Blue for the boys.....

ToysRUs may have withdrawn gender labelling from its toys, but a casual glance round my local Asda Living reveals that gender-specific baby clothing is big big big.

My little scientist

 
Only sixteen months old and my son has already made four separate contributions to science! I'm so proud.

On monday we went to babylab, Oxford's centre for research into child psychology. Orso had to watch a video showing different objects traveling down a tunnel, while a gaze tracker checks where he is looking to see if he has formed expectations based on categorisation yet. He got a very nice t shirt for his troubles.

This is the third time we've been to the lab. Anyone can sign their baby up to the register and you'll then be contacted when there are trials running which need participants in your baby's age group. The activities are all fun and totally non-invasive, and you get a free t shirt each time! Oh and you get to help Science too.

Orso's first ever experiment was while he was still on the inside. We went along to see Liz Braithwaite at Perinatal  Psychopathology and Offspring Lab  to watch a video and spit into some tubes to help her find out about the effects of maternal stress on the neonate's cortisol levels. She followed up by having me gather some of Orson's saliva when he was a few days old. It's a cool experiment, and a topic about which rather little is known, so I'm keeping a keen eye out for the results here.

I thoroughly recommend that other new mothers take their little ones along to be scientific guinea pigs. Its not like you're busy or anything right ; )

 

Baby and me, and Bifidobacterium makes three

It has long been contended that breastfeeding boosts an newborn's immune system. But I've never quite understood how this is supposed to work. Antibodies  are made of protein, so wouldn't any antibodies in the milk just get digested before they were any use to the baby? Actually, newborn stomachs are not actually very acidic, and digestive enzymes are targeted at snipping only particular proteins in particular places. We have also known for a while that breastfed babies have different gut flora from bottlefed babies. Now we know that there is a surprising connection.

Trisha Gura at science mag explains that breastmilk contains lots of oligosaccharides, a type of carbohydrate that is too complex for humans to digest. What's that doing in there? Providing a food supply for baby's 'good' bacteria, it turns out.

Helen De Cruz surveys tenured philosophers' experiences of motherhood

Here.

Monkey selfie

Just because we can.

Joots me up, Dennett!

Intuition Pumps, and Other Tools for Thinking

by Daniel Dennett
Allen Lane, 2013


Ever since I devoured Darwin's Dangerous Idea as an undergrad I have loved,  and will always love, Daniel Dennett. In fact, at a wine reception after a public talk he gave in Bristol, I told him so. Not my finest hour,

We should be ashamed of this

It has long been recognised that childbirth is a pretty dangerous activity to undertake. Pre-eclampsia, post-partum haemorrhages and infections, there is the ripping and tearing and then all the hazards associated with the pain relief. For as many generations as hominids have had massive heads, women have been dying trying to birth them.Of course, now that we have modern medicine, antibiotics and doctors that wash their  hands, it isn't nearly as dangerous as it used to be.Good old science.

Its not all great news though, because medicine largely continues to suffer from a sort of Cartesian schizophrenia, maintaining a steadfast blindness to conditions of the mind, rather than of the mind's more tangible transport: the body. And so it is that the United Kingdom in the year 2014 must report an embarrassing fact: one of the leading causes of postpartum death in this country is suicide.

A bun in the oven, or the oven has a bun-part?

At the BSPS......

Elselijn Kingma explored  a 'fetal container view' of the relationship between a mother and her unborn offspring. Her jump-off point was Smith & Brogaard's account of the moment the human organism comes into existence.

How much more valuable is a 35 year old than a 40 year old?

At Good Done Right....

Its not a question I get asked every day. But according to Michelle Hutchinson, of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, there are robust experimental results showing that most people think a 35 year old is more deserving of life-saving medicine than a 40 year old. The questions are Why? and How much?

That such questions must be answered, and answered quantitatively, furthermore, is apparent as soon as you consider the decisions faced by governments and healthcare administrators every day. Should we fund this new drug? Who should we make it available to? And which drug or treatment should be cancelled in order to pay for it? It is difficult, emotive stuff, but it has got to be dealt with, and much of the time it demands facing up to some Sophie's choices about how to weigh up the competing claims of different people, or groups of people.

According to popular intuition then, a person's value, or claim on life saving medicine, peaks in late teenagehood and slowly drops off thereafter. Hutchinson argued that it is difficult to explain this result in terms of egalitarianism (we don't think it would be better if everyone died at 20, for example, even though that would be more fair) or the notion of having had your 'fair innings'.

What I found most interesting here is that the intuition lines up strikingly closely to that of 'reproductive value' -  an age-specific measure of an organism's expected lifetime reproductive success. This peaks at onset of reproductive fertility, and declines smoothly thereafter. Females are more valuable than males because they make a bigger investment in the offspring, and have much smaller variance in their probability of successful mating. Thirteen year old female humans are said to have the highest value of all humans, in reproductive biological terms (by Robert Wright, for example.  The death of such an individual represents the greatest possible loss of both investment and breeding potential.

So if reproductive value were the main driver of our ethical intuitions we would put all female teenagers on the lifeboats first, and prioritise their healthcare ahead of everyone else, especially post-reproductive adults.

Of course, most people don't think that moral truths are dictated by biological truths. I  think it is interesting, however, and worthy of explanation, when biological truths seem to reinforce some aspects of our moral intuition but not others.

Furthermore, I wonder if the biological prediction cannot be brought closer to moral norms by considering that: a) males invest a huge amount in reproduction in our species, which should reduce the margin of value between males and females. b) Older, especially post-menopausal women also contribute significantly to the care of children in our species, narrowing the gap there too. The intuition about babies and young children being less valuable than older children (typically explained in ethical theory in terms of gradually increasing personhood) remains.

The next challenge

Having conclusively failed to get to grips with the whole sleep thing, opting instead for a passive war of attrition in which both parent's brains were gradually eroded until Orson got bored of waking us up, we now look forward to utterly failing to get to grips with the new challenge that seems to be upon us: discipline.

Orson is now at the age when the angelic, innocent and good-natured baby occasionally and unexpectedly turns purple and bursts out of his babygro in an unbridled orgy of rage. Knowing what to do when this occurs is not one of my strong points, it turns out.