Environmental and Genetic Influences on Pubertal Development: Evolutionary Life History Traits?

Abstract

Precocious pubertal development has been observed among girls in single parent families and among girls exposed to family conflict. One explanation for their precocious puberty is that it is evolutionarily adaptive (called here the "life history theory" view). Another explanation is that mothers simply pass on genes for precocious puberty. Thus, family environmental circumstances are not causally determinative of rates of pubertal development. The evidence for these two views was evaluated using the genetically-informative sibling pairs from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Both menarcheal age and pubertal timing were heritable (h2 = .44 and.40, respectively), with negligible shared environmental variation. However, in White girls, greater parental warmth delayed puberty, as did living in two parent families. A test of genetic influences underlying the correlation of warmth and pubertal timing was negative, however. Although some of these findings were inconsistent with the evolutionary life history theory, they did not disprove it decisively.