Editor's Selections: Babies, Balls, Altruism, and Smoking

Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week:

• "Amazingly, babies as small as 12 months old show some understanding of the difference between the deliberate and goal-directed "agents" that can cause order, such as a person, and those randomly acting inanimate objects that cannot, such as a bouncing ball." Daniel Daza of the Ego Sum Daza blog explores an interesting new PNAS paper. Babies, Balls, and Creationists.
• Sandy Gautam of The Mouse Trap wonders: is altruism the result of sexual selection?
• Finally, welcome John Wayland of the new History of Psychology blog to the science blogosphere! Check out this particularly interesting post, The History of Smoking Bans & Anti-Smoking Sentiment