Fun Fact of the Day

"From the first days of life, [human infants] attend more readily to faces than to other visual stimuli and more readily to speech than to other auditory stimuli. This latter bias can apparently be traced to a preference for the intonation contours in spoken language: two-day-old babies show distinctive cerebral blood flow when they hear a normal sentence but not when the same sentence is played backward."

That's from Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, which I think is worth reading for the title alone; it certainly raised the librarian's eyebrow when she handed it to me. The book also includes stories of domesticated baboons in Africa: one who worked as a signalman for the railroads in South Africa, and another who worked as a sheep-dog. I've just started it, but it promises to be a fascinating read.