August 31, 2012

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Building Babies now available online

By Kate Clancy

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

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Building Babies: Primate Development in Proximate and Ultimate Perspective was a macrosomic fetus* that took quite a few twists and turns down the pelvic canal to finally be born. But get borned it did! Edited by me, Katie Hinde and Julienne Rutherford, our hope is that this volume will be both inspiration for future work, as we worked hard to recruit authors doing cutting edge research, and a great reference for undergraduates, graduate students and faculty alike. We hope the book will also be interesting to those of you non-academics with an interest in babies or ladybusiness.

If your university subscribes to Springer, then all of the chapters of Building Babies are free in pdf form, and there is a low-cost option for a paperback copy. If your university doesn't subscribe, you likely have a free interlibrary loan option that will get some pdfs in your hands. And paper copies should hit stores soon. This book is a hefty 531 pages, so paper copies will be pricey. I would recommend getting your hands on pdf copies if dropping serious cash isn't an option for you.

*"Macrosomic" just means a really big baby. But I felt like using the big word today.

I am Dr. Kate Clancy, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. On top of being an academic, I am a mother, a wife, an athlete, a labor activist, a sister, and a daughter. My beautiful blog banner was made by Jacqueline Dillard. Context and variation together help us understand humans (and any other species) as complicated. But they also help to show us that biology is not immutable, that it does not define us from the moment of our birth. Rather, our environment pushes and pulls our genes into different reaction norms that help us predict behavior and physiology. But, as humans make our environments, we have the ability to change the very things that change us. We often have more control over our biology than we may think.

More by Kate Clancy

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