Why Are Childhood Family Factors Associated With Timing of Maturation? A Role for Internal Prediction

Abstract

Publisher's copyright statement:Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. 24Queen's Campus Stockton, University Boulevard, Thornaby, Stockton-on-Tees, TS17 6BH, UK. Children, particularly girls, who experience early familial adversity tend to go 32 on to reach sexual maturity relatively early. This feature of adolescent development is 33 believed to be an evolved strategy that arose because individuals with genes that 34 caused them to mature relatively early under certain conditions left behind more 35 descendants than those who did not. However, although much has been done to 36 uncover the psychological and physiological mechanisms underlying this process, less 37 attention has been paid to the evolutionary reasons behind why it might be 38 advantageous. It has previously been suggested that this strategy evolved because 39 early familial adversity accurately indicated later environmental adversity, under 40 which conditions early reproduction would likely maximize evolutionary fitness. In 41 this paper we contrast this 'external prediction' model with an alternative explanation, 42 which builds upon the existing explanation and is mutually compatible with it, but 43 which is distinct from it. We argue that accelerated development is advantageous 44 because early adversity detrimentally affects the individual's body, increasing later 45 morbidity and mortality; individuals may adapt to this internal setback by accelerating 46 their development. Unlike the external prediction model, this 'internal prediction' 47 relies not upon temporal environmental continuity, but on long-term effects of early 48 circumstances on the body. well-known among these findings, in social contexts where nuclear families 57 predominate, menarche occurs at a younger age among girls with 'absent' fathers (B. 58Jones, Leeton, McLeod, & Wood, 1972;Moffitt, Caspi, Belsky, & Silva, 1992; Tither 59 & Ellis, 2008). Studies that investigate the apparent effects of family circumstances in 60 detail have revealed that early menarche occurs in girls with less affectionate and 61 cohesive parent-child relationships (Chisholm, Quinlivan, Petersen, & Coall, 2005; 62 Graber, Brooks-Gunn, & Warren, 1995;Steinberg, 1988), those who experience 63 greater parent-child conflict (Graber et al., 1995;Kim & Smith, 1998; Mezzich et al., 64 1997), or who are exposed to greater parent-parent conflict (Chisholm et al., 2005; 65 Ellis & Garber, 2000;Ellis, McFadyen-Ketchum, Dodge, Pettit, & Bates, 1999), and 66 those who experi...

Childhood environmental harshness predicts coordinated health and reproductive strategies: A cross-sectional study of a nationally representative sample from France

“…There are two main reasons why life history strategies should be conditioned on early life harshness. First, if early harshness is reliably correlated with post-juvenile harshness, cues of harshness gathered during development should be used as a 'weather forecast' to trigger a faster strategy (this is the so-called 'external-PAR' hypothesis; see Rickard, Frankenhuis, & Nettle, 2014). Second, if stressful events in early life cause irreversible damage to an organism's soma, the individual should also pursue a faster life history strategy since the probability of early death or disability is increased (this is the so-called internal-PAR hypothesis; see Rickard et al, 2014).…”

“…First, if early harshness is reliably correlated with post-juvenile harshness, cues of harshness gathered during development should be used as a 'weather forecast' to trigger a faster strategy (this is the so-called 'external-PAR' hypothesis; see Rickard, Frankenhuis, & Nettle, 2014). Second, if stressful events in early life cause irreversible damage to an organism's soma, the individual should also pursue a faster life history strategy since the probability of early death or disability is increased (this is the so-called internal-PAR hypothesis; see Rickard et al, 2014). Both pathways are not mutually exclusive and they predict that childhood adversity events that might serve as cues of later harshness or that directly impair the individual's somatic state should lead to faster life history strategies.…”

Can family risk-factors moderate the link between psychopathy and life-history strategy?

“…The same can be said for Antisocial and criminal behaviour. The findings from the present study join the large amount of data which show that various detrimental family factors serve as environmental triggers for the development of the fast LHS (Carlson, Mendle, & Harden, 2014;Rickard et al, 2014).…”

“…The studies have shown that family characteristics are an important predictor of human LHS. Individuals who grew up in families with frequent conflicts, poor parent-child relationships or who experienced some form of maltreatment tended to develop the fast LHS (Rickard, Frankenhuis, & Nettle, 2014).…”

Developmental influences on fertility decisions by women: an evolutionary perspective

“…Various models portray physiological changes as 'making the best of a bad start' (e.g. [30][31][32]). This is a form of downside risk protection.…”