SAS Frontiers

Digital Brother
against Brother

Surfing the vast and trackless sea of
the World Wide Web, it’s often hard to know what information is reliable. That’s especially true when it comes to subjects as popular as the U.S. Civil War. “It’s not that the quality of information is no good,” observes history professor Robert Engs, “it’s just that there’s no way to evaluate it. If you’re an uninformed researcher, you can’t tell if you’re getting good material or simply the opinion of a Civil War buff.” Websites tied to universities and vetted by scholars are the most reliable, he counsels.

Knowing how much undergraduates rely on the Internet as an engine of research, Engs, an authority on the war, slavery, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, decided to pull together on one site historical documents from this “most important period of American history.” The Crisis of the Union <http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/civil
war/index.cfm> is a searchable electronic archive of 224 original pamphlets, books, broadsides, cartoons, clippings, posters, speeches, reports, and other print memorabilia. Working with curators from the Library Company of Philadelphia to compile the digital documents, Engs also wrote abstracts for each item and set up the website with the help of the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image, part of the university’s library system. He designed the site with his own students in mind but also to aid secondary school teachers and students, and other nascent researchers who don’t have access to primary sources.

“ I think the most fascinating manuscript,” Engs points out, “is a version of the Thirteenth Amendment, signed by [presidents] James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln—because it had already passed both houses of Congress —which would have guaranteed slavery forever.” Why was this version not ratified? “Ahh,” the historian beams, “the Civil War.”

Anti- “Feminists” for Feminism

In 1963, Betty Friedan published her bestselling book, The Feminine Mystique, which probed the sense of oppression that women felt because of social pressures limiting them to careers as housewives and mothers. The book let loose the wave of legislation and cultural change that came to be called the Women’s Liberation Movement. Eventually Friedan founded the National Organization for Women, one of the movement’s mainstay institutions. Writer Gloria Steinem would later start up another—Ms. magazine—and Bella Abzug in the U.S. Congress soon became an outspoken supporter of equal rights for women.

Those were heady days, and members of that generation are far more likely to think of themselves as feminists than are younger (or older) people, despite the benefits that were won for them. That’s what sociologist Jason Schnittker and others reported in a scholarly study published in the American Sociological Review. Men and women who came of age during the movement, those born between 1935 and 1955, are the most likely to claim the designation “feminist.” Schnittker, the Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences, points out that young adults who eschew the label may still embrace principles like equal work for equal pay, or defy traditional gender roles, or promote other values of a pro-feminist agenda. The meaning of the term is unsettled today, but the champions of equal rights are everywhere among us. “There appear to be many more conceptions
of feminism these days than there were in earlier generations,” Schnittker said, “allowing for a variety of different people with a variety of different ideologies to self-identify as feminists. It’s not just a story about some groups moving away from feminism, which most people have assumed, but about new and diverse ideological groups—groups moving in and out of feminism. ‘Feminist’ is a much more fluid identity these days.”

Embryonic Questions

Couples who want children but are unable to conceive can have their dreams of family fulfilled these days, thanks to advances in assisted reproductive technologies. But biology professors Ted Abel and Richard Schultz have raised concerns about some aspects of new infertility treatments. In findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the two biologists, along with fellow researchers, reported that mice developed from embryos cultured in chemically defined media showed worrisome differences in memory and anxiety.
The scientists say the petri-dish cultures in which the experimental mice were “gestated” before being placed in a mother rodent’s uterus are the cause
of the abnormal behavior.

Male adults that grew from cultured embryos spent significantly more time in open spaces of a maze. Typically, mice keep to the enclosed portions. The unusual behavior suggests a lower level of anxiety, the experimenters said. In tests that measured learning, the scientists observed that male and female culture-derived mice were less able to remember how to find a platform that was just below the surface in a small swimming pool.

“ Our results are not directly applicable to children conceived through assisted reproductive technology,” cautioned Schultz, the Patricia Williams Term Professor of Biology. “Nevertheless, the results highlight the need for further research to optimize culture conditions for human embryos.”

The study made note of a trend in fertility clinics of longer culturing in order to select the “best” human embryos for implantation and to reduce the risk of multiple pregnancies. Earlier studies of mice have shown that many genes are improperly expressed in response to embryo cultures and that the degree of mis-expression can be amplified by different chemicals in the cultures. “Overall, our findings suggest that a special effort should be made to minimize the effect of culture on pre-implantation embryos,” said Abel. “Decreasing the length of time between fertilization and implantation and further refining the composition of
the culture medium are two ways that may mitigate risk.”

Rank Monkey Business

Much like humans, baboons classify members of their society based on complex rules. Professors Dorothy Cheney (biology) and Robert Seyfarth (psychology), along with postdoc colleagues, published findings on the primates’ social world last fall in the journal Science. The paper is part of a 12-year research project on a baboon troop they’ve been studying in Botswana. The group of over 80 primates has a stable and longstanding hierarchy among families as well as dominance ranks within families and between them. Cheney and Seyfarth are trying to sort out the cognitive skills that make the primates able to recognize these layers of kinship and social rank. “We have watched the extended drama of baboon interactions and have a detailed understanding of the hierarchy of their relationships,” Seyfarth stated. “The big question is whether the baboons themselves have an equally sophisticated view of their society.”

The investigators recorded baboon grunts and screams that signify dominance and submission, and then mixed a soundtrack to make it seem like a low-ranking female was dominating a superior one. When the “rank reversals” were played back, some baboons would “pause and give a look,” as though in surprise. The strongest responses were to calls that signaled a reversal in the ranks of two families. Within-family reversals got a much weaker response. The experiment shows that baboons can assess both rank and kinship in the matrilineal pecking order that structures their world.

“ Humans organize their knowledge of social relationships into hierarchical structure, and they also make use of hierarchical structures when deducing relationships among words in language,” Seyfarth noted. “The existence of such complex social classifications in baboons, a species without language, suggests that the social pressures imposed by life in complex groups may have been one factor leading to the evolution of sophisticated cognition and language
in our pre-human ancestors.”