about whether animals or babies are cuter, maybe that’s why.
Well sure. Observing humans, I think there is plenty of evidence that we do a lot of those things.
Teenage boys spend how many hours of their lives poaching monsters in video games? Sure, some games are designed for them to grind, but they find this to be recreational why? Maybe they really would use all the animals as target practice if there weren’t some type of instinct to stop them.
We’ve all seen people taking out anger on others, or on the dog. No reason to think they wouldn’t do that to a forest full of animals.
We’ve seen humans do class signaling—a lot of poor people will spend $100 on shoes to make themselves look richer. Some people get stuck in the “keeping up with the Jones’s” cycle, spending ever more to look just as good. If killing animals was a way of class signaling for primitive people, there’s no reason to think that they wouldn’t be competitive about it like modern humans can be.
We know that humans sometimes hunt animals to extinction, so it’s not implausible to suggest that humans without cuteness might have wreaked havoc on ecosystems.
As for whether specifically cave people / tribes would do any of these things if specifically their instinct for cuteness were removed and whether they’d end up with such a dearth of animals as to interfere with their survival is obviously not testable, but the things I suggested are plausible based on the way that people behave.
Again, you have a hypothesis that sounds very plausible, but because it does sound so plausible, I’m instantly suspicious of it. Plausible things often turn out to be false.
Is there any quantitative test you can propose, or an experiment you could run, that would give you a number between 0 and 1, representing the probability of your hypothesis being true ? If the answer is “yes”, then perhaps someone had already done the research ? If the answer is “no”, then IMO it’s not thinking about.
Different explanation from what I saw in the comments:
Maybe it isn’t that cuteness causes us to care for children, but that it stops us from destroying all other life in the vicinity. Considering that a lot of males have an aggressive instinct (testosterone is connected with violent behaviors in both genders, but males are more likely to have high levels), what would uncivilized people with no sense of cuteness do to animal populations? I have practically no aggressive instincts myself, being female and having the stereotypically low testosterone, but here’s how I think that might go:
They might think it’s a good idea to practice hunting skills by killing everything in sight.
When they’re angry would they shoot the first thing they see even if it’s a baby deer? In contrast, if they go out into the forest to shoot something in anger a few times and encounter cute baby deer, which calms them down and makes them feel bad for wanting to shoot them, this may condition them not to develop a habit of shooting things when angry.
When a cave person with no cuteness instinct feels ambitious, do they set out to kill everything they see for a week as a way of showing dominance over the jungle?
If a non-cute experiencing cave person sees a family of bears, do they launch their spear at the mother, not caring whether all of the cubs die or do they feel concern about orphaning cubs and wait to find a lone male? This is very important because if the cave person allows the first scenario, their hunting practices will reduce the edible bear population substantially. In the second, the cave person has minimized their impact. (Few male bears are can impregnate many females, meaning that the bears can reproduce at a similar pace even after losing most of them, while fewer female bears will certainly mean less reproductive capacity for the bears.)
When a cave man meets a cave woman he finds sexy, does he catch every animal he can find to show her how good he is at catching animals? Do the other men kill even more in order to compete? If she has an instinctive respect for life, then lots of dead bunnies and baby deer will upset her. This may encourage them to channel their urges to compete for her into a “quality over quantity” strategy by finding one really good trophy instead.
I might question here whether cuteness was necessary if they had empathy. However, empathy is triggered for things like verbal explanations, tears and certain facial expressions—behaviors that animals are very disadvantaged at accomplishing. Also, these would be difficult to detect from the distance at which you’d start stalking them, and they would be very brief, as they’d start running as soon as they notice you, so after that, all you’d see was the back of them. Also, cuteness works even after the animal is dead—it can trigger “Oh no! I killed something cute!” remorse when an empathetic equivalent might not be triggered because expressiveness isn’t a likely characteristic of an inanimate face.
This might also explain why babies are less cute—we spend enough time close up to them to notice their facial expressions and empathize with them, and they have various advantages in being able to trigger specific empathetic reactions, so since empathy is frequently triggered, cuteness is less important.
Though, a much simpler explanation is also possible: Maybe your notions about how common it is for humans to find animals cuter than babies is based on a biased sample. I bit, just now, not even thinking about it, because I agreed with your idea that most people find animals cuter but then it dawned on me: maybe it’s not that common for people to find babies less cute than animals. There could be some other reason our cuteness websites seem to focus on animals—parents don’t like putting up pictures of babies for security reasons, they’re concerned they’ll look like braggarts, and on a website dominated by animals they don’t want to upload pictures of a child because it makes the dehumanizing implication that their baby is just an amusing little animal.
Also, it could have to do with the supply and demand of cute little animals to cute human babies. There are 300 million Americans and probably only a few million of them are babies. To contrast, Americans probably have millions of cats and dogs and gerbils, etc plus there must be many times more bunnies and squirrels and such that they might see in their lawns than there are human babies. Also, animals are cute for longer—many of them are cute as adults—whereas cute babies are, by definition, only cute while they’re babies.
And we can add goofy words to animal pictures without worrying about it humiliating them, or take dozens of videos of them jumping into boxes (like with Maru cat, my personal favorite) without anyone worrying about it damaging their future reputations or near-term mental health. That we can take more pictures of animals and do more things with them may increase the ratio of animal pictures to baby pictures by quite a bit.
Come to think of it, how often do you see cute animals in real life vs. how often do you see cute babies? I work in front of a window that looks out into a garden. I see cute birds and squirrels all day. I probably see at least a hundred times as many cute animals as babies in my daily life. Multiply this by a lot because I think bumblebees are cute. When I see people carrying their babies around at the supermarket, I might smile at them, but I don’t stare at them the way I might watch a cute birdie because that’s rude. I spend a lot less time appreciating cute babies than animals for this reason.
If my mind fills with images of cute animals and leaves me at a loss when coming up with cute baby images when I think about whether animals or babies are cuter, maybe that’s why.
These are all interesting ideas, but are they true ? That is, is there any evidence to support any of them ?
Well sure. Observing humans, I think there is plenty of evidence that we do a lot of those things.
Teenage boys spend how many hours of their lives poaching monsters in video games? Sure, some games are designed for them to grind, but they find this to be recreational why? Maybe they really would use all the animals as target practice if there weren’t some type of instinct to stop them.
We’ve all seen people taking out anger on others, or on the dog. No reason to think they wouldn’t do that to a forest full of animals.
We’ve seen humans do class signaling—a lot of poor people will spend $100 on shoes to make themselves look richer. Some people get stuck in the “keeping up with the Jones’s” cycle, spending ever more to look just as good. If killing animals was a way of class signaling for primitive people, there’s no reason to think that they wouldn’t be competitive about it like modern humans can be.
We know that humans sometimes hunt animals to extinction, so it’s not implausible to suggest that humans without cuteness might have wreaked havoc on ecosystems.
As for whether specifically cave people / tribes would do any of these things if specifically their instinct for cuteness were removed and whether they’d end up with such a dearth of animals as to interfere with their survival is obviously not testable, but the things I suggested are plausible based on the way that people behave.
These things are not common knowledge?
Again, you have a hypothesis that sounds very plausible, but because it does sound so plausible, I’m instantly suspicious of it. Plausible things often turn out to be false.
Is there any quantitative test you can propose, or an experiment you could run, that would give you a number between 0 and 1, representing the probability of your hypothesis being true ? If the answer is “yes”, then perhaps someone had already done the research ? If the answer is “no”, then IMO it’s not thinking about.