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Showing posts from March, 2012

Why I have been neglecting my blog...

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Building Babies: Developmental Trajectories in Proximate and Ultimate Perspective That's why. Since 2010, Kate Clancy , Julienne Rutherford , and I have been putting together a volume of contributed chapters by leading researchers in the phenomena of primate development. In mid-March, after an Athenean * effort by us and the contributors we submitted the book to Springer and it is expected to be available in late summer. Background about the volume and the Table of Contents are currently featured on Kate's Blog . And here is a wordle of the text of the entire book! *Why should Hercules get all the glory- for Labors of the Mind lets celebrate Athena! Amiright or Amiright?

The Fallacy of the "Naturalness" of Breast-Feeding

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Ring -Ring .  “Hello?”  “Hi Katie, its Graham. My wife wanted me to ask you about lactation stuff.”   Incidentally this happens not infrequently. I get questions from high school friends, grad school comrades, and colleagues trying to short-cut the scientific literature.  This must be due to my charming personality (obnoxiously extroverted), demographic (the prevalence of breast-feeding in the US is highest among 30-something, Caucasian, college-educated women), but it probably has the most to do with my research . I have been grateful for these conversations because fielding questions about lactation, breast-milk, and infant development for non-specialists is the most worth-while upshot of being a scientist. To me, making the results of scientific research accessible and meaningful to real people making real decisions is the social contract we sign when we accept grants funded by tax-payers. To be clear, I am not a medical doctor or a certified lactation counselor.  The women, and th