Time and the Teddy Bear
Trick question: What kind of bear is commonly seen near midwinter? Answer: the teddy bear. At least, going by my observations during Christmas shopping expeditions, the fuzzy little brutes certainly proliferate in stores at holiday time.
A teddy bear was my inseparable companion during toddlerhood, but when I wanted to buy a similar, realistically bearlike one for a very young friend, I couldn't do it. Buying a twin for my long-gone toy turned out to be as improbable as buying a live mammoth. Teddy bears like mine are extinct. The teddy bear has evolved, rapidly and dramatically, away from its earlier form.
The tale of teddy bear evolution appears in The Science of Everyday Life, a wide-ranging book by Canadian author Jay Ingram. The first toy bear to be known as a teddy appeared early in this century, thanks to a presidential decision.
In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt visited Mississippi to help settle a dispute over state boundaries. Roosevelt hunted during his free time there, but had poor luck. Someone, worried about the presidential morale, offered him a shot at a tethered bear cub. Understandably, Roosevelt declined the offer. A political cartoonist caricatured the event, and Teddy Roosevelt's bear cub became famous. Within a few years, Teddy's bears were on sale in toy stores across America.
Early teddies looked more bearlike than do the modern versions. The most obvious change is in teddy-bear faces. Like real bears, the first versions had long snouts and low foreheads. Their eyes, noses, and ears, if not anatomically exact, were fairly close in size and shape to what might appear on a real bear cub.
Over time, the features changed. Teddy bears appeared with bigger eyes, higher fore- heads, shorter noses. Buyers preferred these less realistic toy bears. Darwin's principle of natural selection went to work, weeding out the less fit teddy bear models in the competition of the marketplace. (Granted, some primitive types survived for a long time. The teddy bear my mother bought for me reminded her of one she'd had as a child, back in the teddy-bear Neanderthal era.)
The successful features, such as short muzzles and high foreheads, are reminiscent of those of human babies---which is why the modem form of teddy bear predominates. Konrad Lorenz, the pioneering expert on animal behavior, was the first to point out that adult humans respond warmly to certain features common to baby humans and other animals. If so, then being cute could be a life-or-death matter for a baby (or puppy or kitten). Having the right sort of features to elicit caring behavior by adults would certainly enhance the survival chances of an infant creature unable to care for itself.
Lorenz's view was checked experimentally at the State University of New York. Re- searchers devised a series of line drawings of human faces in which, one at a time, features differed by size and location. Students were shown slides of these drawings and asked to rate them on an eight-step scale from unattractive to cute. Lorenz was right; a face with baby-like features, large eyes set low to expose a high forehead and frame a small nose, stood out in the cuteness ratings.
Ingram suspects this predilection has implications for human evolution as well as that of teddy bears. We may be bent toward selecting mates as well as toys that exhibit those cute features. Coming from a long line of people with substantial schnozzes, I find that depressing, but modern humans certainly look more like babies than our apelike ancestors did.
It's worth noting that the cuteness factor has been well documented in at least one case of artifical evolution in a single animal: Stephen Jay Gould points out in The Panda's Thumb that Mickey Mouse looked almost realistically ratlike at his first appearance. Now, though he's old enough to be a grandfather, Mickey looks more babylike than ever.
