Years ago I read about an experiment in infant psychology. Take a curved line and three small geometric shapes. Arrange them randomly in many different patterns, and show them to a baby. Then slip a joker in the deck. Using the same four elements, arrange a stereotypical smiley face. The random patterns don't get no respect, but the anthropomorphic sketch just fascinates em'.

Now, over on Randall Parker's "Futurepundit" we see further evidence of a newborn's powers of discernment.

Babies are born with an eye for beauty. Infants only hours old will choose to stare at an attractive face rather than an unattractive one - and they also prefer to listen to Vivaldi straight, rather than Vivaldi backwards.

According to Alan Slater, a developmental psychologist at the University of Exeter, humans may have a biologically ingrained preference for beauty.

"It used to be thought that new-born babies came into the world as a totally blank sheet of paper on which experience will then write," he said yesterday. "But what we are finding more and more is that babies are born with a number of in-built mechanisms that help them to organise and make sense of their newly-perceived world - and one of these is that they display an attractiveness effect."

"Attractiveness is not simply in the eye of the beholder, it is in the brain of the newborn infant right from the moment of birth and possibly prior to birth," the University of Exeter researcher said.

This should interest Stephen Malcolm Anderson.