♫ Neoteny, forever young ... ♬♪

topic of the day 060 & video of the day 053

why do Disney princesses

looking increasingly child-like?

It's Okay to be Smart

What, who, when, how, why? Then, so?

In the earlier Disney films, the princesses look like real, human woman. Over the years, the heads get bigger compared to their bodies, while the eyes get bigger compared to their heads.

By the time we get to Elsa, this twenty two years old Frozen princess has the body ratios of an eight years old, as with Moana who is sixteen yet has the ratios of a four years old.

This is happening all over the animation industry, as they get older, they age in reverse.

Getting a literal headstart throughout development, a newborn's eyes are already 75% of their adult diameter while our brains hit 55% of their adult volume by three months of age.

Biologist Konrad Lorenz speculated that these babyish features trigger an instinct in adult mammals to give love and attention.

Just like in babies and kittens, cuteness is nature's secret weapon to persuade adults into caring for babies.

Disney is just using the same biological trick to encourage audiences to root for their characters, with cartoon protagonists tend to have juvenile characteristics, and the villains ... not so much.

Dogs like Cavalier King Charles Spaniel has been selectively bred to be cute, retaining the juvenile features into adulthood, in what biologists neoteny.

We see neoteny in many domesticated animals, from Spaniels to pig with floppy ears, shorter snout and bigger eyes.

The most important trait in becoming a domesticated animal is ... tameness.

Whether it's a companion, a worker or a food source, you can't have a productive relationship with fearful and aggressive animals. That fight and flight response is something most animals only acquire as they get older - the baby animals are pretty chill with humans.

So an animal that somehow never 'grows up' in that sense might make the best candidate for domestication.

Beginning in the 1950s, Soviet scientist Dimitry Belyaev began a breeding experiment to study this idea by using wild silver foxes. The foxes were tested for their reaction to human contact, and only the foxes that were friendly toward experimenters were allowed to breed.

After just twenty generations, his foxes had not only changed in behavior, but also in appearance. Floppy ears, smaller jaws and shorter tails that now wagged whenever humans were around. Balyaev noted changes in hormones and brain chemistry that he suspected were capable of reshaping the foxes' external features.

If you select for one childish trait, a bunch of others tend to come along with it.

Us humans also have neoteny traits as well considering our skull shape changes much less compared to how much a chimp's skull morphs as it matures for example, as well as having less body hair helped in running farther and our faces becomes more visible to each other as social interaction becomes more important. Suppressing that fight or flight response meant we could cooperate and organize in larger numbers.

Most importantly, our brains need a lot of room and time to develop, which is why we rely on our parents for much longer than other mammals. The more complex our society gets, the more time humans need to become independent.

Childhood is a time for experimentation and learning and by extending it into our adulthood, we can learn and change as long as we live.

"We may grow old, but we never grow up."

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