Day 11: If you haven't noticed yet, the days are symbolic.

It's been a while since I last wrote anything here. Call it writers block, call it preoccupation, call it whatever you want. Just don't call it anything you'd regret, and if you find out what that is, let me know. Part of me is curious as to what people would regret calling my lack of consistency on updating a sparsely maintained web-page. Seriously, shoot me a text.

There's not a whole lot of plot involved in this post. I don't really have a goal or aim i'm shooting for. Not trying to make you laugh. Or think. Or send me money. I'm just writing cause, heck, it feels good and it beats trying to peel the sunburn off that frustratingly elusive part of the back right above where your hands can reach if you go under the shoulder and right above if you try to go over the mountain. So let's talk about people and how.... Odd... we can be.

First up, Cuteness.

What exactly makes something fall into the anomalous fog of a definition that is "Cute"? If you ask Google images, you get answers such as this.

Palm sized-hedgehog

Fuzzy Hybrid Animal

Feeding chipmunk-ling

So lets do a brief analysis of what makes these images emit whatever chemical in our brains that corresponds to the "Awwww" vocalization. To start, they all have disproportionally gigantic heads, as do babies and kittens and most of the other things that I intentionally neglected to put on here because some of my readers (And I fervently hope a very small group) might have a cutesy heart attack. So to test this theory, I Google image searched "Oversized head and helpless". There was a bit of a disconnect.

Anthropomorphisms

Crotchety Sea Animal

Robo-Offspring

Socially Abrasive Turkey

Huh?

As you can plainly see, the results of this acid test were... inconclusive. The decision was made that there are quite a number of factors going into cuteness other than Gargantuan faces and a lack of ability to defend oneself. I briefly thought of delving further into this, but decided instead to chalk it up to "Cute is in the Eye of the Beholder." And would you know what caused me to come to this?

Google Image Search: Cute

Yeah... Cuteness is in the eye of the beholder. But if I were to be holding this cup, there would be about 14 knife wounds in this thing's eyes.

Cuteness. It's a weird concept. I've often thought that certain animals who would not otherwise survive in the wild develop traits that can be construed as cute in order to skew the theory of Survival of the Fittest by appealing to the top of the food chain. I mean, there's a reason that Pandas are endangered. They have the digestive tract of a carnivore, but their diet consists of 99% bamboo intake. This insanely frequent error in dietary judgement causes the pandas to be slothful to the point of avoiding any kind of sloping geography as this would cause them to exert more energy than they can take in. This choice of cuisine also accounts for their having to consume up to 30 pounds of bamboo shoots a day, which also leads to the astonishing rate of defecation, which can be up to 40 trips to the can every 24 hours.

So let's sum this up. We've got a 350 pound creature who cannot handle "Sloping Terrain" or common social behaviors because it eats a diet of some of the most inefficient metabolic fuel on the planet (which it's digestive tract isn't even designed to handle.) meanwhile dropping up to a pound of feces  twice every hour. Oh, and they only produce one cub every two years. These animals are basically asking to slowly waddle their way out of existence.

 

But look at that thing! We can't let it die out! It's just so.......cute.... We have to make a big deal of this. Get a huge team of scientists to find out why they don't eat meat (They occasionally do, by the way. But they still haven't figured out that they're supposed to.) and then get another team to research a way to convert common Viagra into a pill that would speed up their reproduction rate! (Not making this up.) There is no way that we're going to let them go extinct. Not when they look like giant, fuzzy, cuddly, depressed (in a disarming way*) chubby teddy bears.

So my theory for cuteness being nature's defense mechanism seems to be holding up. To further prove my point, let me show you an animal that nobody wants to make any effort to conserve. But first, let me tell you that it is very well adapted for survival. It is an omnivore, eating anything from bugs to fruit to eggs that it steals from villages that have been built in its territory, has night vision, echo-location, and is able to find and catch food using only one finger. Sounds pretty sweet, right?

Nope

False. This is the Aye-Aye, the largest nocturnal primate in the world. Nobody really cares if this thing goes extinct, even to the point of it being dubbed as a harbinger of death and killed on sight simply for being straight up evil. Even though this guy fends for himself as far as feeding and generally doing whatever he can to stay alive, nobody gives a care. And why? Lack of cuteness, that's why.*

So far, I believe my theory on cuteness being the great equalizer in the game of life stands firm. Things that would never have made it past the first round of Natural Selection have gotten a pretty hefty handout simply because they look so ridiculous that it's considered adorable. Smooth move, I guess.

Anyways, thanks for reading.



*Panda Attacks on Humans
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/15/panda-attacks-keeper-at-san-diego-zoo/
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,304249,00.htmlhttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28554008/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/gu-gu-strikes-again-panda-attacks-zoo-visitor/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/11/24/us-china-panda-idUSTRE4AN5NF20081124

*Aye-Aye Attacks on Humans
This one guy says that they stab people with their fingers.