Can Thrifty Gene(s) or Predictive Fetal Programming for Thriftiness Lead to Obesity?

Baig, Ulfat; Belsare, Prajakta; Watve, Milind; Jog, Maithili

doi:10.1155/2011/861049

Cited by 27 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Theoreticians have already shown in a general case that environmental persistence is required in order for any kind of predictive plasticity to be adaptive [36,55,58]. Our results are also consistent with previous arguments that temporal environmental fluctuations reduce the adaptive value of external PARs over human lifespans [44,46,47]. Our model shows that, because of the geometric decay of intertemporal correlation across the years, in order for there to be a substantial persistence of childhood environment to adulthood more than a decade later, the year-to-year autocorrelation of the environment has to be greater than 0.95.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…Climatic time series (e.g. rainfall) do not generally show autocorrelations of nearly the requisite strength [47]. However, there have been longer scale climatic fluctuations in the course of human evolution [61], and these could be relevant as long as the shorter term variability could be smoothed out by parental buffering, as discussed by Kuzawa [62].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The evolution of predictive adaptive responses in human life history

2013

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Many studies in humans have shown that adverse experience in early life is associated with accelerated reproductive timing, and there is comparative evidence for similar effects in other animals. There are two different classes of adaptive explanation for associations between early-life adversity and accelerated reproduction, both based on the idea of predictive adaptive responses (PARs). According to external PAR hypotheses, early-life adversity provides a 'weather forecast' of the environmental conditions into which the individual will mature, and it is adaptive for the individual to develop an appropriate phenotype for this anticipated environment. In internal PAR hypotheses, early-life adversity has a lasting negative impact on the individual's somatic state, such that her health is likely to fail more rapidly as she gets older, and there is an advantage to adjusting her reproductive schedule accordingly. We use a model of fluctuating environments to derive evolveability conditions for acceleration of reproductive timing in response to early-life adversity in a long-lived organism. For acceleration to evolve via the external PAR process, early-life cues must have a high degree of validity and the level of annual autocorrelation in the individual's environment must be almost perfect. For acceleration to evolve via the internal PAR process requires that early-life experience must determine a significant fraction of the variance in survival prospects in adulthood. The two processes are not mutually exclusive, and mechanisms for calibrating reproductive timing on the basis of early experience could evolve through a combination of the predictive value of early-life adversity for the later environment and its negative impact on somatic state.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The evolution of predictive adaptive responses in human life history

2013

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“…Informational ADP hypotheses are most straightforward to make in cases where the organism is short-lived, or where the phenotype P is visible to selection soon after I is received. Where the organism is long-lived and there is considerable delay between the experience of I and the fitness advantage of P, within-lifetime environmental change can undermine the informational value of I [33][34][35]. For example, even a modest amount of year-to-year variation is sufficient to destroy the informational content of birth-year conditions for predicting adulthood conditions in humans [33,35].…”

Section: Comparing Informational and Somatic State-based Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive developmental plasticity: what is it, how can we recognize it and when can it evolve?

2015

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Developmental plasticity describes situations where a specific input during an individual's development produces a lasting alteration in phenotype. Some instances of developmental plasticity may be adaptive, meaning that the tendency to produce the phenotype conditional on having experienced the developmental input has been under positive selection. We discuss the necessary assumptions and predictions of hypotheses concerning adaptive developmental plasticity (ADP) and develop guidelines for how to test empirically whether a particular example is adaptive. Central to our analysis is the distinction between two kinds of ADP: informational, where the developmental input provides information about the future environment, and somatic state-based, where the developmental input enduringly alters some aspect of the individual's somatic state. Both types are likely to exist in nature, but evolve under different conditions. In all cases of ADP, the expected fitness of individuals who experience the input and develop the phenotype should be higher than that of those who experience the input and do not develop the phenotype, while the expected fitness of those who do not experience the input and do not develop the phenotype should be higher than those who do not experience the input and do develop the phenotype. We describe ancillary predictions that are specific to just one of the two types of ADP and thus distinguish between them.

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“…A key prediction of existing theory is that environmental conditions need to be sufficiently autocorrelated with later-life environmental conditions. However, some studies suggest that autocorrelations from climatic timeseries are, in fact, small and thus cannot readily account for the widespread occurrence of early-life effects (e.g., [44,45]). Our model, however, shows that variation in the social environment can drive the evolution of early-life effects, even in the absence of autocorrelations in the abiotic environment, because social sensitivity itself generates high autocorrelations between parental and offspring social environments (see Figure 3).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Evolution of Early-Life Effects on Social Behaviour – Why Should Social Adversity Carry Over to the Future?

Kuijper

Johnstone

2018

Preprint

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Numerous studies have shown that social adversity in early life can have long-lasting negative consequences for social behaviour in adulthood, consequences that may in turn be propagated to future generations. Given these intergenerational effects, it is puzzling why natural selection might favour such sensitivity to an individual's early social environment. To address this question, we model the evolution of social sensitivity in the development of in helping behaviours, showing that natural selection indeed favours individuals whose tendency to help others is dependent on early-life social experience. We find that natural selection typically favours positive social feedbacks, in which individuals who received more help in early life are also more likely to help others in adulthood, while individuals who received no early-life help develop low tendencies to helping others later in life. This positive social sensitivity is favoured because of an intergenerational relatedness feedback: patches with many helpers tend to be more productive, leading to higher relatedness within the local group, which in turn favours higher levels of help in the next generation.Keywords: predictive adaptive response, developmental plasticity, inclusive fitness, maternal effect, parental effect, intergenerational effect Running title: Early life effects on social behaviour

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Can Thrifty Gene(s) or Predictive Fetal Programming for Thriftiness Lead to Obesity?

Cited by 27 publications

References 54 publications

The evolution of predictive adaptive responses in human life history

The evolution of predictive adaptive responses in human life history

Adaptive developmental plasticity: what is it, how can we recognize it and when can it evolve?

The Evolution of Early-Life Effects on Social Behaviour – Why Should Social Adversity Carry Over to the Future?

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