Why do we find babies from other animal species cute?
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Finding human babies cute is good for the survival of our species. Other babies, especially of mammals, have similar features, so we find them cute as well.
This doesn’t matter, evolutionarily; finding them cute isn’t bad for us, so the cuteness-finding instinct never got honed down to only apply to human babies. Finding snakes and spiders cute would have been bad though, which is why we frequently find them creepy.
It keeps us from eating them until they are full grown and have had a chance to produce offspring of their own keeping us from exterminating our food sources.
They have a lot of the same physical traits as human babies (big head, small body, big eyes etc.) that trigger our ‘must protecc and nurture’ instincts.
Why do we find anything cute?
We are descended from other ape species that also find babies cute. It they didn’t, we wouldn’t even exist. It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s pretty common among mammals in general, and if we had time machines I’m sure we would find that behavior in the first mammals.
Baby mammals all have things in common (such as relatively large eyes) that are perceived as “cute”, not just among humans. Since baby mammals almost always have this feature, it’s seen as cute among probably all mammal species.
Humans especially, but also most mammals, are born with disproportionately large eyes and heads, with small, frail bodies.
If we didn’t have such a strong instance to protect and take care of our young we might not, they’re loud and smelly and take all your resources after all, so the urge to protect them has to be really strong or our species wouldn’t have survived. Because it’s so strong we get the urge to protect things that look like our babies, even though they aren’t, which brings us back to the big eyes etc.
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