New Home

Well, blogspot has treated me well, but I'm moving on to a bigger host. Come check out www.mommiologist.com and let me know what you think!

It's time

I had an unpleasant realization the other day. My friend Kerri Ann came over so I could sign her kids' passport applications, and I was excited to fill out forms. That's it. I need to go back to work. Part of it is that the summer is waning and as someone who spent roughly twenty four years in school, I always feel the urge to sign up for classes and buy school supplies in August. Part of it is also that as Hannah gets more mobile and interesting and sleeps less, I have less time to blog. Part of it is also guilt that I still have not finished THE EXPERIMENT THAT WILL NOT DIE!! But the biggest part is that though I love my little girl, I'm getting bored. I'm sorry Hannah. I love you dearly. But spending most of every day in the house is making me a little bit batty.

The poor girl. During a raucous exploration of the fun of ripping paper, she pulled a page out of a magazine, and then tried to put it back. I explained to her that she couldn't put a page back that has been ripped out, because time is unidirectional, and that entropy increases without an input of energy. Entropy is the force of disorder, much like Hannah. In her book Busy Bee and Friends she got a lecture on how Coleopterans are the most taxonomically diverse group of invertebrates on the planet, and that during the Carboniferous era dragon flies ruled the skies, at least as far as insects are concerned. And finally, I let her know that pears are gritty because they are full of sclerids, a cell type with very thick and jagged cell walls. The worst part? I learned all this so long ago I can't remember if all this is correct or not. Be sure to let me know.

I come by this earnest nerdiness honestly. Some of my earliest memories of conversations with my dad including an explanation of the speed of light and its implications for time travel. He encouraged me from a young age to become a marine biologist, read about biology and physics, and discuss anything nerdy. Because to us, the nerdy things are important.

So here I am now, nine months into a decidedly non-nerdy time. It's been WONDERFUL. Hannah is a bright, extraordinarily happy and delightful little girl, and watching her go from a largely unresponsive infant to a little person is fascinating. The cupboards and closets are organized, the spare room decorated, and I have planted a vegetable and shade garden. I've started this blog, and published the last paper from my PhD, and submitted freelance articles to a few different outlets.

But now, I'm done. My domestic chores are suffering: the lawn is getting long and I haven't made baby food in weeks. Readers, I am BORED.

I worry, of course, about putting Hannah in daycare. Before her birth she was put on numerous waiting lists for day cares and it's a gut-wrenching and nerve-wracking decision to make. But unlike a lot of women I don't worry about how having a working mother will affect her. My mother worked our whole lives, and gave my sister and I an increased independence and drive to have our own careers. I always felt that if you tell your little girl that she can be all she wants to be, then it's also imperative that you live that message yourself - regardless of whether your dream is to be a CEO or a stay-at-home mom.

Kismet intervened in my life, as it so often does, as I was reading the Globe and Mail the other day. There was an article by Leah McLaren on guilt in working mothers. She references a 2009 study looking at outcomes of children of working mothers (Joshi et al. 2009. Combining Child Rearing With Work: Do Maternal Employment Experiences Compromise Child Development? CLS Working Paper 2009/1). In particular the authors were interested in whether the intensity of the mother's work, during the second half of the first year of the child's life, affected the development of children's cognitive ability. In short, working mothers did not have intellectually or emotionally stunted children. They were fine. I don't find it surprising, and I don't think that the mothers I know, working and not, find it surprising either. There are many ways to raise a happy, healthy child, and the happiness of the mother is hugely important.

So it's going to be an interesting week for this new mom: I'm supposed to meet with my old bosses to discuss a return to work, and I also had a job interview for a position in a biotech company. It has felt wonderful, talking science again, even if it took me about 10 minutes to remember the phrase "optimal foraging." My blissful first year as a mom is entering its last quarter, and now I'm starting to have to reconcile the personal and professional sides of me. Things are going to get interesting, but I'm looking forward to a bit more balance. And I think Hannah, who really just wants to play, will be looking forward to a break from the lectures from mom too.

Who's imitating who?

Hannah's turned into a great eater. And before you think that this blog has degenerated into self-satisfied mommydom where I list off her preferred foods and tell you how cute it is when she can't quite get something in her mouth (sweet potato, chicken and avocado, and the self-feeding thing IS hilarious) stick with me. She wasn't always a great eater, in fact she was quite picky until a stampede breakfast of pancakes and yogurt got her going - oh stampede, you provide so much culinary delight! But I also think that a big part of what encouraged her to eat was something my mom teased me about - I open my mouth when I want her to, and I don't even know I do it. My mom does it too, and I'm starting to think it's a universal mom thing. So, of course, I checked google scholar.

There isn't a lot of research specifically on why mothers open their own mouths to get their babies to eat, but let's be honest, the topic doesn't scream Nobel Prize. However, what is fascinating is research showing just how important social cues are to infant development. Most baby books emphasize how emotionally immature infants are - they cannot smile, cannot see their parents' faces clearly, and in fact have no awareness of their own faces or limbs. However, research has shown that infants as young as twelve days are capable of imitating both facial and manual gestures (Meltzoff and Moore, 1977, Science 4312:75). This implies that they have an awareness of others and their own self that was previously thought to have taken months to develop.

Imitation, even in adults, turns out to be more common than we like to think. How many of us have been asked what kind of accent we have by someone with an accent, only to sheepishly realize that we've been unconsciously copying it? Compulsive imitation can occur in stroke patients who have a lesion in their frontal lobes (Lhermitte, F. et al. 1986, Annals of Neurology, 19:326), which suggests that their ability to voluntarily control their imitative behaviour is compromised. However, it was experiments in macaques that showed just how important imitation in is a social species.

In the early 1990s, Giacomo Rizolatti and coworkers were surprised to discover that certain neurons within the brains of macaques activated not only when the monkeys performed a simple task like grasping food, but also when they watched someone else (macaque or human) doing the same task. In other words, perception of an activity resulted in activation of the neurons that would perform that task. The authors termed them mirror neurons. In 1996 a similar phenomenon was observed in humans using PET imaging; when someone grasping an object, subjects showed activation in not only the visual cortex, but in motor areas that would be involved in grasping (Rizolatti and Fabbri-Destro, 2010, Experimental Brain Research, 200:223). This observation revolutionized our understanding of cognition; previously it was thought that the observation of an act required higher order processing in order to be understood. This may still happen for complex tasks, but simple tasks elicit an extreme empathy - the observer mentally imitates the object of her vision.

And in fact mirror neurons may have a lot to do with empathy. When interacting with people, we unconsciously mimic our conversational partner. Children diagnosed with autism, a disorder that includes deficits in empathy, do not mimic others when interacting, and fMRI studies have shown that areas of the brain that become active during observation in normally developing children were underactivated, or silent, in children with autism (Rizolatti and Fabbri-Destro, 2010, Experimental Brain Research, 200:223). In fact, being unable to mimic an expression may impair one's ability to empathize: a study currently under review suggests that when frozen by botox and rendered unable to frown, subjects were impaired in their ability to interpret sentences that described sad situations (Havas et al. 2009).

Do infants mirror the adults around them in the same way? It has been established that infants mimic their parents at an astonishingly early age, but this could simply be reflex. Imitation in infants starts to lessen after about five months, which is when other reflexive behaviours also start to wane. However, infants have been shown to mimic not only when they see an action, but also when they hear a stimulus associated with that action. This suggests that there might be something more complex going on than simple reflexive mimicry (Bertenthal and Longo, 2007, Developmental Science, 10:526).

Despite the tantalizing clues, there remains a great deal of uncertainty in this area. Mirror neurons have not been directly observed in humans in the same manner that they have in monkeys. Though the name is catchy, it's not clear whether there are specific neurons in the brain that perform mirror tasks, or whether this is a more generalized phenomenon. However, it is clear that there's a neural basis to empathy that is more specific and more important than we had previously supposed. The findings that we reflexively try on the emotions of those with whom we communicate suggest that empathy is not simply a nicety but an integral part of how social beings interact. In a bond as strong as that between mother and child, the ties of empathy are crucial, and if it means that mother has to look silly, with phantom bites at an invisible spoon, then so be it.

Busy Week

I haven't had time to post all week - but I will give you a quick update. I am very lucky - this week has been taken up by festivities for weddings for two friends. Alexis and Carey are getting married in Nova Scotia, so we can't go, but I spent the weekend in Jasper drinking too much with Alexis and some other friends. And between the wedding of Yvonne and Tim and my friend Rebecca's ride in support of Cystic Fibrosis research (I told you about Brian's ride to conquer cancer, but Rebecca also rode her bike from Vancouver to Calgary - incredible!) I have been able to see my friends from grad school. Grad school was an ordeal in and of itself, but in those years we all had our innings with breakups, marriages, divorces, babies, sick parents, loss of parents, moving, new jobs, and new jobs again. They're a special group - and not just for the history we share. They're funny. Really funny. All of them. That's a rare thing - people who are truly witty - so I'm grateful.

Should be an interesting weekend!

Human Nature

There have been a couple of articles lately that have given me pause because of their poor interpretation of human nature. I can be a misanthrope with the best of them, and certainly living in the reactionary-right-wing bastion of Canada, at the end of the Bush years and soon after the G20, does nothing to improve my opinion of human kind. But I'm also a mom to a darling little girl, who's going to have the earth I leave her, so the nature of the dominant species on this planet is an important question to me.

In Scientific American, John Horgan discusses the book Mothers and Others by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Our nature is nurture: Are shifts in child-rearing making modern kids mean?). Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is an evolutionary biologist/anthropologist, who really sounds like someone I might like. Dr. Hrdy worked as an anthropologist during the years when women's contributions to science were not readily accepted, and also raised three children. Her book emphasizes a type of child-rearing that allowed her to pursue her career - allocare, or the assistance of non-related members of the troop. Group child rearing differentiates us from the rest of the great apes, who rear their offspring individually.

In his article, John Horgan then goes on to discuss modern human societies. Many of today's children receive most of their care from non-kin, and often times care from the parents is distant, which can result in disorganized attachment. Might this then result in a loss of empathy in our species, if empathy is not selected for? He then cites a recent study showing that empathy in college students has suffered a precipitous decline in the last 30 years.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Sarah Blaffer Hrdy probably didn't say this in her book, because no evolutionary biologist would suggest that any phenotype can be selected against in roughly one or two generations. Not only is 30 years much too short a time frame for the evolutionary loss of any phenotype, but it would require that empathy be strongly selected against. Certainly the misanthrope in me thinks this is the case in modern society, but in reality empathy is required for the most basic of human interaction and communication, so its selection against seems unlikely to me. But it isn't the science of this article that upset me. I wasn't really sure, however, what was bothering me.

Then tonight I reread an old issue of Discover and came across an article by one of my favorite columnists, Bruno Maddox. He shares my love of Ghost Hunters and wrote eloquently on one of Darwin's bigger mistakes. In "The Body Shop" (Discover, May 2010, pg 43) he discusses the rise of the robot, and wonders why people aren't as disturbed by robotics as they used to be. A large body of 20th century literature examined the fine line between the potential advantages and dangers of robotics, and until just recently, we all seemed to be terrified of the thought of robots taking over the earth. Now, as robots adopt human-like faces, vacuum our floors, and take over the battlefield, we seem to have quietly given up our fears of being made obsolete. Why? Maddox suggests that this is because we've really stopped thinking we're any good at all. The basis of our fears of robots was our belief in unique nobility of humans. Maybe, however, in the age of the internet, we suddenly realize that humans are largely stupid. "[Man] enjoys porn and photographs of cats on top of things. He spells definitely with an a, for the most part, and the possessive its with an apostrophe. On questions of great import or questions of scant import, he chooses sides based on what, and whom, choosing that particular side makes him feel like, and he argues passionately for his cause, all the more so after facts emerge to prove him a fool, a liar, and a hypocrite." Perhaps then, our fear of robots has been replaced with a hope that they can be programmed to be the intelligent, rational, even empathic beings that we have failed to be.

And there it is. This particularly Judeo-Christian idea of the fallen angel. That mankind's nature is inherently selfish and irrevocably sundered from our noble origins. This philosophy has coloured western philosophy for centuries; Thomas Hobbes' depiction of life as naturally "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," Garret Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons. I can't underestimate how much this philosophy has coloured the thinking of the west, and we hardly seem to question it. But we should question it, strongly. Because in a world where humans are basically jerks it becomes very difficult to put in the energy to make it better. It makes it easier to care less for our neighbours, and easier to accept injustice.

It would be easy to categorize my objection to this poor view of human nature as a womanly or sentimental instinct to protect my child, and to be perfectly honest, that is part of it. No parent wants their child to grow up in a society that is irredeemably selfish. But the bulk of my objection comes from the fact that this cynical view of humanity is just too easy. It's simple to look at the state of the world and roll your eyes. Cynicism takes no courage and leaves no room for outrage.

The cynic in me doesn't have a hard time accepting that college students of today are less empathetic than they were thirty years ago, but the optimist in me doubts strongly that this is due to some genetic decline. Instead it seems clear the problem stems from a culture that strongly rewards self interest and devalues idealism. This is not the real tragedy, however. The real tragedy is that, like a rapacious economy and lying politicians, we think that this is the natural, immutable progression of our society. There is no scientific or anthropological reason to suggest that humans societies are limited by rapacious self interest, so let's not give into a poor philosophical excuse.

Delicious

Oh, the science gods are smiling on me today. No, I have not finished THE EXPERIMENT THAT WILL NOT DIE, but it's getting there. And no, I have not found a new job. Stop asking. No, it's even better. Someone high up provided me with an opportunity to indulge that smug instinct present in all nerdy kids, that know-it-all sense of superiority and absolute glee in someone else's intellectual misstep that got me to where am I today - the opportunity to say "NO, that's WRONG. You IDIOT."

I signed up for twitter when I started blogging because apparently it's what bloggers do. I log in sporadically and face that "What's happening?" box with a stupid look and inanely enter in something self-indulgently referential to either my blog or Hannah. (Follow me on twitter! I'm the mommiologist and I promise to be interesting from here on!) However, I am actually enjoying my updates from the likes of the Cassini spacecraft, Jane Goodall, Barack Obama, and Stephen Colbert. And today, I got this tweet (is that what the kids are calling it these days?): " NatGeoSociety

#Video: Why do cats always land on all fours? http://on.natgeo.com/cAHSh9 #animals"

Oh National Geographic, you idiot.

We all know that cats land on all fours. Our childhood cat Fluffy was rendered a drooling, nocturnal recluse by a friend of the family's attempt to prove this by launching her off the dining room table. She landed on all fours physically, but maybe not so much emotionally. Other people still seem to think cat-throwing is a viable scientific endeavor, and even manage to get ethics approval for the study that provided the video in the clip.

In 1987, a vet named Dr. Michael Garvey at the Animal Medical Center in New York noticed an interesting trend: as expected, there's a strong relationship between the number of injuries a cat sustains and the number of stories from which it falls, but only up to roughly 6 floors. Cats who fall from higher heights tend to have fewer injuries, which seems strongly counter intuitive. Dr. Garvey explained this phenomenon by saying that this height allows cats time to a) reach terminal velocity and b) right themselves and c) relax. Hitting the ground relaxed, even at terminal velocity, hurts a lot less than hitting it tense, apparently.

I remember, back in the dim days of the last century when I was an undergraduate, discussing this case in a class called Ecological Methods. The professor, a sarcastic, slightly bitter hippy type who probably had a very bad case of the know-it-alls as a child, went through the whole story, then asked: "can anyone see what's wrong with this study?"

Silence.

Finally, a smarty-pants from the back of the class asked: "Did anyone count the dead cats?"

Consider humans falling from a window: regardless of whether the person survives, there will be considerable paperwork. Definitely a record of some sort. However, if your cat falls from a window and you reach it and it's an ex-cat, joined the choir eternal, you aren't going to pay good money to have a vet declare it dead. You will get a shovel. The author of this study, however, took his data from vet clinic admission records, so you can see how a large subset of the data had been missed. Maybe those cats that fell ten stories and bounced off an awning before hitting the ground skewed the results a little.

I thought this story was dead and only good for inducing smug giggles in other scientists, but no! So thank you, National Geographic, thank you.

More Genetic Conflict

I have posted before on my miserable pregnancy and delicately blamed my darling little girl for it. But she's cute, and I like her, so I really can't blame her for anything. Her father though..... Brian's wonderful, an amazing father, and truly supportive. He's also cute too. But I just read an article that suggests that he might have a darker side. You see, it might have been overexpression of his genes in the placenta that led to my crummy pregnancy. It's also possible that underexpression of genes derived from my side were at fault, but let's not blame the victim.

At first, it doesn't seem that the idea that expression of genes in the placenta can depend on which parent they came from would be revolutionary, but if you think about it for a minute, you can see that Mendelian inheritance cannot explain why this should happen. A gene coding for, say, development of an eyeball codes for the development of an eyeball, regardless of whether it came from the father or the mother. Outside of the sex chromosomes, there is nothing in the genome that tells the infant which parent it was derived from. However, you can see how from a Selfish Gene perspective this could be useful - what if you were a male, and decided that the death of the mother wasn't a big deal if you got a healthy baby that carried half your genes? Hopefully, if you were a human male, you'd be thrown in jail and sterilized for such behavior. However, nature is red in tooth and claw and if you're a gene, then such an influence might spread - but only if it was always passed from the male. This requires a way to temporarily modify gene expression, to turn a gene on only if it is derived from the father. A genetic change that is lasting enough for a generation, but not any more. This is done by epigenetic modification of the DNA.

In order to understand why epigenetic inheritance is so weird, and so revolutionary to the field of genetics, we have to go back to the Origin of evolutionary theory - pardon the pun. Before inheritance was completely understood, there were two major competing theories as to how evolution happened. We now understand that genes are the mode of inheritance. We know that they are inherited from our parents, and while smoking or sunburns might result in random mutations, there is no way that we can alter our genome to affect our future generations. This is in contrast to the idea that an individual may acquire characteristics during their lifetime that may be passed on to their offspring. The most famous example of inheritance of acquired characters, or Lamarckian inheritance, is the idea that the giraffe got its long neck by stretching its head to reach leaves. Thus a giraffe that really stretched its neck out would have offspring with long necks as well. This theory, proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, was disproven by August Weismann in the 1880s, when he showed that inheritance is only possible through the gametes (egg and sperm), as opposed to somatic cells (cells everywhere else). Thus any changes to cells within the body cannot be passed on to the germ cells.

This was the understanding of genetic medicine for years. Genetic disorders are possible, but arise and evolve over thousands of generations due to the breeding success and failure of thousands of individuals. However, a seminal series of papers collectively called the Overkalix study showed how experiences in individual's lifetime could result in disease within one or two generations. In the Overkalix parish in remote northern Sweden is a population that has endured repeated sudden famines, and equally sporadic bumper crops, over the last two hundred years. The study showed that if a boy during experienced a period of plenty during his preteen years, his grandson was more likely to die of cardiovascular disease. This goes against everything we know about Mendelian inheritance: the effect is within two generations, and is only passed along males.

This sounds suspiciously like Lamarckian inheritance. In fact, in this case inheritance is mediated not by changes to the genetic code, but changes to the proteins associated with a string of DNA, or by epigenetic changes. The environment can trigger changes to the proteins that fold DNA, or cause chemical tags to be added to the DNA backbone. Either of these DNA modifications can "imprint," or change the expression of certain genes, and in the case of epigenetic inheritance, can alter how genes are expressed in subsequent generations.

In the case of preeclampsia, the disorder is likely caused by imperfect imprinting. Preeclampsia is a disorder that affects 3-7% of pregnancies, and is characterized by an increased blood pressure and protein in the urine. Left untreated, it can develop into HELLP disorder, which stands for Hemolytic anaemia, Elevated Liver enzymes, and Low Platelets, which can cause seizures and death of the mother. Preeclampsia is often inherited maternally, which suggests that the problem comes down the female side, but there are also paternally derived genes that have been implicated. So when it comes down to it, there is no way to determine whether my crappy pregnancy was the fault of Brian's genes or mine. But I am definitely heartened by the fact that if I had to have a disorder, at least it was a genetically interesting one.

Cousins

Cycling

It's been a very busy week and especially busy weekend. This weekend Brian participated in the Ride to Conquer Cancer. I am SO proud of him. Last fall, a coworker at Behr Energy Services was diagnosed with cancer. The company rallied behind her, doing various fund raising activities to raise money to pay for maid services while she underwent treatment. In the spring, company president Todd Wilson suggested creating a team to participate in this weekend's ride; Brian got things organized and four riders (in the picture, from left to right, Cristofor, Brian, Todd and Bruce) signed up and raised over $15,000 for the Alberta Cancer Foundation. This is the second year for this fundraiser and it raised an amazing 7.3 million dollars.

Cancer sucks. The word itself is terrifying, and it seems to attack with feral intensity. I'm a scientist, so when I think of cancer I think of the biochemical process involved in cancer onset. I know that cancer is a failure of the cell's own self-destruction signals; a breakdown of the delicate pact between individual cells who may have an interest in rampant reproduction, and the body, who needs them to work together and agree to shut down when they're told.

But cancer has a personal impact on everyone. In 2005 my beloved dad, who got me interested in science in the first place, was diagnosed with throat cancer. At this point, the science of it meant nothing to me, I was just angry. My dad started treatment at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre in Calgary, and the treatment also sucked. Because tumors are collections of rampantly dividing cells, cancer treatments are targeted to interrupt the biochemistry involved in cell division. This means that the treatment has a high level of collateral damage on healthy cells that happen to be dividing. Cancer treatments are like playing whack-a-mole with a sledgehammer and hoping you don't wreck the machine.

My dad survived. His doctors and nurses were incredible, and I truly believe that he couldn't have gotten better treatment anywhere else.

Research drives advances in cancer survival. Cancer sums up a variety of disorders that result in the breakdown of the cell's self-destruction pathways, leading to rapid cell division. Because the breakdown of this cascade can happen for a myriad of reasons, cancer is complex and pernicious. The public is often frustrated by the lack of progress in cancer research, but that is a result of the truly mind boggling complexity of the disease. The high rates of cancer incidence fuels this frustration; according to the Canadian Cancer Society, 40% of women and 45% of men will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes, and roughly 25% of Canadians will die of cancer. This is complex disease with alarming prevalence.

Clearly more research is needed, and this is one field that has a great deal of support. The $7.3 million raised by this weekend's ride is the most money raised in one event in the Alberta Cancer Society's history, and it will be well spent. The support and dedication of the organizers, volunteers, and riders means a great deal to all patients and survivors. And it means a great deal to me.

Link here to Brian's blog about his ride.

Pot of Gold

I'm working on the EXPERIMENT THAT WILL NOT DIE (it's like The Cat Came Back song - the experiment didn't work, the very next day, no the experiment didn't work, it really is a pisser, no the experiment didn't work, she'll never enjoy mat leave this way......) but in the mean time, I thought I would share a little uplifting photo. We've had some good summer rain storms this week - thunder and lightning and a pouring rain clearing to sunshine - and the plants are happy and so am I. Driving home the other night we saw this:




































A beautiful rainbow! And if you look closely you can see that it ends in our car. It's a sign, and it's true. The treasure is in the car - and we have everything we ever wanted. And no, it's not the Sirius Satellite Radio. Thanks for ruining the moment.

Cranky Friday

The mom tank is down to fumes today and I've noticed a distinct increase in whininess from my darling little girl as well. It made me wonder if there's something about Fridays. I notice my crankiest posts have been written on Fridays and if you ask Brian he will probably agree that most of my plaintive phone calls for him to come home early are on Fridays. As the time of Hannah's mornings seem to be inversely proportional to her age, by the time Friday rolls around I'm usually a bear and am reliant on an unhealthy amount of coffee. Now, I'm a scientist, so I thought it through and the only logical conclusion is that the problem is me - I'm tired after a long week and really looking forward to the hallowed tradition of the Saturday morning sleep in. I say hallowed because it's sacred. SACRED. To everyone in the house but Hannah and Brian. But the dog is on my side.

Take last Friday. It is a testament to Hannah's sweetness that it wasn't until she was seven months that she learned how to really drive me insane. The WHINING. Very uncharacteristic. Can't imagine who she got it from. So she whined all day. It was raining. Stella was on a course of prednisone for her lupus (some time I will tell you about all the obscure ailments that Stella has been victim to - including the $3000 bladder infection - but this time it's doggy lupus) which makes her hungry. She eyed me all day with a feral desperation that said that I was one scold away from being a giant milk bone. The goddamn internet kept cutting out. The internet is my lifeline to other adults - after a couple hours without internet I start to shake and would stage a home invasion on the neighbours if I thought they had wireless. And do you THINK I could LEAVE THE HOUSE just ONCE without forgetting SOMETHING that requires me to run back inside AFTER I've locked the door? And why why WHY does the bottle warmer use STEAM to warm bottles? Don't they know that steam burns more than hot water due to the LATENT HEAT OF EVAPORATION OF WATER FOR FUCK SAKES?? AND WHY DOES MY HOUSE SMELL LIKE ONIONS?!?!? Brian got home at 6:30 and he got a baby thrust into his arms and I ran. RAN. Drove to the sushi place to meet friends, where the host made me wait until my entire party was assembled. And I swear to God if the owner came within ear shot he was going to get it, sushi knife be damned.

Last week we all survived. This week, I preemptively went for a swim on Thursday to work out the cobwebs, so today I was happy as a clam. But Hannah, after her afternoon nap, was not. WHAT THE. OK, so now I'm starting to wonder. This behaviour belies the pattern - if I'm happy, but she's not, then it's HER, NOT ME. I KNEW IT! My poor sweet girl. Is it a tooth? Is it gas? Or is it just Friday?

All right Hannah. Just for you we will get into the car and drive to Mr. Sub for a foot long pizza sub. But I won't enjoy it.

First Beautiful Weekend

It's been a cold, rainy, even slightly snowy, spring. This last weekend was the first spate of really nice weather that we've had, and our little family made the best of it. Good thing - it's raining again.

Leaking out of the Pipeline

There was a really interesting article in the New York Times earlier this week which has been giving me a lot of thought. It deals with that thorny question of why there are so few women in science and engineering faculties. It's a big question for me, as I am tempted to dive through the BP sized hole in my career and leave the scientific pipeline myself.

The pipeline refers to the years of university, graduate school, post doctoral training, and slavish years as early faculty that are required to obtain that holy grail of the scientific endeavour, the tenured position. The leaks are women leaving the pipeline at every stage. For example, in the field of geology in 2003, women made up 42% of BA/BSc recipients, 45% of MSc recipients, 39% of PhDs, 26% of assistant professors, 14% of tenured associate professors and a paltry 8% of full professors (Leaks in the pipeline, Holmes and O'Connel, 2007, Nature 446:346).

I don't think there's any doubt as to the major reason that women leave the profession in droves: the road to a professorial job is long, arduous, pays poorly, involves a great deal of travel, upheaval, and little support. For example, in my field, a postdoc on support from his/her supervisor can expect to make between 30-45k; if you have a fellowship that can improve the situation, but even then most fellowships are two years in length. Add to the difficulty that this is usually after 5-6 years of graduate school, and you are expected to postdoc in another institution, and have roughly 5 years to prove yourself capable of building your own research program, and you can see how the prospect starts to lose its appeal.

In 2005, Larry Summers, the then President of Harvard, gave a speech at the NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce where he famously expounded on the lack of women in upper levels of science. He was widely excoriated for having said that women aren't as good at math and science and men, but in fact that isn't what he said. As well as acknowledging the lifestyle reasons that women leave science, he spoke on research that suggests that while the average intelligence of men and women is equivalent, the distribution of mathematical/scientific intelligence amongst males may be higher. This means that the extremes of the distribution, or the best at science and mathematical reasoning, will be more likely to be male (by the same token, if intelligence is normally distributed, the dumbest will also be male).

Clearly this is a provocative argument. Luckily, it's testable. The authors of the study "Sex differences in the cognitive abilities: a 30 year examination" (Wai et al. Intelligence, article in press) looked at the SAT and ACT scores of seventh graders over 30 years. The use of two separate types of standardized testing helps balance the inherent biases in standardize tests, and the long time scale allows for inferences of cultural influences on test-taking ability. The results showed that while mean intelligence was equivalent between the sexes, males were overrepresented in the highest math and science reasoning scores, and women were overrepresented in the highest verbal reasoning scores.

I haven't ranted about this yet, but I want to emphasize that one study is never enough to firmly determine whether something is true. Standardized tests are notoriously culturally biased, and even by grade seven children are inundated with gender stereotypes that may discourage either gender from performing their best. However, the demonstration of this trend across 30 years is compelling. In fact, in the 80's, the bias towards males in math and science reasoning was much more pronounced; the ratio has dropped, but has leveled at its current value of roughly 3:1 for the last twenty years. The distribution of ability between men and women requires far more study: is this a trend also seen in other countries? At different ages? Does performance on one of these tests correlate with future ability?

More importantly, what does this mean in terms of how few women there are in science? This is where Larry Summers' address and the New York Times article become more nuanced. Both suggest that as well as social factors, inherent ability may play a role. Theoretically, the high powered institutions such as Harvard hire the brightest scientists, probably those individuals who are in the top 0.1% of the distribution. If the distribution of mathematical intelligence is skewed, then these positions can't help but be filled by men.

Well, I don't think that anyone thinks that the situation is that simple, and in Larry Summers' defense, he never said that it was. (Did he deserve to lose his job over what he said? I don't think so. If you read the text of his speech, he clearly says that there are social reasons that contribute to the lack of women in science, and also admitted to being deliberately provocative. Is provocative so bad in a representative of higher learning?) Still, in my experience, the women who leave science were just as bright as those men who stayed in the game. And I also don't think that every scientist, male or female, was necessarily drawn from the brightest of the population.

The truth, from my perspective, is that the pipeline just gets to be too long, and largely runs steeply uphill. Perhaps it's true, as Larry Summers said, that jobs that require complete devotion and ruthless competitiveness tend to be filled by men because they are more willing to give it all. To spend nights and weekends away from young families, and be constantly, mentally devoted to their subject. And maybe because men find it easier to be competitive, driven, aggressive and demanding (isn't that right, Hillary?)

How science got to be such a high powered career I'll never know. It seems ridiculous to be classed as such, especially once you've met a few scientists. Regardless, increased support for women in science can't help but improve their representation. Some input from the verbally talented gender can't but help those Big Bang Theory types.

Just in case you're having a bad day....

Musical Baby

I'm convinced, at seven months, that Hannah is a musical genius. Here is the evidence: 1) when playing her baby piano, I played three tones (high C - G - low C) and she responded by singing the same tones! Only once, true, but still. 2) She has a demanding ear - while singing her to sleep the other night, I tried out a new song. She pulled out her soother, let out a cry, and tried to shove her soother in my mouth. Point taken. 3) My mom insists she has perfect rhythm. Whether Hannah's rhythm is perfect, or my mom's imperfect, I'm not quite sure yet. But I do know that Hannah loves singing (hers, daddy's and mine, but mostly hers), music, and the sing song rhymes of her children's books. This lead me to wonder if musicality is a innate human characteristic? And is it true that playing Mozart for babies (and fetuses in the womb) can increase intelligence?

First of all, let's put to rest the Mozart Effect. I think it was simply a commercial phenomenon to sell CDs and make mothers feel guilty. The original research (Rauscher, Shaw and Ky, 1993, Nature, 365:611) showed that a short exposure to Mozart increased participants' abilities to do spatial tasks. Participants were adults, and were given either muzak, Mozart, or silence to listen to, then given a spatial reasoning task. The tests showed that the participants who listened to Mozart had a temporary increase in spatial IQ. I have to emphasize three things: the effect was temporary, it was on spatial IQ only, and the participants were adults.

Undaunted, in 1997, Don Campbell published "The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit" followed in 2002 by "The Mozart Effect for Children: Awakening Your Child's Mind, Health and Creativity With Music." In these books, Campbell encouraged parents to play specially selected classical music to babies and children to increase their intelligence. The idea gained such popularity that Georgia governor Zell Miller proposed including funds in the state budget that would provide all Georgian children with a recording of classical music. (State representative Homer DeLoach said "I asked about the possibility of including some Charlie Daniels or something like that, but they said that they thought the classical music has a greater positive impact. Having never studied those impacts too much, I guess I'll just have to take their word for that.")

While few would dispute that listening to music can have a powerful effect on mood and relaxation, the supposition that listening to classical music has lasting effects on general intelligence just isn't supported by evidence. However, most mothers would agree that their children respond powerfully to music. In fact, 33 week fetuses are capable of recognizing music as different from background noise, and by 35 weeks slow their movements as if they are paying attention to what they are hearing (Kisilevsky et al. 2004, Developmental Science, 7:550). In a charming experiment, Hepper (1991) showed that 2-4 day old infants showed a decrease in movement and increased alertness when they heard the theme to a television programme their mothers had watched while pregnant (Hepper 1991, Irish Journal of Psychology, 12:95). The way that mothers talk to their infants has a musical quality - sing song, high pitched, and rhythmical - that infants respond to. So if babies are so responsive to music at such a young age, is musicality an innate, rather than cultural, human characteristic?

The science isn't clear on this and I had to wade through a lot of deeply turgid psychological papers to get any answer at all. (Notice that if it's psychology, it's turgid, but if it's biology, I have no problem with it? Talk about biases.) Evolution works on the premise that the trait in question can be inherited and has an adaptive value for the organism. So first of all, is music heritable? Music is important to all cultures around the world. This would suggest that it is more than simply a cultural phenomenon, because if it were, you would expect that there would be a few cultures that don't have music at all. So then if we accept that music is heritable, is it a trait that gives adaptive value? This question is a lot more difficult.

Long recognized by the designers of IQ tests, people come with different types of intelligence including linguistic, spatial, physical, emotional and general. I'm paraphrasing, I think I once read that there were as many as 12. It has been hypothesized that part of the evolution from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens involved an integration of these intelligences. In other words, what is characteristic of humans is a certain flexibility of the mind, making representation, inference, even poetry possible. It may be that because music involves aspects of language, movement, and emotion, that it helps the developing brain integrate these different arenas of intelligence. However, the lack of experimental evidence showing that music helps general intelligence makes that a harder argument to swallow. Alternatively, music may be a byproduct of the integration that happens naturally anyway (Cross, 1999. Is Music the Most Important Thing We Ever Did? Music, Development and Evolution. In: Music, Mind and Science, Ed: Suk Won Yi).

Predictably, I would like to run an experiment and re-evolve humans to determine which is true - but given a lack of time, employment and common ancestor, that's just not possible. So instead, I will keep singing to my darling little girl and imagine our ape-like ancestors, singing around a campfire, slowly getting smarter.

Running and Beer

It's been ONE OF THOSE WEEKS. One of those weeks where I take care of my darling little girl all day, then put her to bed, then drive 30 minutes to my old lab to finish up THE EXPERIMENT THAT WILL NOT DIE. (Did I finish it? No. Do I want to talk about it? No.) Then I get home and my darling little girl decides that sleeping even for 5 hours straight is for CHUMPS and she will wake up multiple times tonight, thank you. The kind of week where my parents flew to Palm Springs and I volunteered to watch their puppy with bladder control issues, Stanley. And my dog, Stella, goes on a hunger strike. (Given their names, it's not a surprise that he's a bully. But I really wonder if this is what Tennessee Williams had in mind.)

It was the kind of week that by the time Thursday rolled around, I really dawdled getting ready to go to the lab. Then I looked out the window, and saw that it was snowing. SNOWING. IN THE LAST WEEK OF MAY. That's when I had what I like to call a "fuck this" moment, got a beer, and sat down to enjoy the evening.

Of course, that night Hannah did not want to sleep and the next morning Stanley wanted to be up early, so by Friday noon the cranky factor was on high. Therefore I decided to meet my friend Jaime at the mall for a coffee and maybe to yell at some Telus employees. I treated myself to a nice coffee, wandered through the bookstore, and put my hand casually on the stroller handle, where I felt something weird.

Before I go on I should explain that our house is small and full of baby stuff at the moment. Also, Brian is developing our basement so there is not a lot of room for storage. I have become uncharacteristically frustrated with the clutter so the stroller has been spending a few evenings outside, on the deck. In fact it had been outside all night before. You might see where this is going.

Back to my idyllic afternoon in the bookstore. I put my hand on the handlebar of the stroller and felt something weird. I looked down, and IT WAS A SPIDER!! Okay, if you know me, you know that I. Do. Not. Like. Bugs. However, they seem to like me. When I was in Michigan it was only when my roommate was away that the centipedes came out to drink from my apple juice. So when I saw this spider did I jump into action to save my infant daughter? No. Sadly, I swore. A lot. And colourfully. And then - and this is the worst part - got a stranger to flick the spider off my stroller.

New motherhood low. Hannah thought it was hilarious. The only thing to do in such a situation - a week of frustration, dog pee and finally humiliation in the mall, is continue shopping, then go home, go for a run, and start drinking beer. Hope Hannah likes formula tonight.

Late Night - I'm Too Old For This

There was a documentary on PBS the other night about grad students at Columbia University doing the PhD program. They were doing x-ray crystallography, which even among molecular biologists borders on voodoo, and the program did a wonderful job of conveying the difficulty, frustration, and determination that science requires. In x-ray crystallography, proteins are crystallized, then x-rayed to determine their shape. I think we all assumed that once the genome was cracked that all of biology would be evident from there. Unfortunately, not only is sequence information a lot more complicated than we thought, but the sequence of a protein tells you little about how it works. Protein seqence is very much like beads on a string; imagine that the beads are magnetic and spontaneously clump up into a complicated three dimensional shape. That's what a protein does soon after its assembled; and it's this shape that determines how works.

So, imagine now that you are a young scientist, wet behind the ears, stars in your eyes, and you decide that your project will be to determine the three dimensional shape of ONE protein. That will be your life for 5-6 (7?) years. This requires isolating the protein (not necessarily easy), crystallizing it (voodoo - any number of conditions can create a viable crystal, but it rarely works the same for even related proteins), and then measuring the x-ray diffraction of this crystal using the world's largest microscope, a synchotron. THEN, IF, after years of trying, you get good crystals, you get to sit in front of your computer wearing 3-D glasses using complicated computer programs (more voodoo) to determine what the structure is. Did I mention that molecular biologists are among the most superstitious of biologists? That it is not unusual to find shrines to the gods of PCR in labs? X-ray crystallography makes PCR look like a three year old pulling a stuffed rabbit from a hat. It's the David Blaine of molecular biology.

THE POINT of all this is that people actually manage to make it through grad school doing this. In the documentary the one student of the lab who solved the problem (and subsequently published in the journal Science, maybe the second most important journal in science, depending on with whom you're arguing) succintly summed up what drove him. Obsession. You - just - can't - let - it - go.

So now imagine me, at a quarter after 10, sitting in my old lab. I'm thinking that I am definitely too old for this shit. I'm exhausted and fighting a cold, and darling Brian and Hannah are sleeping at home. I could have spent the evening planting vegetables or doing any number of homebody activities that I am shocked to discover I like doing (making cushions? Refinishing furniture? Mowing the lawn even?) I'm not even getting paid to be here. The crazy thing is that I have experiments that I didn't finish before Hannah was born, they are SO close to being done, and I - just - can't - let - it - go.

Intralocus conflict in evolvability of parenting traits - it's way more catchy than "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"

Oh, I mention gender differences in parenting and everyone gets their panties in a bunch. Cries like women. Bangs their chests. Clearly there are a lot of weighty preconceptions that come to the fore when we talk about the differences in parenting between men and women. The difference between men and women is the trite fuel of bad comedy and self help books (he's just not that into you) but it's hard to deny that there are innate differences. Well, what's innate and what's learned is a big question. Nature versus nurture, that old chestnut.

Parental investment varies a lot in the animal world. From fish that lay eggs and swim away, to seahorses in which the male invests a lot of time and care, harem-maintaining mammals, and monogamous birds. Again, from an evolutionary perspective, a lot of it boils down to the only reliable difference between males and females, in plants, animals, and insects (notably not always fungi - there can be hundreds of mating types in fungi, but I digress). Females produce larger gametes - the egg. That's it. Only difference. But from that, so much follows. Males therefore have an easier time producing gametes, hence produce, and spread, more gametes than females. Females invest more from the very start, so automatically have more reason to continue investing in this one egg. From this initial imbalance, there is a selective pressure for males to invest less, and females to invest more. But let's not take this to mean that males have it easy: even in harem maintaining species, males have to invest a great deal in fighting, attracting, and guarding females. Yet it still remains a truism biologically and in human societies: males benefit from spreading their seed far and wide and females benefit from tying them down to take care of their offspring. Bring home the bacon. Thus males are cast as rogues and women as the ball and chain.

CLEARLY this doesn't explain everything, because if life were that simple then the animal kingdom (and Calgary) would be full of harems. I was MOST disappointed, as I did research for this post, that a great model system for investigating parental investment is burying beetles. That's right. Beetles that burrow into a carcass to lay their eggs. Who knew that carrion-eating bottom feeding insects were instructive to everyone, not just Wall Street executives? Intellectually, burying beetles are quite interesting because they're the only non-social insect in which both the males and females invest care in their young. But in reality they're disgusting, their offspring are maggots, and they live in rotting dead animals. And try googling "sex determination in burying beetles" and finding anything to read that does not contain pictures. And if you know me, you know I'm TERRIFIED of bugs. I'm ashamed to admit that I have invited people over (begged?) for the sole purpose of killing a silverfish in the bathroom. Anyway, I did manage to learn, before shuddering, turning off the computer and grabbing a beer, that male and female burying beetles both care for their offspring by regurgitating rotten food and spreading the carcass with anal secretions to keep it fresh enough for the maggots to eat. It's okay, I'll wait. Go get a beer. But here's where it gets interesting. If you take one or the other partner away, the remaining parent is equally capable of performing these tasks and the offspring are fine.

So are the parents in this case completely interchangeable? Truly equally helping each other out in a completely cooperative manner? Evolution would suggest that this wouldn't be a stable situation. And sure enough, the females to tend to specialize in direct care more when both parents are present. So the authors of a particular study (Walling et al. 2008. The quantitative genetics of sex differences in parenting. PNAS, 105:47. Spoiler alert: there are pictures.) investigated whether this situation would be stable. Say if perhaps the situation changed and the species were forced to evolve such that either males or females became the predominant caregiver. This is a new and interesting type of question: basically the authors were curious as to how evolvable these traits were. And surprisingly, male direct care was less evolvable than female direct care. In other words, lack of direct investment by males wasn't just the evolutionarily smarter thing to do, it was the only option available genetically. If selection increased for male direct care, there wasn't a lot that would change in the species, because the gene for direct care in males was incapable of increasing its influence. The reason for this is the title of this post - intralocus conflict. It's complicated, and not that interesting. The take home message is that some solutions aren't necessarily the smartest evolutionary strategy: they might just be the most convenient for your genetics.

As evolutionary biologists we spend a lot of time coming up with explanations for why things are the way they are that credit selection for everything. It's nice to be reminded every now and then that selection doesn't determine everything. Thus no one gets to use "I'm evolutionarily inclined to spread my gametes" as an excuse for infidelity. And the whole question of evolvability adds another layer to the old question of nature vs. nurture. It asks us: just how written in stone is the "nature" portion of ourselves?

MEN

At the risk of sounding trite, I really have to talk about how men aren't necessarily natural mothers. I mean, some are great. Well, all are great once they get a bit of practice in and stop being so afraid of the baby. And having said that, I needed a bit of practice and thought that I broke Hannah when she was a day old. (Her shoulders made a clicking noise! I thought I broke one!) But let's be honest, sometimes watching dad change a poopy diaper is pure comedy.

The topic came up when I was chatting with some friends. A good friend of mine was waiting anxiously to find out if her IVF treatment had worked, so was relaxing at home watching Baby Story. (Interesting aside to pregnant women out there - DON'T WATCH BABY STORY!!! When I was pregnant a male friend of mine asked if I watched it, so I tried, and in this particular episode a WOMAN GAVE BIRTH TO TWINS IN HER KITCHEN!!! SHE DIDN'T EVEN HAVE TIME TO GET HER PANTS DOWN! I threw up and stayed awake for three days.)

But I digress. In the episode that my friend was watching, the woman opted to have a water birth. Was there ever a nouveau hippie birthing innovation that teed up more one liners? I don't think so. I'm going to change their names for privacy, so let's call them Jenny and Ted.

Ted: Won't the baby drown?

Jenny: No, it's still attached to the umbilical cord.

Ted: Like baby scuba?

Oh, Ted. This is the same man who days earlier had asked how old babies are when they open their eyes. ("They're not kittens, Ted!!!") And who recently confidently asserted that babies can't feel the difference between hot and cold.

I don't mean to pick on Ted. He's not alone. When I first told a colleague that I was pregnant, it didn't immediately dawn on him that this meant that I would not be able to spend half the year in the states anymore. When I broke the news, he said "Can't you just put it in a carboard box with some lettuce?" Although, having said that, if lettuce keeps her occupied for more than five minutes, it might not be such a bad idea.

Even Brian, who has had seven, count them, SEVEN nieces and nephews and is a natural father, does things that drive me mental. QUIT LEAVING HER UNSUPERVISED ON THE COUCH! He's a lot more physical with Hannah than I am. He gives her the airplane rides, tickles, and pretend air tosses that terrify me. He'll pick her up by the sleeper with his teeth. And you know what, SHE LOVES IT. Is DELIGHTED! Boys naturally express their affection with roughhousing more than girls - ask my sister - her three year old Harrison just cracked the cartilege in her ribs by jumping on her for a cuddle. So maybe if they're not natural mothers, they're natural something else. So even if it means answering weird questions, you gotta let them do their thing.

Mother's Day

It's late, and tomorrow is Mother's Day. My first Mother's Day as a mother. I'm a complete hypocrite when I tell you I'm excited; my family didn't celebrate the Hallmark Holidays, and we were instilled with a healthy disregard for marketing. However, to quote a friend, motherhood has made me maudlin, and I'm going to enjoy this milestone.

I was one of those women who was convinced that motherhood would be a dreamy time of watching my body do its natural, beautiful thing. In actuality, it was 9 months of nausea, swollen feet and carpal tunnel syndrome. If there was a possible weird pregnancy symptom, I had it (except for hemorrhoids, I hasten to add). I ate whole jars of pickles, a couple small packages of mustard, threw up at a conference, and lived off of apples. I got up in the middle of the night every night for a bowl of cereal, the better to avoid early morning nausea. Turns out that pregnancy was not a magical, lovely time. It was disgusting.

So in the spirit of balloon popping, I thought I would discuss the fascinating world of mother-child genetic conflict. Common pregnancy complications and side effects can be considered from an evolutionary perspective; there is evidence that gestational diabetes and preeclampsia can be the result of genetic conflict between mother and fetus.

We usually consider pregnancy and childbirth to be a cooperative endeavor between mother and child. However, as was elegantly pointed out in Richard Dawkins' seminal work the Selfish Gene, the picture is much different if you consider human procreation from the point of view of the gene. Genes are the primary vehicles of inheritance, and the only thing that matters from a gene's perspective is propagation into the next generation. Both the mother and child have a genetic interest in the survival of the child: the mother shares 1/2 of her genome with her, therefore has a strong stake in her survival. However, the mother also has the opportunity of making more offspring, so the investment in current offspring has to be balanced against the potential for investing in future offspring. The fetus has some interest in the survival of siblings, as she shares 1/2 of her genome with them, but has a 100% stake in the survival of her own genes. Thus, it can be hypothesized that the child might be interested in acquiring more of the mother's resources than the mother is interested in giving.

So the baby wants as much food as possible, and the mother would like to not have to nap in the car after she parks at work each morning. I stumbled upon an older paper that reviews some of the evidence for this sort of conflict: Genetic Conflicts in Human Pregnancy (1993, Haig, Quarterly Review of Biology, 68:495). At the beginning of pregnancy, fetal tissue embeds in the maternal endometrium and alters the tiny blood vessels it contacts to make them more porous and less able to constrict. This means that the mother is no longer able to regulate blood flow to this area and thus is unable to restrict nutrient uptake by the hungry baby. To add insult to injury, the fetus is now able to release hormones directly into the mother's blood stream such as human placental lactogen (hPL). It acts to increase the mother's resistance to insulin, thus increasing blood concentrations of glucose. If the mother is not able to release enough extra insulin to combat this, then gestational diabetes results. Did I have this? CHECK! It really meant that I had to be annoyed by ignorant dietitions (Her: Maybe you should get up two hours after your middle of the night cereal to check your blood sugar. Me: Maybe you should go fuck yourself.) It is also hypothesized that the fetus can manipulate the mother's blood pressure to increase vascular flow to the baby, resulting in preeclampsia. Again, CHECK!

Even nausea, which strikes approximately 2/3 of women, may have an evolutionary advantage. Morning sickness is prevalent in cultures around the world, and commonly involves aversion to meat, poultry and dairy products (especially HAM and the smell of skin care products from Bath and Bodyworks). Women who experience morning sickness, especially vomiting, are significantly less likely to miscarry, and vomiting peaks during the weeks where the fetus is most vulnerable to exposure to weird toxins that may be a result of food poisoning. Interestingly, morning sickness is not commonly found in parts of the world where meat consumption is much lower. All this suggests that morning sickness is an evolutionary adaptation to protect the fetus from food borne pathogens, especially those in meat (Flaxman and Sherman, 2000, Morning Sickness: A Mechanism for Protecting Mother and Embryo. Quarterly Review of Biology, 75:113).

After nine months of nausea, vomiting, diabetes and preeclampsia, I then delivered the most beautiful baby girl in the world who then goes and looks more like her dad than me. That leads to another interesting evolutionary question: is there a selective advantage for babies to look more like their fathers than their mothers? The identity of the mother is not in question, however, the father's continued support of mother and child is a lot more likely if the father is certain that the child is his. BUT - what if approximately 20-30% of babies are actually fathered by the non-resident male? This percentage is largely true for most human cultures, and also most monogamous birds. If this is the case, might there also be a selective disadvantage to looking like your father, if your father is not the one who's currently bringing home the bacon? (Daly and Wilson, Selfish Genes and Family Relations. In: Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think. Eds, Grafen and Rifley.) Stew on that one for a while.

Was all that nausea and time in the doctor's office worth it? No question. I miss my little darling if I'm away from her for even a few hours and 1/2 of my genome is especially happy. And am I celebrating tomorrow? Damn right I'm celebrating tomorrow. I earned it.

THE RULES

1. No come ons while chewing food.
2. Only the driver can choose Sirius radio stations.
3. Pasta bowls, soup bowls and large glasses all have their own spots in the dishwasher.
4. Rules can be made up at any time.
5. When someone else is in the room, the laptop goes down.
6. The person using the laptop should not yell at the awkward keyboard.
7. No chewing gum in the car.
8. No chewing gum unless there's enough for the other person.
9. No come ons while chewing gum.
10. Only the passenger can choose Sirius radio stations.
11. No animated movies for falling asleep movies.
12. No unseen movies for falling asleep movies.
13. No more Matrix for falling asleep movies.
14. No emotional shopping.
15. No criticism for emotional shopping.
16. Make more than enough coffee.
17. Only fold your own laundry. Don't try to fold Brian's.
18. Laundry shall only be left in the machine for one day.
19. Every load of laundry for every person has a prescribed detergent/cycle/fabric softener.
20. No opening clean dishwasher without putting dishes away.
21. No Newfie jokes, sexist jokes, or jokes about the Pope.
22. Extra points for the most offensive joke.
23. No getting the dog excited about a walk with the intention of making the other person take the dog for a walk.
24. Please check separate list for rules on loading the dishwasher.
25. Every item has a place. It's just that sometimes, that place is stupid, and needs to be changed.
26. No opinions on placement of diapers is allowed unless you are the primary diaper changer.
27. No talking on the phone in the same room as someone who is watching television.
28. Turn off the television if the other person gets involved in an important phone call.
29. Turn off the television if you want to talk.
30. Turn off the television if you are not watching it.
31. Turn off the television if you can't agree on a show.
32. Turn off the television.
33. Turn on the television if Hannah is fussy.
34. No Disney movies for Hannah after the big fish in the beginning of Finding Nemo made her cry.
35. No playing of Diana Krall while Carla is in the house.
36. No making fun of Diana Krall's narcoleptic singing (she's so relaxing. Makes you just wanna get up and stretch.)
37. Take turns on wii tennis.
38. Person holding Hannah during wii tennis has a Hannah-cap, therefore, Hannah holding duties shall be shared during wii tennis.
39. No Boneyard on Sirius Satellite radio, and no Left of Center.
40. Person who made elaborate dinner is exempt from dishes duty, but not from keeping dish-doer company.
41. Person who made elaborate dinner should clean as they go.
42. Not every large dish needs to sit overnight to "soak."
43. Dice rolled on the floor during Yahtzee can be played as they landed, or rolled again.
43. No one can roll dice on floor during Yahtzee to take advantage of rule 44.
45. Person who encourages Hannah or Stella to make a mess must clean it up.
46. Stella gets first dibs on crusts.
47. Stella is not allowed on furniture, unless she asks to come up.
48. Don't make Stella come up on furniture for cuddles.
49. Rules are subject to change, challenge, ridicule and disregard.
50. No more making up new rules.

Maybe this work thing isn't so bad......

It's been a rough week for the science/mom interface. I've passed the six month mark, which I had decided while pregnant was when I thought I would definitely be ready to go back to work. I thought, ok, I can probably stand to stay home every day for six months! No more!

Turns out, I'm enjoying this dream state of new motherhood. The rhythm of Hannah's naps and meal times, hearing all her cute noises, and selfishly making sure I'm her most favorite person in the world. I'm enjoying having time to explore creative projects that I never could have before - the elaborate meals (succotash!), the interior decorating projects (the guest room!), and not least of which, this blog.

Science is a bitch of a mistress. She's fickle, mean, and likes to tease. She gives you delightful ideas, promising pilot experiments, then power failures for the big experiments. She gives you uninterpretable data, then when you finally do submit papers for publication, she gives you dick head reviewers, political decision making and slow deadlines. And this is if you manage to have a position from which you can enjoy these aspects of the job. As a postdoc, I am constantly worrying about new sources of funding and about whether I will have a job. And if I do have a job, it's borderline as to whether my position will pay enough to justify the expenditure on day care. AND, if I reach the holy grail of a faculty post, then I just get to start worrying about grants and keeping all my students, postdocs and technicians employed.

So why, why do I do this to myself? I'm not exaggerating to say that every six months or so I burst into tears and apply for crap jobs in the oil and gas industry. I remain a scientist because like a rat in a cage, I am addicted to the irregular payoff. I remember my PhD supervisor telling me that if you train a rat to hit a lever, and it gives him a reward every time, then the rat will get bored and stop hitting it. If, however, the rat gets rewards at unpredictable intervals, the rat gets addicted. It may be the basis of gambling behaviour. And is also the reason that we remain scientists.

Last week was a typical scientific rollercoaster. On Monday I learned that my favorite prof at the UofC does not have the money to hire me as a postdoc right now, so I remain unemployed. On Thursday, I learned that a paper I submitted a month after Hannah was born was accepted to BMC Systems Biology. This experiment was my favorite from my PhD and I was pretty proud that I managed to get it through the pipeline during my maternity leave. AND THEN, I got an email from my other favorite prof at the UofC asking me to meet later this week. Is there a possibility of work there? I don't know. Do I want it? I also don't know.

Meanwhile, an article I submitted to the blog carnival All Things Eco was accepted (do they accept them all? I can't help but wonder!!!) and there are some interesting articles in this issue: http://focusorganic.com/all-things-eco-blog-carnival-volume-ninety-nine/

So, whether I return to science, like a beaten wife, convinced that this time it will be different, or indulge in my fantasy of being a writer or interior designer with no training or track record is an open question! I will keep you posted.

Ineffable

Tomorrow Hannah turns six months old. This afternoon after a big meal, she fell right asleep, completely askew, in my lap. I have never seen such complete trust, vulnerability, quiet and comfort. It's hard to believe that six months is the complete tally of her existence; that a few short months ago she was a tiny, wailing, purple thing; it's like she's been a part of our lives forever. All my training in observation, measurement, and my attempts to describe my baby girl came up completely against this perfect, quiet, moment. Both of us, pretzled up on the couch.

Babbling

Like I said earlier, Hannah has been making a wide array of fascinating sounds. Luckily, the World’s Most Annoying Sound only lasted a day. Her babbles are mesmerizing, and the consonant sounds are getting clearer. Do they have meaning? The other night, as we were hanging out in her room Brian said to her “dadadadada.” She smiled and said back “dadadadadadada.” They had this proto-conversation at least half a dozen times. It brought tears to my eyes it was so sweet, and scientific skepticism be damned, I’m convinced it was her first truly vocal communication with us. And the next had better be “mamamamamamama.”

Turns out that babbling is not just meaningless vocalizations the province of newscasters, tour leaders, and lonely old women at the fabric store. Early babblings are universal in babies around the world, regardless of culture, or even whether the baby is deaf. Deaf children go through a gesturing phase that is just like vocal babblings in hearing babies. In fact, even songbird chicks also go through a babbling phase before becoming proficient singers. The extent to which this babbling phase is important in developing language was the subject of a 2002 paper in Science – “Left hemisphere cerebral specialization for babies while babbling” (Holowka and Petitto, 297: 1515). The take home message is simple: when babies babble, the right side of their mouths open more, when they smile, the left side opens more, and the mouth stays symmetrical when they are making non-language related sounds. In fact, we all speak like Jean Chretien to a certain extent, but as adults our brains have learned to make faces talking to us look symmetrical. Don’t believe me? Go look in a mirror, take a hand mirror to double your reflection like the hairdresser does, and talk. You might see it.

This reflects the fact that the left hemisphere is where language is processed. Does this mean that as humans we are hardwired for language? The extent to which language development is nature versus nurture is a huge argument that is still ongoing, but there are a couple other compelling reasons to think that language has a strong nature component. There is a genetic component to speech that is partly controlled by the gene FOXP2. The gene itself is ancient, with versions in mammals, birds, even insects. In songbirds, its expression in the brain coincides with the period of greatest song learning. The human version of the protein contains two amino acid differences from that of chimpanzees, our closest relative. Given that the gene is so highly conserved – or so similar – between species, the adoption of two amino acid differences during the evolution of humans from our ape ancestors suggests that these differences imparted a strong evolutionary advantage. Along with physiological changes in the larynx to make complex vocalization possible, changes in FOXP2 may be what make language possible.

So maybe Hannah, before my eyes, is showing me the most unique aspect of her emerging humanity, how she’s learning language.

On the left, my darling girl is smiling because Canada scored during the Olympic Gold Medal hockey game, and you can see that her mouth is slightly more open on the left side. On the right, my darling girl's wail is clearly saying take this stupid hat off me, and the larger opening on the right side of her face indicates to me that she really wishes she had the words to tell me how she really felt.

She some chatty

It finally happened. My darling little girl has discovered the world's most annoying noise. She has gone from making adorable baby chatter to something like this. (And kudos to whoever looped that.) It's not an unhappy noise, it's a constant, thinking about-the-world and enjoying-her-vocal-chords kinda noise. It gives me sympathy for Brian and all my old roommates who have had to listen to me sing while I cook.


Having said that, a child learning to talk may be the most adorable thing in the world. My niece, Cailin, wins for the cutest baby stutter, when at something like 14 months would say "wah - wah - water?" everytime she saw it. The mispronunciations come next - her three year old little brother Harrison has some real doozies, such as "hopsicle" (hospital) "ballila" (vanilla) and "pink dink" (picnic). I very much enjoyed getting him to say fox for a while - he couldn't say X, it came out as a K sound. New parents and especially friends of new parents delight in teaching kids to say borderline things. That can quickly backfire - the husband of my friend Kerri Ann, Tim, taught his 2 year old son Carter to call a friend jack ass. Unfortunately, when Kerri Ann, Tim and Carter and Brian and I spent Christmas dinner at the house of said friend, Carter spent most of Christmas dinner yelling jack ass! jack ass! at the dinner table.

I hesitate to call these kiddy-isms, it's so treacly, how about infanphonics? Toddlese? Anyway, some of these have entered the common parlance around my house. Quite often, they shorten conversations quite nicely. "Doing?" "I DO-ing" (after Brian's nephew Declan). I don't say "that's all right, leave it to me," I say "do it SELF." Another Cailinism.

Now Cailin just keeps upping the ante on adorable things to say. She is now 5 going on 24, has an enviable fashion sense, and runs a tight ship where she and her brother are concerned. Since the day she could finally string together words, she has been apt to utter pure poetry. "Mom, I need a new nose. This one is leaking." When she was three she was dismayed to be told that she couldn't play in the playground until summer. Days later, as she was looking intently out the window, my sister asked her what she was doing. She was searching for summer. And once, when my sister was talking to her on the phone, she suddenly said "I have to go mom. I don't have a job so I have to take the kids to the casino."

We have no idea where she gets these. Her weird comments are timely and incredibly astute about the world. The latest is the best. My sister had put out a plate of cheese for guests which included applewood smoked cheddar. Cailin declared that she didn't like it. "It's too smoky. It's too...... San Franciso-y."

NO idea where that came from, and even under some pretty determined questioning Cailin wouldn't break. I love it though. San Francisco-y. Like slightly pretentious in a progressive sort of way. Like too nouveau cuisine. Like too foggy and indistinct. I have no idea. But I'm keeping it. That phrase has a whole world of possibilities.

Earth Day

Happy Earth Day! At the risk of ruining this blog with sincere feeling, I do have to say that it’s hard to underestimate the impact that having Hannah has had on the way I see the world. In school we were always encouraged to think about generations past our own (I went to cool schools) but having a child makes it real in a whole new way. So, to dispel my SUV guilt (it’s killing me) I am going to devote this post to some good green resources for kids, specifically around Calgary.

I really think that the best thing you can do for the environment is cloth diapers. I’m lazy, and don’t like to do laundry, and am not exactly what you would call a natural home maker (I just set off the smoke detector baking muffins from a mix) so I opted for a diaper service. I was VERY pleasantly surprised to find that a diaper service is not that much more expensive than buying disposables. I went with Happy Nappy, which has franchises in whole bunch of cities in Canada. They drop off as many diapers as I need and pick up the dirties once a week. I even change her diapers out of the home, and just have a special bag to bring home dirties. I am not kidding – they are no less convenient than disposables! There is the argument that the energy and chemicals that go into cleaning them makes them less than perfect, but this hardly as big a concern as using approximately 5000-7000 disposable diapers per child. If you are more organized than me, you can buy your own and launder them. My darling friend Jaime with the one year old twins does her own diapers, and finds it really convenient and easy. She calculated that with twins cloth diapers were cheaper than disposables, and the right brand can even have resale value. The ones she got were from Babes in Arms, a cute store off Elbow Drive and Glenmore Trail in Calgary, that seems to be expanding its repertoire of environmentally friendly products.

As for baby products, I am just starting to experiment with the environmentally friendly brands. My friend Kerri Ann is a rep for Only Green products, and so far I’m pretty impressed with their selection. They also sell environmentally friendly cosmetics, clothes and household cleaners. I have just bought baby soap, shampoo and cream – I will let you know how they work out. My concern is persistent organic chemicals and as much as possible I would like to minimize Hannah’s exposure! Along these lines are BPA free bottles. BPA (bisphenol A) is a chemical that was used to temper plastic products. BPA mimics estrogen in the body, and thus has been implicated in impairing brain development and sexual development, and contributing to heart disease, diabetes and cancer. In 2008, Health Canada proposed classifying BPA as toxic and subsequently many retailers pulled BPA-containing baby bottles, food containers and sippy cups. In my own searches I have not found any baby bottles commercially available that do NOT say that they are BPA-free, thus it is not hard to get safer bottles. It might be worth replacing any old ones that you might have.

Cleaning products are a big one, and I have very strong opinions on this. MOST OF THE CLEANING YOU NEED TO DO ONLY REQUIRES SOAP AND WATER. THAT’S IT. First of all, soap is naturally antibacterial, and soaps marketed as antibacterial are no more effective at killing bacteria than regular soap. Also, a certain amount of bacterial challenge is beneficial. You will NEVER be able to eliminate your exposure to bacteria, given that the human intestinal tract contains 10x more bacterial cells than cells in your body, and you would not want to. There is some evidence that an overly-sanitized existence has contributed to the rise of autoimmune diseases, including asthma, in first world countries. Vinegar, baking soda and borax are all excellent natural cleaners. I do buy household cleaners but I mostly use environmentally friendly ones. The best household cleaners that I have ever found are enzyme based, but I have a hard time finding them. If I were ever to rant about parenting, and parenting of the few areas I try to avoid ranting about, I would encourage people not to try to raise their kids in an antibacterial bubble. It’s impossible, and you are essentially replacing bacterial challenge with chemical challenge. At least humans have evolved some mechanisms for dealing with bacterial challenge. Which is not to say that you should let your baby gum raw chicken, I’m just arguing for some common sense and relaxing of the antibacterial hysteria. For laundry, I recommend Nellie’s laundry detergent and drier balls. The detergent is hypoallergenic and mostly soda, from what I can tell, and made in Canada. It’s available at Calgary’s Farmers Market.

SPEAKING of the Farmers Market, I sadly parted with more money than I’d like to admit buying produce there under the assumption that because it’s sold at the Farmers Market, it must be local and organic. Not everything there is. Most of the produce is local, but not all, but luckily it is ALL labelled well. Be aware too that Hutterite produce, though definitely local, is not always organic. I’ve decided to make my own baby food and so far I have found it ridiculously easy. Essentially I steam whatever fruit/vegetable I’m interested in, puree, and freeze in ice cube trays. Chicken can be poached and treated the same way. I have bought baby cereals which are fortified in iron, and found that Superstore sells a good selection of organic baby cereals that are reasonably priced.

Furniture and room furnishings are difficult. Used or repurposed furniture is always a great idea that really reduces one’s environmental footprint. I have not found a good used furniture store in Calgary, and would love to know if there is one. Kijiji is always a great option and some children’s consignment stores sell furniture. If you do buy new, know that most furniture contains a great deal of chemicals that are volatile and not necessarily good to be exposed to, including formaldehyde. Ikea’s furniture is apparently sourced from farmed trees and its pressed fibre board is formaldehyde free. The cribs can be converted to baby beds so will have a longer life in your home, and they are reasonably priced. In looking for a VOC-free paint for Hannah’s room I was surprised to learn at Home Depot that their VOC-free base is only suitable for very light colours. Instead I went to Benjamin Moore and bought their VOC-free paint, which can be a base for any colour you like (including colours chosen at Home Depot – ha ha ha). It was about twice the price of a gallon of paint (around $60) but one room only required one gallon.

Finally, toys. It’s amazing how after six months I have already reached my breaking point with kids’ toys. They are expensive, ridiculously over packaged, and I have yet to meet a kid who isn’t showered in them so it’s impossible to find something really special. I have thus decided to borrow hand me downs or buy previously loved toys as much as possible. For example, I spent days looking for a good mirror toy for Hannah, but I couldn’t find one for under $20. FOR A MIRROR. A NOT EVEN VERY GOOD MIRROR. Instead I went to my neighbourhood consignment store, Huckleberry Kids, and bought a stuffed turtle with a mirror belly for $4. And Hannah loves it. I am increasingly becoming more interested in buying consignment toys, and there is a good selection of consignment kids stores in Calgary. They also sell clothes, which is a great option for weedy little ones. Here are a few:

www.lullabylane.org

www.onceuponachild.com

www.sproutzkidz.com

www.starbrightforkids.ca

www.huckleberrykids.com/Index.htm

For new clothes, it’s a good idea to wash them first to remove any wrinkle-resistant additives. Here are some more online retailers that sell environmentally friendly kids toys and clothing:

www.sagecreekcanada.com

www.hankettes.com

www.ethicbaby.ca

www.figkids.com

www.wildrepublic.com

www.plantoys.com

www.ecotoytown.com

www.grassrootsstore.com

www.tenthousandvillages.ca

Only Green sells a GREAT book called Ecoholic: Your guide to the most environmentally friendly information, products and services in Canada. This is the source of a lot of the information I used on this post.

Finally, the most important thing: we’re all doing the best we can. I have had a few heart attacks just tonight putting this post together (OMG, I had TUNA while I was pregnant! MERCURY! And her new clothes! I DIDN’T WASH THEM FIRST!!! She’ll get CANCER!) and I have to remind myself all the time – I will not be perfect. We’re doing the best we can, and if our kids have a non-organic apple or two, they will survive JUST FINE. Living well is never a destination you reach; it’s always a work in progress.