Repost: Ponies are cute because they co-evolved with human protectors · 10:41pm May 6th, 2014
Screw being creative. I'm just post one of my previously popular forum threads.
Out of curiosity, why is it that when a human encounters a pony for the first time, his first reaction is to protect it? What is it about ponies that always makes humans choose their side of any conflict? 
It’s because they’re cute, right? Big eyes, broad forehead, general “roundness” of features, large head compared to body size- just like a baby, right? Their physical traits, their high voices… An adult human is getting bombarded with “protect me, I’m a helpless baby” signals.
Thing is… they still look and sound like ‘children’ even by adulthood. Take an honest look at these ponies’ body shapes and tell me that they’re optimized for survival in the wilderness. I don’t think strength, agility, speed, or resistance to extreme temperatures were what made Pony Kind survive before the creation of society.
I think it was the advantage of cuteness which played against the instincts of other, sturdier beings. Possibly humans. We might have coevolved together, since ponies universally have traits that we find cute, or else we’ve adapted to find cute the traits that ponies possess.
It makes a certain degree of sense, but are these cute traits universally accepted by humans as cute? What we find aesthetically pleasing is heavily influenced by our cultural background, meaning that if humans lived with the ponies there is a possibility that they would not find the same things cute which we do.
2083718 Making me do research, are you? You monster…
Here's probably what you already know: There is a biological factor to what we consider cute.
In a study where pre- and post- menopausal women were shown images of babies and asked to rate their cuteness on a scale of 1 to 7, it was found that premenopausal women discriminated cuteness at a higher level than their postmenopausal female peers. This suggests that the biology of younger women made them care more about the health, coyness, and infantile features (all the things that collectively make something cute) of babies more than grandmas did.
And that makes sense. In the wild, a mother who can’t care for both of her children should favor the one that’s already in a good standing for survivability.
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I'd like to say that there’s also culturally perceived cuteness where that culture designates something as a ‘cute thing’ because a reference to something that’s generally beneficiary. Such as finding butterflies cute because they basically mean "summer time" which means "best time for agriculture" to us historically. But... I couldn't find any research papers on cuteness varying from culture to culture.
One of my favorite theories for fics where Humans and Ponies coexist in numbers.