It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. We adore babies because they’re so cute. And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why.

Source: "Cute, Sexy, Sweet, Funny." TED2009. Feb. 2009. Conference Presentation. Additional Information: This quote is from philosopher Dan Dennett's 2009 TED Talk explaining the logic behind evolution. It means that there's nothing intrinsically sweet about cake, sexy about girls that look a certain way, cute about babies, or funny about jokes; rather, we find these things sweet, sexy, cute, and funny because our evolutionary wiring tells us to find these things appealing. Finding these stimuli appealing causes us to propagate the species by eating high-energy food, mate, reproduce, care for children, etc. Watch the full TED Talk here: Dan Dennett - Cute, Sexy, Sweet, Funny