Pete’s post on giant pandas reminded me of something I’ve often thought about when contemplating our rabbits, namely: is cuteness an evolutionary strategy? Pete’s right that in every other sense the giant panda seems to be an animal whose survival strategies are doubtful, but it’s also an animal which we’re very keen on preserving for symbolic and aesthetic reasons. It strikes me that in a biosphere which has a single, widespread dominant species, appealing visually to that species is a really useful survival mechanism. In which case perhaps the panda is (as a species) brighter than we thought…
(But everything I know about evolutionary science I learned from comics, so I’m sure this theory is very easily dismissed.)