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Most mammals find other mammal babies cute. I’ve heard it posed as an adaptive survival tactic encouraging inter-species care of young.
by zeckalpha 5y ago
Most mammals find other mammal babies cute. I’ve heard it posed as an adaptive survival tactic encouraging inter-species care of young.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoI think it is more likely it's just a side effect of being wired to find our own babies cute. The traits that we key on for that just happen to also be the traits most other mammals key on because we're all descended from a common ancestor that was wired that way.
- kybernetikos 5y ago> adaptive survival tactic While evolving to trick others into looking after your young is on a relatively straightforward evolutionary trick, evolving to look after others is not a straightforward story. Child care is incredibly resource intensive and hard work. Evolving an instinct to care for creatures other than your own young is almost entirely negative from an evolutionary point of view, unless there's a big benefit that isn't obvious. The suggestion higher up the thread is that perhaps that trait lead to humans keeping animals that provided a significant evolutionary advantage. It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't seem terribly likely since other mammals have the same trait but don't keep pets.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoMaybe they don't keep pets, but there are many documented cases of domesticated and wild animals adopting other species' infants.
- kybernetikos 5y agoThat's exactly the point. They have evolved the same behaviour but don't have the hypothesised way of benefitting from that behavior.