Baby faces are cute by design.

Think of human babies you've seen, or even photos of babies, in ads or a scrapbook. They all have round faces and big eyes, almost no nose and only the hint of lips, drawn up in a bow. Because they're so adorable and absolutely vulnerable, we bond with them and tacitly promise to take care of them until they are grown and ready to be out on their own.

[It's good for sales, too: Look at any baby doll from any era and you'll see the resemblance to a real human baby. Not so for dolls of older girls and boys: think Barbie and G.I. Joe.]

Same thing, if you think of it, with animals. What is cuter than a fuzzy kitten or a frisky puppy? Not even a human baby in some cases! You can't think that nature made those baby animals so irresistable to please us humans, can you? Of course not. They're cute for their parents so that those parents will accept them, bond with them, not kill them. The mother almost always bonds, and sometimes the father, too -- but the mother has been known to fend off the irrational and violent father bent on destroying his own progeny. Hmmm . . . sounds familiar, no?

But here's a funny thing: We humans find animal babies cuter than cute, but I'm not sure if animals find OUR babies cute. Would you leave your one-year-old by herself in the backyard with a mother Rottweiler? I hope not. So what's the diff? I'd have to guess it's consciousness -- of who you are and what humans are, etc. -- and, in the case of animals, lack of it. They recognize their own babies as special and worthy of nurturing, but they don't understand the universal concept of "cute babies": i.e., all the young of any species is cute compared to its adult self and should be protected. And that it's intended by nature to be sure that each new generation is cared for and encouraged by the more powerful older generation that will sooner or later die off.

But think of species in which the infant looks nothing like the parent. I mean, a baby snake looks a lot like a mother snake, but a baby frog is not just a smaller version of a frog. How does the mom frog recognize that creature that looks more like spermatazoa than it does a frog? And how does an adult butterfly know its progeny who, last time anyone looked, were worms in cocoons?
Do some species somehow recognize their children even though there's no resemblance? Or do some species -- butterflies, e.g. -- just not take care of their young?

Are the only attentive animal parents those, like us, who recognize our kids as looking like us? I seem to recall a film about baby turtles making a mad dash -- relatively speaking -- for the sea soon after they were born, hoping to make the water before some seabird or other predator snatched them up. Where were THOSE parents? Nowhere to be seen. Useless.

I'm tempted to say that the facial recognition part of parental bonding is, if not purely human, at least mammalian. The cute kitties and pups. It's true that a baby alligator looks just like a full-grown one, but does momma gator -- maybe dad, too -- take some pride in a "little me" and vow to care for it? I don't know. I'm not sure where the cut-off is. Come to think of it, baby chicks are about as cute as cute can be, so we have to include birds, probably even the wild ones. Where does it end?

Do insects acknowledge and care for their young? I mean, don't all crickets look alike? Hmm . . .

Remember that nature, which underlies all we are and all we do, wants only one thing: to make more of itself, in the form of its innumerable species of animals and plants. As set up by Whoever/Whatever, nature is programmed only to reproduce. But it has clever means of getting its way, one of which is to make baby animals cute.

I'm always amazed at how well the world works. Not the world we humans have created but the one that existed before us and may exist after, the one we were born into and will exit. It's way too brutal for my taste -- kill or be killed, eat or be eaten -- but that's what we have to deal with and try to figure out. But nature has a kinder side, too, and thinking about cute animal faces, including ours, is just one example. Think of the pleasures nature -- our natural state and the natural beings we are -- gives us, from those darling kittens to views of mountains to sex to love to giving birth to and raising that special next generation to baseball to dessert to whatever.

Nature, our nature, giveth and taketh away. And after all we're put through in this life, we deserve those precious baby faces, no? And did I show you the latest shots of my new granddaughter? I've got them right here. Hey, wait, it'll only take a sec!