Who could forget the Antarctic starts of last summer’s silver screen, when moviegoers went wild for the adorable, waddling, tuxedo-clad creatures in March of the Penguins?

The year before that, another cinematic hit, Anchorman, garnered laughs through its parody of media’s and everyday peoples’ obsession with panda cubs.

Now scientists are saying that there’s an explanation underlying this movie madness for all things fuzzy and cute. In a New York Times article published Jan. 3, Natalie Angier noted the burgeoning study of visual signaling.

“[Scientists] have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute,” Angier wrote. They include “bright, forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter totter gait.”

Add up these traits and you’ve got something that exudes youth and vulnerability, fitting perfectly with Darwin’s predominant theories. Anything that appears as though it can’t help itself will rouse the attention and nurturing of its bigger, more capable caregivers.

“The greater the number of cute cues that an animal or object happens to possess, or the more exaggerated the signals may be, the louder and more italicized are the squeals provoked,” Angier added.

This would explain why infatuated onlookers shelled out the big buck last month — up to $100 — and scoured the popular Internet auction site eBay in hopes of catching a glimpse of the latest panda miracle at the Smithsonian zoo. A total of 13,000 people were lucky enough to lay eyes upon the arrival of Tai Shan, a 6-month-old, 25-pound panda cub.

It might also explain why one Stanford student, senior Da Pan, bears a name with some cute-minded roots.

“Rumor has it that I was named in honor of the international year of wildlife conservation, 1984, the year I was born,” Pan said.

Researchers in Angier’s article noted that the human cuteness radar is set at a very low threshold, distinguishing it from rare and difficult-to-obtain marks of beauty. Unlike its elusive counterpart, beauty, cuteness is deemed “commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness.”

And here’s a helpful editorial hint: don’t mention this supposition to your female significant other, whom you have deemed “cute” instead of “hot.”

Meanwhile, debate is surfacing over whether cuteness is completely wholesome and harmless.

Denis Dutton, a philosopher of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, said that our eagerness to indiscriminately praise things as “cute” can lead to frustration and disappointment.

“Cute cuts through all layers of meaning and says, Let’s not worry about complexities, just love me,” Dutton said. “That’s where the sense of cheapness can come from, and the feeling of being manipulated or taken for a sucker that leads many to reject cuteness as low or shallow.”

Lest this opinion should dismantle the image of cuteness, bear in mind that new research seems to show that cute images activate dopamine-based pleasure pathways in the brain the same way sex, good food or psychoactive drugs can.

And long before science could call upon biological bases to substantiate theory, savvy advertisers have been capitalizing on the human impulse to squeal over cute items. Do Beanie babies or the Taco Bell chihuahua ring a bell?

Close to home at the Stanford Bookstore, this marketing ploy surfaces in the annual stuffed cow giveaway — each is plump, bedecked with jingle bells and free with every $100 textbook purchase.

So when it comes to making a verdict to what’s cute and what’s not, signs point to the possibility that anything goes.