Insignificant randomness

I remember hearing somewhere a while back that, from an evolutionary biology standpoint, there's a reason why little things are cute. Something about how kittens and puppies and foals and baby humans are designed to trigger an "awww" reaction (and/or our brains are designed to react in that way), in large part so that the baby whatever-it-is will be more likely to be taken care of. (Forgive my ineloquence here; I'm a little tentative when the subject at hand involves science.)

Anyway, so there's some sort of underlying reason why small living things are so cute. That makes sense to me. What baffles me, though, is why this would translate to inanimate objects. Yes, I have a specific example in mind: teeny tiny binder clips! You know, binder clips, the black plastic things that hold packets of papers too big for staples or paper clips, with the metal pieces that you flip to the sides and use to open the black plastic part, like a mandible* hinge. You know what I'm talking about, right? They're usually maybe an inch wide or so; sometimes you'll also see larger binder clips on really big stacks of paper... but apparently, they also come in itty-bitty, teeny-tiny size. Maybe a centimeter wide, or only slightly more than that. And they're so! darn! cute!

Obviously, there's no biological reason for this - I mean, it isn't as though there's an evolutionary need for wee binder clips to be taken care of so they can continue to thrive and eventually grow up to be big, strong binder clips. Is the small-things-are-cute notion so fundamentally hard-wired in our collective psyches (um, or just mine?) that it's transferred over from living creatures to pieces of metal and plastic? What gives?

See, I wasn't kidding with that post title up there! Very random, and entirely insignificant.



*I should note, also, that I am incapable of seeing a bunch of snapdragon flowers without pinching one by the sides and making it "talk." [Oddly, they never sound like you'd think a dragon would (that is, "roarrrr," or the like), but usually more along the lines of "mawh mawh mawh mawh"...] So maybe the thing with the binder clips is less about inanimate objects that are very tiny, and more about inanimate objects that can look like they're talking... hmm...