what's the mechanism behind "cuteness"? Why we see stuff like pic related we suddenly feel warm and fuzzy, and we want to cuddle and protect them? Is it some sort of defense? Are we the only specie that feels like this?
>>2061964
Seems like a basic social creature thing, like I'm assuming it's similar to feeling things like empathy, pity, for something, and so on.
I'm not quite sure why it is especially for males so difficult a concept to deal with. Also there are things in the animal kingdom like a male lion that kills cubs of another lion, but may play with cubs of his own (I'm making the assumption that adult animal engaging in play is somewhat close to the "human finding something cute"). I guess most of us come around at least once we have a child of our own, no matter how masculine men we were.
I don't know if this makes any sense, I just wanted to say something a bit more than just saying it's parental instinct.
Google oxytocin
Dogs evolved to be cute so humans would take care of them more :3
Humans are engineered since childhood that outer beauty doesnt matter, what matters most is how kind a person is..
when it comes to dogs its quite the opposite, people care about how their dog looks, does it look like a wolf? instant purchase. is it cute like a lion? boom, get me that shit. does it look like a dog? pound.
but the one thing to blame is patriarchy
>>2061993
>but the one thing to blame is patriarchy
for what?
tangentially related but man i would snuggle all those puppers
>>2061993
>Dogs evolved to be
NO NO NO NO NO
THINGS DO NOT EVOLVE TOWARDS SOMETHING THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS
EVOLUTION IS A CHANGE IN HERITABLE TRAITS OVER GENERATIONS
THERE IS NO END GOAL FOR EVOLUTION
>>2062012
>:3
lmao
>>2062007
same. this is a dog thread now.
what are y'alls favorite breeds? Mine are German Shepherds/Rottweilers. I love their colors and how they're built.
>>2062012
Besides the fact that he was playing, that is just entirely untrue. While the changes are somewhat random, the ones kept, the actually evolutionary changes, are kept by weeding out the unfit through natural selection.
>>2062012
Their is an end goal for selective breeding you halfwit.
Dogs become cuter is selective breeding.
Last I read, we see things as cute if they remind us of babies. We look for big heads, big eyes, little noses, and large foreheads. Things that are cute give us an oxytocin rush, which is good, because if they didn't we wouldn't tolerate a baby screaming, or a puppy chewing up our shoes, or a kitten clawing its way up our legs.
>>2062128
Why are there so many people who find babies ugly but dogs cute then?
Besides, not all cute animals fit those characteristics. Especially little noses.
>>2062154
Not sure. The asshole in me wants to say they're broken. But many people don't think babies are cute until they have their own, which makes sense, because we don't normally raise other people's babies. We're never going to give birth to kittens, but they're just baby-like enough for us to melt and want to care for it, without being baby-like enough that we feel "this ain't my baby, where's this cunt's mother, holy shit stop crying I don't have any milk."
I am a mother, and other people's babies gave me anxiety until I had my own. Now that I'm more equipped to handle them, I like them much better, and now think they're cuter than kittens. I've noticed the same thing with a lot of my friends. Even the father of my child hated babies until he had one, now he's always pointing out babies that he thinks are adorable, and I think a lot of it just came from not knowing what to do with them or a subconscious fear of responsibility for them.
This is just speculation on my part, though.
>>2062098
No. A trait being fixed in a population can come down to pure chance. A natural disaster could wipe out the majority of animals expressing trait X while leaving most expressing trait Y, allowing Y to become the dominant trait even if it confers no advantage.
This is more along the lines of what I meant. From
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_32
>Second, it's more accurate to think of natural selection as a process rather than as a guiding hand. Natural selection is the simple result of variation, differential reproduction, and heredity — it is mindless and mechanistic. It has no goals; it's not striving to produce "progress" or a balanced ecosystem.
>>2062123
Wasn't referring to artificial selection.
