How’d they come up with that? And does it mean anything?

They enlisted 2900 women to provide data at 18 and 34 weeks of gestation on weekly alcohol intake: no drinking, occasional drinking (up to one standard drink per week), light drinking (2–6 standard drinks per week), moderate drinking (7–10 standard drinks per week), and heavy drinking (11 or more standard drinks per week).

Then, their children were followed up at ages 2, 5, 8, 10 and 14 years, using a standard checklist to measure behavior.

“This positive behavior meant that the children of light and moderate drinkers had less emotional and behavioral problems through childhood and adolescence,” Dr. Monique Robinson, from Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in West Perth, Western Australia, told Reuters Health.

If this report has you jumping out of your chair to pour yourself a glass of wine, you might want to stop and think about it for a moment. Good behavior is great, but the study addresses nothing relating to cognitive abilities or general health. It also seems to me that measuring something like “positive behavior” is incredibly subjective.

As one eloquent commenter at iVillage said:  “Maybe they are less emotional because the brain cells are dead.”

Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is a pattern of mental and physical defects which develops in some unborn babies when the mother drinks excessive alcohol during pregnancy.  Fetal alcohol exposure is the leading known cause of mental retardation in the Western world.  The current recommendation of both the US Surgeon General and the UK Department of Health is not to drink alcohol at all during pregnancy.  (Wikipedia)

Remember, while an occasional glass of wine may or may not have an affect on your unborn child, no amount of alcohol is proven safe for consumption during pregnancy. Sacrificing your baby’s mental and physical health for good behavior seems very silly indeed.

Researchers says yes, although this may be a controversial claim, since people’s conception of morality varies from society to society. “At the same time,” writes Paul Bloom in the New York Times, “People everywhere have some sense of right and wrong. You won’t find a society where people don’t have some notion of fairness, don’t put some value on loyalty and kindness, don’t distinguish between acts of cruelty and innocent mistakes, don’t categorize people as nasty or nice.”

How does this manifest itself in babies who can’t express themselves? To test “baby morality” studies were conducted at the Infant Cognition Center (within one of the Yale psychology buildings). Short puppet shows were shown to babies in which one puppet helped the other, and another puppet hindered. In the end, results showed that 6- and 10-month-old infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual to the hindering individual. “This wasn’t a subtle statistical trend; just about all the babies reached for the good guy… babies are drawn to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy. Again, these results were not subtle; babies almost always showed this pattern of response.” In other words, babies at an early age can identify actions which we’d call “mean” or “nice.” Even more fascinating is that the babies show an elementary appreciation for “justice,” where they favor “mean” actors, when those actors are punishing bad behavior

You can read in more detail about these studies at the New York Times or watch this NY Times video. The article concludes, “Babies possess certain moral foundations — the capacity and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness.”  Does the existence of an innate moral sense mean there’s something more profound going on than biological evolution could produce, “the voice of God within our souls,” to quote Dinesh D’Souza?

I, for one, would say YES. What do you think?