The Reason We Find Dogs So Cute | The Science of Cute

[Music] the world K9 organization recognizes 349 different dog breeds displaying every imaginable shape color and size but despite these physical differences they all share over 99% of their genes with each other and not only with each other they also share 99% of them with this animal too the wolf he's an apex predator in his environment the top of the food chain afraid of no one so how did this become [Music] this a clue to the answer may be found in a tiny difference between the facial musculature of wolves and dogs and it has to do with that enigmatic quality we call [Music] cuteness meet Lucy right now she's doing something wolves can't do she's raising her eyebrows we've all seen dogs do it it even has a name puppy eyes but just how dogs can do this was only recently revealed in a paper published in the proceedings of the National Academy of [Music] Sciences the paper demonstrates that the musculature surrounding the eye differs in dogs compared to wolves in particular the L muscles just above the eyebrows and the raol muscles on the side right there and right there um are more present in dogs than they are in wolves suggesting that dogs might be using their eyebrows expressively trying to potentially communicate with us but knowing how a dog can do this doesn't answer the question why they do it and the answer to that question may lie in how dogs were domesticated in the first [Music] place a hint can be found in the fact that there is one breed of domesticated dog that also can't raise its eyebrows the Husky huskys are genetically closer to wolves than any other breed of dog and like wolves they don't possess the muscles in their eyebrows that other dogs do one of the authors of the scientific paper that described this unexpected difference between wolves and dogs is Professor ruie Doo seen here with a husky called Wolfie wolf is a Husky and is one of the more ancestral lines genetically and morphologically and what we saw when they dissected huskys is that they don't have these muscles as develop as other dogs all the other dogs include Chihuahuas they had it and shihas are very ancestral also but Asis cannot do the puppy eyes so if I if I do this he wants it but he will not do those puppy eyes like oh please I'm dying without it you know that is a big difference that as simply cannot do it's now thought that huskys didn't develop puppy eyes because they never needed them we selected them for the things we wanted them to do like pulling sleds in the Arctic not for companionship they can be cute but they really don't interact so much and don't care so much about humans so they are in theory more detached than other dogs that were really raised to be company dogs we don't call them right company dogs that's that's the main difference and companionship was certainly not on the minds of the Wolves when they first began to pay attention to us it's thought that even before the first Agricultural Revolution at the end of the last ice age wolves began to tag along with our nomadic ancestors hunting the same animals that we were hunting biologists call it commensalism literally eating at the same table but when our ancestors stopped migrating and started to build permanent encampments a profound change in our relationship to wolves began to occur we actually don't know when the change would have started to occur domestication is controversial we don't know when it happened we don't really know where it happened and we don't really know how it happened it may have been the case that a sort of ancestral dog wolf may have incurred some sort of evolutionary benefit from interacting with humans in particular this may have been some sort of access to resources that they didn't have before as humans live in certain areas and potentially become sedentary we have awful we have trash we have rubbish and as a predator in a carnivore you potentially no longer have to waste or expel a lot of energy in finding available food resources you can just eat the scraps that human left behind but it seems like the interaction might be more mutually beneficial humans may have benefited from having a dog likee an around in terms of protection or in a sense a way to have other Predators be scared off so this could essentially be the evolution of a guard dog and so the descendant that you have at home this dog that's cute and cuddly is very different from a wolf-like ancestor from 14,000 years ago a key insight into how dogs became cute and cuddly came in the latter part of the 20th century when a Russian geneticist decided to breed silver foxes solely on the basis of their tameness and lack of aggression the results were dramatic and unexpected this is a lovely experiment where since the 1950s they have been in a sense selecting um four evolutionary traits related to tameness or interaction with humans and we see that in roughly 10 or so Generations that not only do behavioral changes arise but also physical features seem to change the experiment with the silver foxes showed that we were just selecting for tameness and some of this cuteness comes as a byproduct for tameness the byproduct is the the Hees like that this not normal for a mamal because the ears are always erect right but in dogs and tame foxes they the the ears get curved the air has strange colors a mix of colors uh the snout gets smaller the te got smaller so again it's more juvenilization but that was not selecting for the those characters themselves or for the Tess is a byproduct that came we call it the domestication syndrome but how could this domestication syndrome connect such an apparently unrelated range of characteristics like floppy ears small teeth varying coat color and aggression the answer is to be found in the earliest stages of development in the pup embryo and specifically it relates to a group of multi-potent stem cells called called neuroc crest cells these cells migrate throughout the developing embryo to form muscle cartilage and skin pigment cells they also form the adrenal glands these are the glands that produce adrenaline a key chemical in the body's fight ORF flight system and a key component in aggressive behavior what's now known is that by repeatedly selecting for Tame foxes the Russian scientists were unwittingly selecting animals with smaller adrenal glands and as a byproduct a reduction in all the other neural crest cell characteristics the result was what we would describe today as cuteness for the ancestral dogs this cuteness byproduct would pay off handsomely because it perfectly matched another genetically inherited trait that humans possess we love babies can't help ourselves it's hardwired into our genes and we're not alone in this [Music] regard throughout the animal kingdom if a species is to survive it's members need to be able to pass on their genes to the Next Generation over time ever more complex mating rituals have evolved to ensure that only the fittest are successful those rituals are driven by a family of hormones that not only trigger the distinctive behaviors that encourage mating they also prepare the mother's body for conception birth and care of the young one of the primary hormones versions of which can be found in fish reptiles birds and mammals is oxytocin in humans oxytocin performs a range of functions from strengthening the contractions of the womb during child birth to promoting milk production after child birth it's also been known to play an important role in human behavior including sexual arousal trust anxiety and mother infant bonding as a result oxytocin has been called The Love hormone or cuddle chemical and it can be released simply by looking at a baby well I think cuteness cuteness is really what I'm holding right here here um and cuteness is incredibly cuteness is incredibly important for us as a species um so back in the early 1900s Conrad Loren one of the early ethologists people that study animal behavior introduced the idea that there might be certain physical features that are particularly cute and endearing that we are attracted to they would have a high and protruding forehead very big eyes she has mushy big cheeks she has a little nose and a little mouth and they'd have short pudgy extremities and that all of these features would essentially elicit our attraction and our caretaking so it's really worked I mean it it definitely you're definitely cute what's also notable is oxytocin the hormone that's really associated with social bonding and affiliation when I look at Olympia and she looks at me we both get increases in our in in levels of oxytocin and when you look at the dog human relationship especially with dogs and their owners when they're looking at each other and interacting with each other in an enjoyable manner you see similar um increases what's interesting is that this idea of um infantile schema this infantile appearance that we're attracted to um it can be easily co-opted and nowhere has that co-opting been more obvious than in the world of cartoons long before Conrad lorence suggested that baby features are powerful emotional triggers animators were already instinctively applying them to their characters so big eyes you know button nose children have like bigger heads the smaller bodies you know all the things that we kind of in animation use as proportions for our uh for our drawings the basic proportions are where you start rounded shapes larger head everything starts with simple shapes and traditionally rounder edges softer edges softer shapes is cuteness so if we were going to draw just a generic head and then from that we can sort of place where the eyes may be I like to start with the eyes because the eyes are very important animation a lot of expression is told specifically Through The Eyes but traditionally like a cute character they generally have like smaller noses MH cute mouth chubby cheeks some rounded ears and you can really start to play with the appeal of the character expression the eyebrows go hand inand with the eyes are sort of one they allow you to really show the expression of a character with just a simple change [Music] all right feel like this is a familiar baby you get the idea I don't know what should we what should we call him or her how about Bob this newly created character that Steve calls Bob has all the baby feature characteristics that Conrad lorence identified over 70 years ago characteristics that can be easily transformed into a cute puppy with only a few Strokes of Steve karp's pen so you kind of would start with the same basic shape again right uh a lot of it is the same so the shapes are similar to what was appealing in humans so you get the basic idea and just as with real dogs it's the eyes that can command attention in animation and you can do a lot with eyes so say we have a pair of eyes right General friendly looking eyes but just looking off to the left a little bit is is is a lot different than if they're looking straight at you you kind of get a different uh sense or changing the eyebrow a little bit in the placement of the eyes someone can be thinking right as opposed to how upset they are with the other person or something like this seething right really angry so the eyes being a very very important part of the detail and animation of trying to emote and relate to the audience we're [Music] angry happy get along working on a problem so where the pupils look where the eyebrows are makes a big difference I mean they're obviously an exaggeration of our human features but I feel like being able to communicate through the eyes is the most important thing in animation and I mean animals or at least my dog they really have this emot of their eyes you know you can like feel them you can almost see them processing you can see their emotion right on their face at the thinking dog Center in New York researchers have been studying the ways dogs and humans interact and have come to realize that eye contact may be key to how we connect with our four-legged friends humans like to look at eyes and so for us our attention is immediately drawn to a face when we look at the eyes itself and so when we're looking at a dog we might be looking at those same areas and for dogs when it comes to communicating with humans they might want to emphasize their cute little puppy dog eyes so that we actually are more attentive to them dogs are very very good at understanding human gestures hey good job buddy it may be the case that because of the fact that they have evolutionarily developed in such close proximity to humans that they have developed a social understanding of how to communicate with us this has all hijacked onto a pre-existing system we love babies we like looking at babies there are certain things about babies that make them cute and so by hijacking onto a pre-existing system dogs have developed features that resemble babies and we have in a sense artificially selected to breed for those traits in dogs as well we see them as babies we want to care and nurture them as infants and that's potentially hijacking onto these existing maternal lines and nowhere is that more evident than at your local pet adoption center it can be a case of cuteness overload we see it on a on a day-to-day basis that immediate attraction your um like your yellow labs your your fluffy dogs they do tend to go pretty quickly but surprisingly sometimes I would say friendliness cells you know the what makes the the dog different than the wolf being their sociability really it's that dog that that goes up to you that wants you to pick them and even in the curly Burly of an adoption center full of yapping puppies it's still the case that the eyes have it I think both with animals and with people there's a certain element of trust that you feel with eye contact you feel kind of an endearment a connection um kind of you know eyes are what eyes are the window into the soul I can say having a three-year-old dog and having a three-year-old child they equally demand my attention and I equally give it you know I get puffy eyes from either one I mean the head drops down the eyes get wider and whatever you want you can have whatever you you want yeah and even if they don't know they seem to the moment they've done it once correctly they're like oh this worked let's do it again clearly being cute does work for both babies and puppies and it has done for many Millennia thanks to a fortuitous convergence of shared instincts and genetic Good Fortune wolves became Mankind's best friend and we became their some scientists have even suggested that maybe dogs and humans selected and domesticated each other [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Curiosity Stream

Views: 192,835

Keywords: CuriosityStream, Curiosity, dogs, puppies, wolves, puppy eyes, science, evolution, dometication, dogs vs wolves, wild dogs, husky, huskies, animals, science documentary, animal documentary, science of cute, cute, cuteness, documentary, animal, why are things cute, why, are, things, what is cute, live, kittens, Animal, Animals, Pets, Animal Facts, Dog Facts, Amazing Facts, Cute, Adorable, Pup, Funny, Blow your mind, Science of dogs, biology, physiology, paw, canine, emotion, love

Id: 2hCI0yDylEI

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2024