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What psychological mechanisms has natural selection built into our brains to push us into the parenting niche? There are various candidates, but to introduce a particularly important one, consider a simple question: Why do we find babies cute? At first, this sounds like a silly question, up there with William James’s “Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl?” and Jared Diamond’s “Why is sex fun?” 79 The natural response is to say: “Of course we find babies cute; babies are cute. Are you a robot?” But just as an alien scientist wouldn’t find adult humans any more attractive than fertile chimpanzees, nor would it find human infants any cuter than human adults or than any other animal. We’d probably all look quite distasteful to a psychologically healthy alien. Similarly, to a chimpanzee, our babies might look crumpled, bloated, and ugly, and our children bulbous-headed and weirdly hairless. They might look as unappealing to a chimp as hairless cats and naked mole rats do to us.
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