Mamels life animal

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

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

Kristen Hawkes and Wenda Trevathan have organized an incredible symposium "Birth to Grandmotherhood: Childrearing in Human Evolution" at the  Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA) next month.   Sarah Hrdy , Kim Bard , Sue Carter , Barry Hewlett , Hilly Kaplan , and Melvin Konner !   Luckily for me, I will be so riveted by all the other speakers I won't have the chance to get nervous about my talk. The talks are Friday afternoon, February 21st, 2014.  Admission is free for this event, but registration is required for each person who will attend. Click here to register & for more information . Best of all, if you can't attend in person, there will be a Live Symposium Webcast (which also requires online registration ).

No mother does it alone. Well, no human mother.    An important difference between humans and other apes is that women simply can not raise their young without help.  As infants, we have to grow bigger brains and yet our mothers wean us at younger ages .  Fossils of early human ancestors show that relative brain size was beginning to get larger by about 1.8 million years ago, suggesting that the at this point mothers likely needed help.  Who was helping? "Mother and Child" by John Henry Twatchman, 1893 In the 1960s, many scholars proposed “Man the Hunter.”  Males, by providing nutrient rich meat to their mates, were the obvious critical factor in shaping human evolution (Lee and DeVore 1969). The assumed importance of the human male-female bond for infant rearing and lifetime reproductive success inspired decades of social and evolutionary psychology research on human mating behavior. Picking mates, attracting mates, and guarding mates was of paramount importance for humans b