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Parent and offspring strategies in the transition at adolescence

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Abstract

Adolescence signifies a transition from the use of prereproductive to reproductive strategies in the life history of Homo sapiens. Insofar as human generations overlap, events at adolescence, surrounding the onset of puberty, offer a unique glimpse into human adaptation from the point of view of the changing strategies of both parents and offspring. The timing of puberty is an important life history trait that varies between species, but also between and within the sexes in human beings. The onset of puberty marks the beginning of the reproductive life, is affected by previous experience, and serves as a trigger for behavioral change. Surbey (1988, 1990) reported relationships between father absence, heightened levels of childhood stress, and early menarche and considered them within the context of human evolutionary history. Subsequently, similar findings have been reported in a number of human populations and have been interpreted from several evolutionary perspectives. This article discusses the extent to which these and related findings regarding alterations in the timing of human puberty reflect evolved parental or offspring strategies. It entails a consideration of the applicability of the concepts of phenotypic plasticity, nonadaptive genetic variation, and conditional and alternative reproductive strategies in describing the interwoven nature of strategies employed by parent and child in the transition at adolescence.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Mount Allison University, 49A York Street, E4L 1C7, Sackville, N.B., Canada

    Michele K. Surbey

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  1. Michele K. Surbey
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Correspondence to Michele K. Surbey.

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Originally accepted as part of the special issue on Human Life Histories (Vol. 8, No. 4); publication postponed until this issue for reasons of space.

This article is based on a paper presented at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting at Evanston, Illinois, in June 1996. I thank P. Keelan and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the manuscript. This article was prepared with the support of a standard research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Michele Surbey is an assistant professor at Mount Allison University where she teaches courses in evolutionary psychology. She continues to study environmental influences on pubertal timing from an adaptationist perspective and also conducts research on human mate selection and the evolution of self-deception.

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Surbey, M.K. Parent and offspring strategies in the transition at adolescence. Hum Nat 9, 67–94 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-998-1012-3

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