Science Proves Natural Law
by Agnes M. Penny
I don’t usually read Smithsonian magazine.
In fact, to be honest, I never read Smithsonian.
However, recently, a kind neighbor dropped off a stack of Smithsonian magazines, and as I leafed through them briefly, something on the cover of the January issue caught my eye: a huge photo of a baby with the provoking words “The New Morality.”
As a Catholic living in what has been called the post-Christian era, I naturally felt my interest piqued at what a secular magazine would say about morality. Moreover, as a mother, I felt the irresistible attraction to all things pertaining to babies.
I opened the magazine.
What I found was scientific confirmation of our faith. The actual article, entitled “Born to Be Mild,” by Jill Greenberg (1), detailed recent findings by several prestigious research labs regarding the moral consciousness of babies and toddlers. For babies 3 to 18 months of age, some experimenters put on a puppet show involving two characters, one nice and one mean.
Babies 6 months old and up watched the same puppet show several times, and then they were offered a graham cracker by both characters.
Overwhelmingly, the youngsters accepted the cracker from the nice character.
The 3-month-olds, obviously, could not reach for a graham cracker, so scientists timed how long these babies looked at each character; and, once again, the babies overwhelmingly preferred the good character.
The article then went on to chronicle various experiments with toddlers, testing their altruistic interest in helping others.
As a mother, I was not surprised to read that these experiments revealed toddlers’ desire to help others, even when helping meant inconvenience or sacrifice to themselves and when the people they were helping did not ask for help or even appear to notice they needed help.
The researchers’ goal was to discover if people are born with a sense of morality, which is why they included such young babies: so that they could test children before they’ve absorbed the values and social norms of their families.
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Read more: www.ncregister.com
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(1) Are Babies Born Good?
Arber Tasimi is a 23-year-old researcher at Yale University’s Infant Cognition Center, where he studies the moral inclinations of babies—how the littlest children understand right and wrong, before language and culture exert their deep influence.“What are we at our core, before anything, before everything?” he asks. His experiments draw on the work of Jean Piaget, Noam Chomsky, his own undergraduate thesis at the University of Pennsylvania and what happened to him in New Haven, Connecticut, one Friday night last February
It was about 9:45 p.m., and Tasimi and a friend were strolling home from dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings. Just a few hundred feet from his apartment building, he passed a group of young men in jeans and hoodies. Tasimi barely noticed them, until one landed a punch to the back of his head.
There was no time to run. The teenagers, ignoring his friend, wordlessly surrounded Tasimi, who had crumpled to the brick sidewalk. “It was seven guys versus one aspiring PhD,” he remembers. “I started counting punches, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Somewhere along the way, a knife came out.” The blade slashed through his winter coat, just missing his skin.
At last the attackers ran, leaving Tasimi prone and weeping on the sidewalk, his left arm broken. Police later said he was likely the random victim of a gang initiation.
After surgeons inserted a metal rod in his arm, Tasimi moved back home with his parents in Waterbury, Connecticut, about 35 minutes from New Haven, and became a creature much like the babies whose social lives he studies. He couldn’t shower on his own. His mom washed him and tied his shoes. His sister cut his meat.
Spring came. One beautiful afternoon, the temperature soared into the 70s and Tasimi, whose purple and yellow bruises were still healing, worked up the courage to stroll outside by himself for the first time. He went for a walk on a nearby jogging trail. He tried not to notice the two teenagers who seemed to be following him. “Stop catastrophizing,” he told himself again and again, up until the moment the boys demanded his headphones.
The mugging wasn’t violent but it broke his spirit. Now the whole world seemed menacing. When he at last resumed his morality studies at the Infant Cognition Center, he parked his car on the street, feeding the meter every few hours rather than risking a shadowy parking garage.
“I’ve never been this low in life,” he told me when we first met at the baby lab a few weeks after the second crime. “You can’t help wonder: Are we a failed species?”
At times, he said, “only my research gives me hope.”
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