Our favourite photographer philosopher, Laszlo Bencze, translates from the Darwinspeak:
Certain factors associated with facial symmetry appear to be tied to the expression of the Hox gene 124a cis prime. These factors have been linked to greater parental pleasure due to visual receptors with proclivities towards regularities. It is surmised that symmetry and visual receptors evolved through a sequence of mutational instability towards equilibrium and stasis. Hence, Hox gene 124a cis prime which is surmised to have originally controlled bipedal motion took on symmetricity enhancement via allelic transfer resulting in increased inheritance of this gene. Parents with responsive visual receptor systems already in place emitted greater caloric transport to their offspring resulting in improved survival and ultimately reproductive success. In this way evolutionary mechanisms have insured that infants with highly symmetrical physiognomies predominate within familial units and day care centers.
Now, the English:
Early babies were ugly and their parents killed them. But then some mutations occurred and babies became cuter than buttons, cute as cute can be, cute as a bug’s ear, and their parents loved them to death. End of story.
As published in really high-powered journal Schmience, and soon to be part of the national schmience standards, coming soon to a tax-extorted school near you.
PS: As if reality mattered, but (well, let’s pretend it does, just for fun), natural birth babies are NOT born cute or even necessarily very symmetrical. They are usually screaming, sometimes misshapen, red as a beet, and getting redder if someone thinks to wind up the cord around the placenta, forcing the valuable cord blood into the infant’s body before severing that organ forever and tying off the umbilicus.
Take it from friend who is a delivery room nurse: The beautiful babies are the “sections,” the ones the surgeons remove, with no labour, and nurses hand to their mothers after they wake up. It takes the natural born lot several days to become so cute.
All newborns, in any event, are just noisy, difficult, and largely free of apparent personality for weeks. But who can blame them? Their first real experience in life was usually awful and terrifying.
Maybe we can get a just-so Darwin story out of that fact, just in time for the schmience standards.
See also: Design inference used in detecting science fraud, but significance not really admitted