If you think that was just a coincidence (like maybe the helper shape was also shaped like a boob), they've done multiple versions of the study -- for instance, babies as young as 8 months agree that justice should be rewarded and evil should be punished. That study was again conducted with puppets (the universal language of babies), and in this one a bad puppet was either rewarded or punished as the babies watched. This time, the babies picked the punisher as their favorite. Not the victim or the bad guy, but the one who administered justice.

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A baby who doesn't love Frank Castle isn't a baby we'd want to keep anyway.

And the older the kids get, the more intensely they feel right and wrong (one toddler actually smacked the bad puppet). But all of it happens at an age when they shouldn't even have witnessed enough good or evil to even know what it is. We practically come out of the womb wanting to administer pain to bad guys. Or bad puppets, at least.

Again: There are absolutely no real-world scenarios where you're allowed to put this knowledge to the test, unless you're the woman in the video below, dangling her naked newborn for shits and giggles:

The reflex is called the palmar grasp, and it happens when you stroke an infant's palm or put anything in his hand (which makes the idea of the baby reaching for his mother's nipple before latching on even more painful -- he's going to squeeze the shit out of it first).

The instinct doesn't just appear out of nowhere at birth, either. It's seen even in the womb. In fact, anti-abortion activists have used images of babies grasping the hands of their surgeon during in utero operations as propaganda for their cause. What those activists probably didn't appreciate is that the reflex to wrap your hands around whatever you can get your chubby fingers on is found in baby monkeys as well. Monkeys don't have the advantage of getting carted around in BabyBjorns, after all, and the ability to cling to your monkey mom while she's swinging through the vines could be the difference between surviving infancy and getting eaten by a rhino.

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Monkey veal is a delicacy in many alpaca herds as well.

Where things get interesting is when doctors test out exactly how strong infant grips can be. Way back in 1891, one researcher decided to test baby grips by dangling 60 different newborns from a walking stick (one at a time, sadly). What he found was that most were able to hang on for at least 10 seconds, and one of them lasted two minutes and 35 seconds. A separate researcher did the same test with monkeys and found that they could make it between seven and 33 minutes, and with just one hand to boot. But again, human babies aren't required to grip their mothers to stay alive, so it makes sense that we're a little behind our monkey cousins.

The bad news is that a baby's superstrength grip disappears when he's between 6 and 12 months old. So if you're ever in a situation where you're attacked by babies, you better hope they're not newborns, because you might not make it out alive.

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To get there, this little blob of weak sauce has to do push-ups while using his feet to step on his mother's abdomen, propelling himself to the boob of choice. With each little push-up, he lowers one arm and reaches to the nipple for leverage before pulling himself to his milk-filled destination. At which point he instinctively figures out how to latch on and start sucking.

Now, if you're thinking, "Of course babies instinctively know how to breastfeed, DUH," think again. The process of breastfeeding can be so anxiety-ridden, unintuitive, and painful for some moms that they quit before they even leave the hospital. But those mothers are probably guiding their babies to their breasts, not letting their brand new infants do the hard work of figuring out the business of eating on their own.

Man: The only species that has to be taught how to feed AND how to bang.

So how can babies do it? Researchers think the mother's breasts emit a secret smell that only her child can sense, and it's that smell calling him to action. Which also explains a lot of what we know about the teenage years, but not how the weakest thing on the planet can pretty much do one-armed push-ups right after birth.

Starting at about 6 months old, babies stop looking into their caregivers' eyes and start looking at their lips to figure out how to make sounds correctly. So one day your baby is bonding through eye gazes and gentle coos, the next day the baby says "Fuck this, I'm going to learn how to talk." And his gaze drops and starts watching the speakers' mouths.

Researchers figured the phenomenon out by studying babies at ages 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 months old. At 4 months old, babies stared at the speakers' eyeballs. At 6 months, they split their time between the eyes and mouth. The 8- and 10-month-olds focused exclusively on the mouths. By 12 months, the kids spontaneously switched backed to eye contact -- unless the scientists used Spanish speakers on babies who came from English homes. In those cases, the older babies kept their eyes trained on the mouths, because they still had some learning to do.

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"Your conjugations are atrocious, tonto."

In other words, we have a natural instinct to quit bonding through eye contact and start communicating with words, and we make the transition without help from flash cards or Rosetta Stone or worried grandmothers who secretly think we're developmentally delayed. And every sound you've ever learned how to make was acquired during a six-month window before your first birthday. It kind of makes everything you've done since then look pretty lame, huh?