Monday, April 9th 2012
Another year, another podium presentation. This year I want to redeem myself: last year I rocked my first presentation on hormonal contraception (woo hoo!), then was too exhausted to be remotely coherent for my second on diet composition and C-reactive protein (though to be fair, I was also chairing that session). This year I have just one presentation, which will allow me to concentrate on my talk, but also enjoy the meetings more.
A few highlights from the AAPAs this year include:
- A Building Babies get-together on Wednesday night (look for Julienne Rutherford and some obvious signage at the reception that evening)
- A Physical Anthropology Women’s Mentoring Network Happy Hour Thursday at 5:15pm in the Alexander’s Room on the 23rd floor of the Hilton
- A Biological Anthropology Developing Investigators Troop Happy Hour from 6-7pm on Friday, also in the Alexander’s Room on the 23rd floor of the Hilton.
So if you were involved with our book, are looking to give or receive some lady mentoring, and/or are a junior bio anthro colleague, there are chances for you to meet up with others.
Then there are, you know, the talks. The stuff you do between the schmoozing and the drinking. The Building Babies Lady Editors are all in the same, late Friday session (Session 24 in the Galleria North, 2-6pm). Guess who has the 5:45 talk?
This girl.
The relationship between strenuous physical activity and C-reactive protein is cycle-phase dependent: results from rural Poland
Energetic and inflammatory variables impact ovarian functioning, but their mechanistic links to each other and the ovaries remain unclear. We hypothesize that inflammatory biomarker C-reactive protein (CRP) is negatively correlated with strenuous physical activity in a population of rural Polish women. Because progesterone is suppressed by physical activity, yet progesterone administration can increase physical activity, we further hypothesized that their activity patterns would vary between the follicular and luteal phases, periods of low and high progesterone. Using standard epidemiological methods to collect daily records of minutes and exertion of physical activity over one menstrual cycle, we distinguished between light and strenuous activity, and activity variation through the cycle. Saliva was collected daily (progesterone), and urine seven times over the cycle (CRP).
Midluteal progesterone concentrations were inversely correlated with luteal CRP (p = 0.02), median CRP (p = 0.05), and were positively associated with strenuous activity in the luteal phase (p = 0.09). Median, luteal and follicular CRP were all negatively correlated with strenuous activity in the luteal phase (p = 0.03 for all three measures). And when women were grouped into those with high and low CRP concentrations, those with low CRP performed significantly more strenuous physical activity through the luteal phase. None of these associations were found with follicular phase physical activity. These results suggest physical activity influences systemic inflammation, which may additionally influence ovarian functioning. Therefore continued attention on systemic inflammation is crucial to determine mechanistic links between it and reproductive success in women.
Since writing this abstract my thinking on the topic has matured a bit (this is part of the problem with having an abstract deadline in September for a conference in April). We’ve also played around with the data a bit more, and have some more to report. I hope my presentation will get us thinking about subsistence versus recreational physical activity, as well as variation in strenuousness. I expect some of this will turn out to be pretty relevant to variation in reproductive function.
Friday, March 30th 2012
As I mentioned Wednesday, Building Babies, the volume edited by me, Katie Hinde and Julienne Rutherford will be out in only a few months in one of the fastest turnarounds I know of for a book of this nature. It also happens to be awesome.
I shared an interview with Lady Editor Katie on Wednesday, and today I share one with Lady Editor Julienne to describe how we developed this book, and why books like this are still important in academia (even if we could and should discuss issues in cost structures and accessibility). I also have printed the second half of the Building Babies table of contents, so that you can see the breadth of topics covered and our excellent chapter authors.
Building Babies Table of Contents (Part 2)
IV. MOTHERS AND INFANTS: THE FIRST SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP
12. Maternal influences on social and neural development in rhesus monkeys: Christopher J. Machado
13. Maternal Condition: Infant Compensation, Resilience, and Adaptive Response: Lynn A. Fairbanks and Katie Hinde
14. Tentative title: The role of mothers in the development of complex skills in chimpanzees: Elizabeth V. Lonsdorf
V. THE EXPANDING SOCIAL NETWORK
15. Reproductive Strategies and Infant Care in the Malagasy Primates: Stacey R. Tecot, Andrea L. Baden, Natalie Romine, Jason M. Kamilar
16. When dads help: infant development of owl monkeys and other primates with allo-maternal care: Maren Huck & Eduardo Fernandez Duque
17. Ontogeny of Social Behavior in the Genus Cebus and the Application of an Integrative Framework for Examining Plasticity and Complexity in Evolution: Katherine C. MacKinnon
VI. TRANSITIONS TO JUVENILITY AND REPRODUCTIVE MATURITY
18. Identifying proximate and ultimate causation in the development of primate sex-typed social behavior: Stephanie Meredith
19. Future adults or old children? Integrating life-history frameworks for understanding primate locomotor patterns: Michelle Bezanson and Mary Ellen Morbeck
20. Quantitative genetic perspectives female macaque life histories: heritability, plasticity, and trade-offs: Gregory Blomquist
21. Cultural evolution and human reproductive behavior: Lesley Newson
CONCLUSION (Robert Martin)
Interview with Julienne Rutherford, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Oral Biology, College of Dentistry, University of Illinois, Chicago
Julienne Rutherford hard at work, doing awesome science.
What was the experience like editing this book?
I had never done anything like this. I’ve done some co-writing and I’ve reviewed papers before, but the teamwork and choreography that go into an edited volume took those skills to a new level. I think it’s hilarious that Katie thought maybe I’d be smart enough to say no to editing a book as an as-yet untenured assistant professor. HAHAHAhahahaha. Um, no. But I have to say that even though I was warned and even strongly advised against doing this, it has turned out to be a real joy and so far one of my proudest professional achievements. I learned so much about editing (cutting extraneous prose, cleaning up narratives, tightening arguments, retaining an author’s voice through it all) and this in turn has already had a really positive impact on my own writing. And ultimately, it was just so fun to work with you and Katie and our incredibly talented cast of contributors.
What were some of the reasons you chose these chapter authors?
Their science is good, you know? We were just super jazzed about what is happening right now in the complex world of primate development. That said, I don’t want to shy away from the fact that it was very important to me personally to highlight new avenues of research into primate development being defined and pursued by junior scholars in our field, and especially women. We certainly did not include or exclude anyone just because of their gender – it really just turned out that the work we were most drawn to as exciting, interdisciplinary, innovative, and visionary was being done predominantly female scholars early in their careers. And I think that’s great. If we can inspire each other, support each other’s scholarship, and really stand up for an inclusive intellectual culture, I hope our book makes a contribution to keeping women in the pipeline.
What is the value of an edited volume in this era of academic publishing?
The value to me is that it allowed us to craft a specific kind of narrative in a specific time in the history of the field of primate development. The chapters bring to the forefront complementary themes like epigenetics and evo-devo, inflammation and stress, developmental transitions. Certainly some of the avenues outlined in the book are in their infancy – hee, I made a Building Babies pun! – and we will see how they bear out over time. But an edited volume is sort of like staking a flag, a grand gesture because we are saying that this is for posterity, in a way that a special journal issue or meeting proceedings doesn’t achieve, in my view. I also want to point out that our review process was unusually rigorous for an edited volume (I’m sure many of our contributors would agree with that!) but that meant that everyone really had to make a concerted effort to be intelligible to each other. So the book in many ways forms a conversation, a really nerdtastic conversation.
What contribution do you think this book makes to anthropology? To evolutionary biology?
We take an explicitly comparative approach to primate development. By that I mean that we don’t divide this book along taxonomic lines. Since our organizing frame is the developmental trajectory, we are talking about humans, baboons, lemurs, chimpanzees, et cetera, all in the same breath. I think it’s enormously important that the study of human biology and human biomedicine is integrated into a comparative primatology. I can’t help find it odd that we train human biologists in some anthropology programs with nothing but the barest bones of a primatology background. Many human biologists are really well-versed in the rodent literature that pertains to their particular phenomena of interest, and are really well-versed in human physiology, but are not aware of the amazing work their primatological colleagues are doing. I anticipate this book helping to foster a cross-pollination that I think will be tremendously beneficial to the future of biological anthropology. See, I have a dream of a world in which a biological anthropologist who works on both human and nonhuman primate projects makes sense to hiring committees and funding agencies, and if that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right.
Wednesday, March 28th 2012
After almost two years of work, Building Babies is off to the presses, due to be out late August/early September! Building Babies: Primate Development in Proximate and Ultimate Perspective is a volume co-edited by me, Katie Hinde, and Julienne Rutherford about the many mechanisms and broader adaptations involved in – you guessed it – building a (primate) baby. To celebrate the completion of this volume, the hard work of the Lady Editors (as we came to call ourselves), and our accomplished, intelligent chapter authors, I have interviewed Katie and Julienne about the book editing process. With Katie’s interview I’m including the table of contents for the first half of the book; with Julienne’s the second half.
I also think it’s worth noting that this book was edited by three anthropologists at the assistant professor level, all three of whom write science blogs.
Building Babies Table of Contents (Part 1)
PREFACE (Hinde, Clancy, & Rutherford)
I. CONCEPTION & PREGNANCY
- Inflammation, reproduction, and the Goldilocks Principle: Kathryn B. H. Clancy
- The primate placenta as an agent of developmental and health trajectories across the lifecourse: Julienne N. Rutherford
- Placental development, evolution, and epigenetics of primate pregnancies: Kirstin N Sterner, Natalie M. Jameson, and Derek E Wildman
- Nutritional ecology and reproductive output in female chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): variation among and within populations: Kevin B. Potts
II. FROM PRE- TO POST-NATAL LIFE
- Prenatal steroids affect development and behavior in primates: Adam Smith, Andrew Birnie, Jeff French
- Navigating transitions in HPA function from pregnancy through lactation: implications for maternal health and infant brain development: Colleen Nyberg
- Genome-environment coordination in neurobehavioral development: Erin Kinnally
- Building Marmoset Babies: Trade-offs and Cutting Bait: Suzette Tardif, Corinna Ross, Darlene Smucny
III. MILK: COMPLETE NUTRITION FOR THE INFANT
- Lactational programming: mother’s milk predicts infant behavior and temperament: Katie Hinde
- Do bigger brains mean better milk? Lauren A. Milligan
- Infant gut microbiota: developmental influences and health outcomes: Melanie Martin & David Sela
Interview with Katie Hinde, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
Katie Hinde, giving her exit seminar at UC Davis
What was the inspiration for this volume?
I had been interested in doing an edited volume that showcased the state of the art in terms of understanding primate development. Maternal effects and infant development was a target of substantial research effort in the 80’s and 90’s and was now experiencing a major interdisciplinary resurgence. It also dovetailed nicely with my “Russian nesting doll” academic strategy; little doll- write empirical papers; medium doll- write the review paper that puts those empirical papers in context within that domain of research; large doll- edit the book volume that puts that domain of research into a broad intellectual context. Of course there is the X-large doll- write a text book, but no effing way am I tackling that jazz. Of course, I was well aware of the conventional wisdom to “never edit a book before tenure” so I set the idea on the back burner and focused on little and medium-sized nesting dolls.
But in May of 2010 Janet Slobodien from Springer sent me an email inquiring if I would be interested in editing a book for the Developments in Primatology series on maternal nutrition. I was kicking it around when two weeks later Julienne invites me to participate in your symposium at the AAPA meeting in MPLS “Eating for two: maternal ecology and nutrition in human and non-human primates.” Hmmmm… The conventional wisdom wasn’t “never CO-EDIT…” So I pitched the idea of editing a book to Julienne. I can still remember how nervous I felt on the phone because I was really hoping she would say “Yes” but expected that she would be smarter than me and say “No.” But she was in, and proposed inviting you to join us since at that time I still didn’t know you. And then, well, the actual work started.
What was the experience like editing this book?
Without question it was a major learning experience. I am very pleased that I did this so early in my career because I think I learned some skills that will serve me very well moving forward. I learned a lot about writing; from evaluating earlier drafts of contributed chapters, to assessing the comments of the many external reviewers, and by always reading through the eyes of the intended audience. While writing my dissertation, the goal of my writing was very much about representing my thoughts on paper. But as an editor, I shifted my perspective to “how can the thoughts be communicated most effectively to the reader.” I loved your earlier post about terrible first drafts and how revising is “killing your darlings” because we are so attached to our words. Cutting them up and throwing some away can be devastating. As an editor, they aren’t my darlings, so I could be more objective about the reader’s perspective, instead of predominantly my own. And now I am working to translate that perspective to my own writing efforts.
And although it may seem minor, I learned how to ask for help when I needed it, offer help when I suspected it was needed, and accept help when it was offered to me. I am so proud to have been part of such an excellent team that we were able to escort a 600 page volume from concept to publication in two years.
What is the main contribution this book makes to anthropology? To evolutionary biology?
This book’s contribution is in showcasing the multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches to studying primate development. Everyone will learn something new reading this book, no matter if you are studying the development of capuchin play behavior in Costa Rica or glucocorticoid receptor density in the hippocampus in infant rhesus. By integrating information from complementary approaches we can build a more comprehensive understanding of primate development. Unfortunately there is sometimes a dearth of cross-talk among anthropologists, psychobiologists, neuroscientists, ethologists, immunologists, microbiologists, and biologists. Here we bring those perspectives together.
How does this book intersect with your own research and pedagogical interests?
Um. I am totes interested in primate development, duh. I am also hoping that this book motivates others to become interested in integrating developmental investigations into their own research programs. I hope that with more minds trying to understand how infants are shaped by the placenta, mother’s milk, and behavioral care, we will have exponential progress in untangling the processes of ontogeny. Beyond informing us about the elegance of the natural world, such research can have major translational potential for human health, longevity, and social relationships.
Why should someone buy this book?
Because they are studying for their qualifying exams. I know I used that excuse to justify the purchase of several ludicrously expensive books.
Seriously though, the hardback copy version of this book is expensive. Part of that is the length of the book- if it was less informative it would be less expensive. However, if you study primate infant development you will unquestionably find it a valuable and up to date resource. Moreover the chapters here present novel and unique syntheses not found elsewhere in the literature. Best of all, if your institution subscribes to the Springer Book Series, you can order a free e-book version or a paperback version in the US for $25. Details can be found here. As we approach the publication date we will compile a list of institutions that have access to the “MyCopy” mechanism.
