Thanks. I have been meaning to read this one as well. Thanks for the motivation.
Father absence in early life has been shown to be associated with accelerated reproductive development in girls. Evolutionary social scientists have proposed several adaptive hypotheses for this finding. Though there is variation in the detail of these ...
royalsocietypublishing.org
Abstract
Father absence in early life has been shown to be associated with accelerated reproductive development in girls. Evolutionary social scientists have proposed several adaptive hypotheses for this finding. Though there is variation in the detail of these hypotheses, they all assume that family environment in early life influences the development of life-history strategy, and, broadly, that early reproductive development is an adaptive response to father absence. Empirical evidence to support these hypotheses, however, has been derived from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) populations. Data from a much broader range of human societies are necessary in order to properly test adaptive hypotheses. Here, we review the empirical literature on father absence and puberty in both sexes, focusing on recent studies that have tested this association beyond the WEIRD world. We find that relationships between father absence and age at puberty are more varied in contexts beyond WEIRD societies, and when relationships beyond the father–daughter dyad are considered. This has implications for our understanding of how early-life environment is linked to life-history strategies, and for our understanding of pathways to adult health outcomes, given that early reproductive development may be linked to negative health outcomes in later life
4. WEIRD populations are weird
An over-reliance on data from WEIRD populations, regardless of language spoken, is problematic, not only because such populations represent a very narrow slice of humanity, but also because such populations are rather weird in many respects, compared with most of humanity [
8]. WEIRD populations are very different energetically, in that they have much greater access to food resources, have to expend considerably less energy to acquire those food resources, and expend less energy on immune defence. One consequence of this is that age at puberty is now several years earlier in WEIRD compared with non-WEIRD populations [
44]. WEIRD populations are weird in terms of reproductive behaviour, particularly student populations, which were well represented among the samples included in the meta-analysis. These typically consist of large numbers of similarly aged young adults grouped together, away from the influence of parents or other family members, with female-biased sex ratios, and where short-term mating behaviours have relatively few consequences in terms of unintended pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. WEIRD populations also have a rather weird family structure, in that the nuclear family, with an unusually extreme sexual division of labour [
45], is considered the norm, with couples often living in geographical isolation from extended kin networks [
46,
47]. In such families, children are dependent on parents for much longer than is typically the case in human societies, and are expected to contribute little to the family economy. These family differences have implications for psychological theories of child development: attachment theory, for example, which forms an important component of the psychosocial acceleration hypothesis, has recently been criticized for cultural specificity [
48,
49]. The exclusively WEIRD focus of empirical work on family influences on reproductive development, as represented in Webster
et al.'s [
5] review, therefore raises questions about how generalizable these empirical results are.
17. Conclusion
While the large body of work on early-life family environment and reproductive development originated in a hypothesis proposed by anthropologists, this literature has strayed away from its anthropological roots by focusing very largely on WEIRD populations. The results of the review presented here suggest that limiting environmental variation by restricting empirical research to such a narrow slice of humanity may distort the conclusions of this literature: associations between one particular aspect of early-life environment and reproductive development—father absence and the timing of puberty—look quite different when contexts beyond WEIRD populations are considered. These differences may be relatively easily incorporated into the theoretical frameworks used in this literature, but they also suggest that these theoretical frameworks may need closer examination, and certainly require more detailed testing across a broader range of human societies. Our opinion is that the variation in family organization and paternal investment seen across human populations means that associations between father absence and the timing of puberty are likely to vary between populations; future research needs to focus on developing theoretical frameworks and producing empirical evidence to explain how and why associations between early life experiences and reproductive development vary between populations.
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