Survival of the cutest

Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains And Conquered The World

Joshua Paul Dale Profile Books €24

Road blocks made out of Hello Kitty characters, manhole covers adorned with manga cartoons, animal cafes offering cuddles with miniature pigs… there’s no denying that cuteness (or kawaii as it’s known) is huge in Tokyo, where the academic Joshua Paul Dale lives. But in his new book, Dale puts forward the theory that cuteness has taken over the world. The main question he tries to answer is, what came first: our ancestors deciding what is cute, or how they developed cute traits that then go down through generations?

While we might associate the growth of cuteness to the 20th Century, it actually reaches back 1,000 years to the Japanese literary classic The Pillow Book. In this, its author Sei Shonagon writes a ‘list of adorable things’ still recognisable today – a child’s face drawn on a melon, a baby bird being fed, a tiny lotus leaf floating on a pond.

But Dale, who has set up a new academic field in ‘cute studies’, is fascinated that cuteness doesn’t make an appearance in the West until much later. This, he concludes, is a combination of too many wars (no time and energy to invest in cute things) and religion (the

Western Christian tradition characterising children as either vessels of Original Sin or saintly symbols of innocence – neither giving much room for the kind of adorable foibles we associate with cuteness).

Some of the most interesting parts of the book, though, are the attempts to analyse cuteness from a scientific viewpoint. Many will have heard of the ideas of the Austrian biologist Konrad Lorenz, who developed the ‘baby schema’ – the theory that we feel protective towards animals that have similar appearances to young children – large head relative to body size, large low-lying eyes, round bulging cheeks and soft body.

But the science now goes further. Dale looks at a fascinating experiment on a Siberian silver fox farm where scientists bred the tamer-seeming foxes together. Over generations, not only were aggressive fox behaviours eliminated from this tamer group, but even their appearance started to change – developing the curly tails and floppy ears we usually see in domesticated animals and pets, suggesting that both tameness and aggression are in part governed at genetic level.

The best parts of this book remain, however, the fascinating nuggets that he digs out such as Lorenz’s Nazi sympathies and why the human race has never been able to lasso a zebra. Certainly you’ll never look at a Pokémon or Hello Kitty the same way again.