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Comment by agentgt | Hacker News Reader

I vaguely remember reading somewhere how domestication brings about cuteness in animals. When animals are breed to be less aggressive they look more like babies. We are not even sure if humans are naturally selecting the traits (as baby like features seem less aggressive) or that just inherently happens when aggression is removed (ie lower testosterone would cause less maturity).

I believe the study on domesticating foxes showed this. As they removed aggressive foxes from the gene pool the left overs were unbelievable "cute" with soft fur, round eyes, etc. Seriously a domesticated fox is a pretty animal.

Of course I believe there is an exception to this of the house hold cat. Supposedly cats are technically not domesticated (I'll find link on this shortly but yes this mainly a joke as domestication is likely a multi-faceted continuum).

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Domestication brings about neoteny. Adult domesticated animals maintain appearance and behaviors that wild animals only have when they are young.

Young mammals are very cute to us, possibly because we are mammals too and inherit our cute-sense from a common mammal ancestor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#In_domestic_animals

There is even an old theory that modern day humans are neotenous products of a proto-ape-man. A list usually follows of those characteristics that humans share with infant modern apes: less hair, larger head to body ratio, shorter arms, less muzzle, etc. Then 'futurists' grab hold of that and imagine current human babies as our adult future; is that how the bug-eyed hairless 'gray alien'[1] arises, or the 2001 "star child"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_alien

I have to wonder if this is partially responsible for the "Asians are smarter than everyone else" stereotype, given that Asians have more neotenous features than other races on average.

From what i remember reading, basically how you domesticate an animal is to convince them that they're still babies (and will always be babies for the rest of their lives) and that their humans are their mothers. Obviously, an animal is going to love their mother and not run from them or attack them, and you want them to apply that behavior to us. And you do that by breeding neoteny into them.

Even as wild as domestic cats can act, they still retain a considerable amount of kitten-like behaviors well into adulthood. You can distinguish someone's pet cat from a feral cat largely because the pet cat still acts like a kitten. A hyperactive, playful kitten with sharp implements of death who treats small animals as their toys to play with until dead, but still a kitten.

>Supposedly cats are technically not domesticated

I have a Siberian cat from a breeder and I've compared him to pictures of Siberian cats that live in Siberian forest(in videos of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agafia_Lykova, i saw some of her cats. You can see one here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt2AYafET68&feature=youtu.be... ) and mine's definitely much more "cuter" .

You are right but it's the other way around. Being cute brings about domestication in an animal. Dogs are just more common because they were wolves 15000 years ago and stuck around groups of human hunters for leftover hunt. In return they acted as protection since others animals didn't come close, whereas humans were able to control them with fire. So humans domesticated the cute ones.

Strangely, domestication can bring about cuteness. Radiolab did a story on the domestication of the silver fox [0]. They discuss how domestication yielded physical changes.

"Through generations of selectively breeding a captive population, Belyaev noticed not only increased docility, but also unexpected physical changes."

[0] - http://www.radiolab.org/story/91696-new-nice/

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