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Showing posts from February, 2014

Daily Fail Disappoints

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Scroll to the bottom to reach updates, the worst aspects of the articles have been fixed :-) 2-14-2014 ~1PM I know you are shocked, simply SHOCKED, to discover that the Daily Fail has egregiously   sensationalized my press info/briefing/interviews on my AAAS talk ( and the Guardian replicates those issues in their headline ). They misrepresent my opinions and statements.  I won't even link to the ir article s because eff them  I think it undermines mothers trying to meet their breastfeeding goals .  Italics- "reporting"/headlining. " Dr Katie Hinde, from Harvard, says formula milk should be gender-specific "  NOT EVEN CLOSE. I said that there is emerging evidence that the "biological recipe" for milk for sons and daughters may be different in some species and at some times. This motivates doing more research to better understand what human infants may be adapted to expect in milk.  In humans there are 5 total studies on milk for sons compared to mil

Daughter Dearest?

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In mammals, females dissolve parts of themselves to feed their babies. Or more science-y “mammalian females pay high energetic costs for reproduction because the synthesis of milk requires mobilization of bodily reserves to nourish developing young.” Photo by Pascal Gagneux  BACKGROUND In evolutionary biology, lots of research has been dedicated to understanding how mothers direct care and nourishment to their young in relation to their own physical, social, and psychological condition and where they are at in their reproductive careers (first baby, second baby, etc). Infant characteristics may also influence how mothers invest, and the characteristic of greatest interest to evolutionary biologists has been whether they are rearing a son or a daughter. Biologists have proposed numerous hypotheses “for sex-biased maternal investment,” but the most well-known and investigated remains the Trivers-Willard hypothesis. Trivers and Willard hypothesized that a female, depending on if she is in