The perverse inner world of babies

I find babies to be charming, but I also don't ascribe to them the innocence that most do, in fact this is probably why I like them so much. For being such little things, they can be so damn clever. Some of their more perverse behaviors are a good rejoinder to those who scream that psychopaths are murderous, manipulative, evil devil's span when it turns out, if those are your criteria for devil's span, we all are. Cracked.com, "6 Shockingly Evil Things Babies Are Capable Of" includes lying, prejudice, defiance, getting high, stealing, and my favorite -- murder:

For a long time scientists had a theory that left handed people might have started out as twins in the womb. Their rationale was that in a set of twins one tends to be right handed and one left handed. Genetic and nurturing factors can also affect handedness, but they can't explain it completely in many cases. Maybe all lefties were the result of only one twin surviving the cage fight that is fetal development.

It wasn't until ultrasounds, and fearless cameras capable of surviving the uterus, that scientists discovered their hunch was right. Sort of. They were right in the fact that most lefties were once twins but they didn't go far enough. Scientists now think that a ridiculous one in eight people started out as two peas in a pod. Of course, only about one in 70 people actually is a twin. So what happened to your twin? You killed it and then absorbed it into your body. Yeah, those stories of adults finding teeth in their shoulder? Not urban legends.

Why Did I Do That?!
Because you're evil.

Not really. Chances are you were just the healthier fetus. Or you hogged all the blood if you shared a placenta. Or you grew faster and literally left your sibling no womb at the inn. If multiple pregnancies are really as common as they now seem, we evolved to be this way for a reason. Trying out two fetuses to see which one is more likely to survive is a pretty good plan evolutionarily. Unfortunately, carrying twins is very dangerous for the mother, meaning that our best bet as a species was to let one twin kill off the other early on in development. Just another reason lefties are a sinister, sinister group of people.

I trained my one-year-old relative how to carry a knife in her teeth commando style. It was hilarious. That babies must be trained to stop doing certain bad things, socialized to do "good" is not surprising. Of course they have a limited capacity to be good, at least a limited capacity to fight against what they have been evolutionarily programmed to do. This should not surprise us, as adults have similar difficulties in eschewing "evil" acts, but again for good evolutionary reasons. Does this suggest that we should reconsider how we define evil to exclude all evolutionary inclinations? And if so, how would the psychopathy fit in that equation? I guess the terms "humanize" and "demonize" are not the polar opposites that had been previously supposed.