"They have a mat of messy protein extrusions in place of an exoskeleton, their eyes have no facets, and their thorax is completely indistinct from their abdomen!"
- Insect Aesthetician
While I subjectively agree about cats, "aesthetically well put together" is downstream of the "evolved innate" factors.
Beauty is objective. Taste is subjective. Hence why we can say that someone has poor taste, i.e., the subjective fails to align with the objective.
I can admire the beauty of an insect as an insect without me being an insect. Similarly, if an insect were intelligent, possessed with an intellect, it could judge the feline as a beautiful creature as a feline.
"As X" is important, because it is a matter of how well the specimen realizes the telos of its species. Hence, why defect is ugly. You wouldn't say pi is an ugly integer. You wouldn't say a hammer is a crappy saw. You wouldn't say a fish is a bad mountain hiker, except as a shorthand for "fish do not mountain hike, are not anatomically + physiologically ordered toward hiking".
And of course there degrees of good, and therefore, beauty, based on how much more you resemble the Highest Good and therefore the Most Beautiful, Goodness and Beauty as such.
I would say that the cute cats are domesticated species, like many animals. So they wouldn't exist without humans, and it's in their benefit to behave to survive.
Compare this with dogs that are more of a "working animal." We've bread dogs to fill specific roles because they were larger to work with. If humanity had tried to find companionship in the mountain lion instead of Felis lybica (the wild cat).
Also for the how almost-domestic the African wild cats are: https://youtu.be/ZRqlSr1Yp1M
The other part of it (as I understand it) is that cats body form is not as easily selected for when compared to animals that humans have domesticated.
Dogs have a number of body sizes that can be "easily" selected for - https://embarkvet.com/products/dog-traits/traits-list/#body-... and https://embarkvet.com/products/dog-traits/traits-list/#other... (there's even a mutation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPAS1 in wolves that was selectively bred into dogs https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/34/3/734/2843179 )
I suspect part of the lack of range comes also from that the cats of size that don't eat us are not ones that can be crossbred with cats in the wild to introduce new useful genes. Trying to cross a domestic cat a wild cat doesn't produce a new cat that is useful in a new role ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felid_hybrids#Confirmed_domest... ). Compare this with domestic dogs and the various wild dog species.
The 14 genes mentioned that control dog size: https://research.nhgri.nih.gov/dog_genome/study_descriptions...
The concept behind this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotypic_plasticity
And linking to a reddit post about this from a while back - https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1hhzcn/why_do_w...
Elevated basal slippage mutation rates among the Canidae - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17437958/
> The remarkable responsiveness of dog morphology to selection is a testament to the mutability of mammals. The genetic sources of this morphological variation are largely unknown, but some portion is due to tandem repeat length variation in genes involved in development. Previous analysis of tandem repeats in coding regions of developmental genes revealed fewer interruptions in repeat sequences in dogs than in the orthologous repeats in humans, as well as higher levels of polymorphism, but the fragmentary nature of the available dog genome sequence thwarted attempts to distinguish between locus-specific and genome-wide origins of this disparity. Using whole-genome analyses of the human and recently completed dog genomes, we show that dogs possess a genome-wide increase in the basal germ-line slippage mutation rate. Building on the approach that gave rise to the initial observation in dogs, we sequenced 55 coding repeat regions in 42 species representing 10 major carnivore clades and found that a genome-wide elevated slippage mutation rate is a derived character shared by diverse wild canids, distinguishing them from other Carnivora. A similarly heightened slippage profile was also detected in rodents, another taxon exhibiting high diversity and rapid evolvability. The correlation of enhanced slippage rates with major evolutionary radiations suggests that the possession of a "slippery" genome may bestow on some taxa greater potential for rapid evolutionary change.
(and if you're interested in genetic diversity and fossil records, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_gap )
Arthropods and even snakes are morphologically too distant for that. Nevertheless, people usually find large-eyed geckos more cute than armor-eyed chameleons or tiny-eyed crocodiles.
In person they can produce a different reaction.
A couple of years ago, a jaguar climbed from its habitat on the local zoo here, and put its paw over the fence to "play" with the humans.
A really unexplainable amount of people did not have a different reaction.
Wolf spiders are welcome in my basement though. They are smart enough and have good enough eyesight that the likelihood of getting bit by one is super low. They hunt down all the pests in your home.
What makes them extremely cool is that they're kinda like nature's hydraulic robots.
For a long time I've been interested in the fact that children are afraid that, if they are left alone, they will be eaten by monsters.
In the ancestral environment, this is absolutely true. But the belief is obviously innate and not learned. What's interesting is that the innate belief is correct in the details, as opposed to being something that is not necessarily true but nevertheless produces the correct behavior.
Of course, I'm not an expert in anything so this could be bunk.
I think there's just something viscerally, instinctually unsettling about how some arthropods move, which gives rise to arthropod-like monsters in fiction (xenomorphs, Bugs in Starship Troopers, Zerg, etc.). Spiders, the poor beasts, get the worst of our fear because they don't move their legs via muscles like we vertebrates, or even insects, do; their body pumps hemolymph into the legs, forcing them to straighten. This hydraulic-pressure system of movement is just different enough to our visual system to be really weird.
Still do, in parts of India and some other countries, and not just where poor people live
Having a leopard stare at you, even through a fence, does raise the heart rate. But I don't know why we regard big cats so relatively favourably, when an evolved innate repulsion, such as to spiders or snakes, would make as much sense.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopard_attack#Leopard_predati...