[djtango]

I appreciate your response here but it's still pretty handwavy.

Ultimately it's pretty easy to sit back and say - well it's just so. Sure we have a flight or fight and pathways towards adrenaline and cortisol. We also have pathways for oxytocin so we like to find a friend/mate. So obviously we'd also have pathways towards wanting to nurture our kids. That's evolution bro - I guess nature and science are pretty obvious and boring after all /s

The response to children is impressive to me because it appears to be highly specific in its stimulus and the ramifications are pretty large.

Our cortisol and adrenaline response is very generic. All kinds of things can trigger it. You can experience adrenaline by jumping out of a plane or gambling at a roulette table. Even in a showdown in poker or playing video games. So the same response has been conditioned towards all kinds of situations when originally it might have been predominantly towards enemies/predators

Likewise for oxytocin we can probably produce oxytocin from cuddling a pet so it's kind of generic in stimulus.

Meanwhile there's a whole slew of specific responses that men and women have towards babies that I personally find fascinating in their specificity. Maybe because I'm just ignorant but I'm excited for the future when we may be able to understand how a bunch of senses (visual, aural, olfactory) convert into specific neural signals which the body is preprogrammed (how?) to then produce a specific response (via what biochemical pathways) to induce a hormonal response. Which incidentally have pretty wide ranging physiological consequences in the case of testosterone.