Cats, dogs, bears, owls, weasels. Most of them could seriously injure/kill an average human with minor difficulty and yet we find them adorable?

Does not compute.

  • ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.worldOP
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    12 hours ago

    “Where’s the baby!?”

    “Gone. Reduced to atoms.”

    Still kinda wild to me that our preservation instincts can be overridden by something that doesn’t resemble a human in any way outside of a few features.

    • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠@slrpnk.net
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      11 hours ago

      It’s because they evolved to hack our brains, and our brains evolved to be hacked by their smells / sounds / features. ‘Natural selection for reproductive fitness’ is a harsh mistress.

    • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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      11 hours ago

      To be fair, our ancestors, evolutionary speaking, didnt resemble us that much if you go back far enough. A system that just considers a few key features a “child to be protected” is probably more adaptable than if every change in appearance had to be accompanied with a corresponding mutation to whatever gives us our mental picture of what our young should look like, for them to still get taken care of.

      • ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.worldOP
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        10 hours ago

        It wouldn’t take any evolutionary change to notice your offspring look nothing like you especially if they were completely different colors and had drastically different features.