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Childhood experience and the development of reproductive strategies

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心 理 学 报 2007，39（3）：454~468
Acta Psychologica Sinica

Experience in Childhood and the Development of Reproductive Strategies

Jay Belsky
Birkbeck University of London

Even though a great deal of mainstream developmental psychology is devoted to understanding whether and how
experiences in childhood shape psychological and behavioural development later in life, little theoretical attention
has been paid to why such cross-time influences should characterize human development. This is especially true
with respect to the well-studied determinants of mating, pair bonding and parenting. Theoretically, Draper and
Harpending (1982), Belsky et al. (1991), Ellis (2004) and Chisholm (1996) have all addressed this lacuna,
stimulating research on linkages between childhood experience and reproductive strategy, which is summarised in
this paper. Concern for experiential effects on pubertal timing distinguishes this line of inquiry from more
traditional developmental studies because an evolutionary perspective suggests that experiences in the family
might affect somatic development. Fifteen years since BSD advanced their “uncanny” prediction, it seems clear
that this pubertal timing, at least in females, is related to selected aspects of early family experience (Ellis, 2004).
Keywords: developmental psychology, pubertal timing, evolutionary perspective.

早期经验对繁衍策略形成与发展的影响

很多发展心理学家探讨了早期经验与心理行为发展的关系，但这些发展心理学家较少以进化理论为指导
来探讨不同发展阶段的心理行为特点。比如，配偶选择、性交往与父母教养等成果颇丰的研究领域均缺
少以进化理论为基础的理论解释。与主流的发展心理学研究不同，Draper 和 Harpending (1982)，Ellis
(2004)，Chisholm (1996) 和 Belsky 等(1991)以进化理论为基础探讨了早期经验与繁衍策略对儿童心理行为
发展的影响。进化观点认为儿童在家庭中获得的早期经验会影响身体发育与未来的繁衍策略。Ellis
（2004）已经证实女性青春期确实与早期家庭经验有关。
关键词：发展心理学，青春期时间表，进化观点。
分类号：B84-069

Students of human development, especially those
working from traditional psychological perspectives,
generally take for granted the biological structure of
the life course. Introductory textbooks in
developmental psychology routinely point out that
humans are born relatively helpless at birth, have an
extended juvenile period before reaching reproductive
maturity and, in the case of females, experience a
rather long post-reproductive life (i.e., menopause).
The fact that the very nature of the human life course
is something in need of explanation, at least from an
evolutionary-biological perspective, is rarely
considered. Indeed, it is taken as a given that our
species’ lengthy period of juvenile dependency
evolved in order to facilitate brain development and
learning and thereby afford successful functioning in
the highly varied physical environments and social
contexts in which our ancestors resided (see
Bjorklund & Pellegrini, 2002; Flinn, 2005; Geary,
2002; Kaplan et al. 2000). Not yet appreciated,
however, is the competing claim that an extended
Received 2006-06-30
Correspondence should be addressed to Jay Belsky, Institute for the Study
of Children, Families and Social Issues, Birkbeck University of London, 7
Bedford Square, London, WC1E 7HX, UK; e-mail: j.belsky@bbk.ac.uk.
454
childhood was an inadvertent consequence of the
development of a post-reproductive lifespan which
enabled grandmothers to increase their reproductive
success by assisting daughters in childrearing, and
thus that learning represents a mere secondary effect
of a long juvenile period, itself determined by the
long lifespan (Hawkes 2003; Hawkes et al. 2000).
However one views this contest of ideas, it makes
clear that from the standpoint of evolutionary
anthropology, the main question about human life
history concerns selection pressures which led to the
emergence of our species, with the central features of
that life history more or less taken for granted. Given
the field’s focus upon cross-species comparisons (e.g.,
chimpanzees’ faster development and shorter
lifespans), it is not surprising that little attention has
been paid to within-species variation in life history.
Until perhaps two decades ago, the same was
generally true of mainstream developmental-
psychological thinking as well.
Even though a variety of theoretical perspectives
(e.g., social learning theory, life-course theory,
attachment theory) and a huge research literature
address the determinants and sequelae of variation in
multiple elements of human life history (e.g., onset of
3期 Jay Belsky. Experience in Childhood and the Development of Reproductive Strategies
sexual behaviour, parenting, marital/partner relations),
evolutionary thinking informs little of this work.
Indisputably, it is to a history of rewards and
punishments or to the child’s psychological
attachment to a parent or to the quality of important
relationships in the child’s life (e.g., parent-child,
marital, friendship) that students of human
development routinely turn when seeking insight into
developmental “outcomes” that evolutionary thinkers
would characterize as features of life history and
elements of reproductive strategy (e.g., age of first sex,
sexual “promiscuity”, quality of parenting). In many
respects this is because students of child development,
whether trained in psychological, sociological or
cultural-anthropological traditions, have been--and
remain—concerned principally with proximate
questions of how--How does development operate?--
rather than with ultimate questions of why: Why does
development operate the way it seems to?
An excellent example of such an almost exclusive
focus upon proximate rather than ultimate influences
on development can be found, ironically, in four
decades of research on the infant’s attachment to its
(principal) caregiver, usually the mother. Even though
Bowlby (1969), perhaps the first modern practitioner
of evolutionary psychology and the theoretician who
coined the now well-worn phrase “environment of
evolutionary adaptation (EEA), drew heavily upon
Darwin’s insights when formulating attachment
theory, his concern with ultimate causation, while
mentioned in passing in textbook discussions of
infant-parent attachment, has been more or less
abandoned entirely in developmental studies of
individual differences in attachment, especially the
determinants and consequence of this first
relationship (but see Belsky 1997, 1999; Chisholm
1996).
Although an abundance of evidence supports
Bowlby’s (1969) thesis that secure attachment lays
the foundation for general well being (Thompson
1999), as well as Ainsworth’s (1973) postulate that
sensitive (vs. insensitive) mothering fosters secure (vs.
insecure) attachment (de Wolff & van Ijzendoorn
1997), developmentalists fascinated with the
attachment bond virtually never wonder why
development operates this way rather than some other.
Given the risk in the EEA of mother being physically
or emotionally compromised and/or even dying
during the infant’s first years of life, to say nothing of
the inherent unpredictability of the future, would it
not have made more sense for nature to design a
relationship system that was less—if at all—shaped
by the quality of care that mother provided or that
would exert less of a developmental impact on the
child than attachment theory presupposes? Clearly,
such fundamental theoretical issues pertaining to the
developmental legacy of early attachment security or
455
childhood experiences more generally arise only
when evolutionary “why” questions about ultimate
causation are posed.
Even though mainstream developmental
psychology and human development have not, for the
most part, applied an evolutionary perspective when
asking and answering questions about how
experiences in childhood might shape development
later in the life course, it is not the case that no such
efforts have been made in that direction. In this paper,
one such programme of theory building dealing with
childhood experience and reproductive strategy, along
with some relevant evidence, will be reviewed. Before
doing so, however, two foundational topics must be
addressed. The first is the proposition that experiences
early in life might shape developments later in life.
The second is life-history theory, as this serves as the
higher-level framework on which this paper builds
(Ellis 2004; Ketelaar & Ellis 2000).
I. The legacy of childhood experience
For most students of child development, it is
presumed that experiences in the early years of life
influence individual differences in later development.
This is not to say, however, that there is no debate
about the power of earlier experiences to shape later
development (e.g., determining vs. contributing;
contingent vs. inevitable), the timing of putatively
influential experiences (e.g., first year of life, first 5
years, prepubertal years), the nature of these
experiences (e.g., prenatal exposure to alcohol,
quality of parenting, sib and/or peer relationships), the
means by which any such influence is exerted (e.g.,
direct vs. indirect) or the aspects of development
which are affected (e.g., intelligence, antisocial
behaviour). Nevertheless, it remains the case that only
rarely is the specific question already posed with
respect to attachment entertained more generally:
“Why should experiences early in life contribute to
and forecast developments later in life?” In fact, in
recent social-policy-oriented discussions of early-
experience effects on brain development (e.g., Schore
2001; Shonkoff & Phillips 2000), virtually no attempt
has been made to explain why natural selection would
have crafted a developmental system whereby what
transpires early in life, well before reproductive
maturity, would affect functioning later in the lifespan.
Yet almost three decades ago, Kagan et al. (1978)
argued that the notion that early experiences affect
long-term psychological/behavioural development
was more a (western) cultural myth than biological or
psychological reality. This theme was taken up more
recently by Bruer (1997) in challenging claims that
human research illuminates early-experience effects
on brain development and, thereby, provides a basis
of crafting social policies. Relatedly, Lewis (1997)
argued that concurrent experience is of far greater
456 心 理
consequence to human functioning than experiences
and developments earlier in life. Finally, a seemingly
logical case could be made that it would make much
more sense for nature to shape human development so
as to be consistent with Lewis’s (1999) thesis
emphasizing responsiveness to contemporary
environmental input rather than to earlier life
experiences. What should be clear by this point, then,
is that grounds most certainly exist for questioning
much of what will be the primary focus of this paper.
But even when plausible arguments against early-
experience effects sound convincing, there remains
the matter of evidence. Perhaps most noteworthy is
recent research showing that antenatal experiences,
especially but not exclusively involving nutrition,
affect foetal growth and forecast physical health
across the lifespan, including risk for developing (a)
impaired glucose tolerance and reduced insulin
sensitivity (Phillips 1998), (b) impaired immune
function (McDade et al. 2001), (c) coronary heart
disease (Robinson & Barker 2002) and (d) even
senescence (Sayer et al. 1998). If the very early
environment of the womb and foetal growth
systematically affect physical health over the ensuing
decades of life—and in a manner likened to a
“weather forecast” signalling the unborn child of a
poorly nourished woman that it is about to enter a
harsh world (Bateson et al. 2004)--why should
postnatal experience operate any differently on
psychological and behavioural phenotypes? After all,
it is now well appreciated that brain development, to
say nothing of psychological and behavioural
development, continues well into adolescence and
even beyond (Giedd et al. 1999).
Moreover, it would seem just as
commonsensical to assume that rather than
leaving human functioning to the whim of
contemporary circumstances, nature would
have crafted an organism capable of modifying
its phenotype in response to early environmental
inputs provided those inputs afforded a
reasonable degree of prediction—in the EEA--
about the future that the developing organism
would encounter as it grew and developed. (For
detailed consideration of this latter point, see
Belsky 2005a, b; Ellis 2004.) This argument
seems even more plausible the moment the
possibility is entertained that developmental
constraints imposed on the organism as it
matured could restrict its future responsiveness
to the environment (Boyce & Ellis 2005). In
point of fact, many organisms other than
humans are strikingly capable of altering their
development in response to their environment,
including environments encountered early in
development (Kaplan & Lancaster 2003; West-
Eberhard 2003) and in many cases it is
学 报 39 卷
maternal care that shapes reproductive
potential (Clutton-Brock, 1991; Mousseau &
Fox, 1988). In sum, although it should be
regarded as an empirical question whether any
kind of experience early in life influences some
particular aspect of development later in life,
there seems to be good theoretical and
empirical reason for entertaining the prospect
that they could. This, of course, is the working
assumption on which this paper is based.
II. Life-history theory
The beginning of this paper made clear that the
biological organisation of the human life course is
something in need of explanation. Life-history theory
(LHT) is the metatheoretical framework within more
general evolutionary theory that seeks to account for
the timing of reproductive and lifespan developments
in terms of evolved strategies for distributing
metabolic resources between the competing demands
of growth, maintenance and reproduction (Charnov
1993; Ellis 2004; Kuzawa 2005; McArthur 1967;
Stearns 1992; Wilson 1975). LHT describes an
individual’s total bioenergetic and material resources
as allocated between somatic effort (i.e., resources
devoted to the continued survival) and reproductive
effort (i.e., resources devoted to producing-supporting
offspring). Reproductive effort can itself be further
divided into mating effort (i.e., resources devoted to
obtaining-retaining sexual partners) and parental
effort (i.e., resources devoted to enhancing offspring
survival and quality). Life-history traits are the basic
units of analysis in LHT and include, for example, age
at weaning, age at sexual maturity, adult body size,
time to first reproduction, and litter size.
LHT provides a useful means of organising life-
history traits in a manner that highlights costs,
benefits and trade offs of different patterns of
development. Such trade-offs are inevitable because
time and energy used for one purpose cannot be used
for another. In a determinant growing species like
humans (i.e., cease growing at reproductive maturity),
the decision of when to switch from investing energy
in growth to investing in reproduction is a classic
example of such an adaptive trade off. So, too, is that
between number and fitness of offspring. Even though
there are benefits, reproductively speaking, of large
adult size, risks are associated with delaying maturity
in order to grow large; this is because there is always
the chance of dying before the reproductive benefits
of large size are realised (Williams 1966). At the age
when mortality risk associated with delaying maturity
outweighs the reproductive benefits of growing larger,
LHT predicts that the organism will cease growth and
direct energy otherwise devoted to growth into
supporting reproduction. These assumptions about the
costs and benefits of delaying maturity have been
3期 Jay Belsky. Experience in Childhood and the Development of Reproductive Strategies
used to predict the timing of reproductive maturity
across species (Charnov 1993).
Natural selection should favour earlier reproduction,
ceterus paribus, for several reasons (Ellis 2004).
Because the risk of death always exceeds zero, no
matter what the time scale, producing offspring earlier
in the lifespan lowers the chance of leaving no
descendants. Derivatively, the benefits to fitness of
early reproduction should be greater the higher the
mortality risk (Chisholm 1999). In addition, earlier
reproduction affords a longer period of reproduction,
as onset and termination of reproduction (e.g.,
menopause) are unrelated (Borgerhoff Mulder 1989;
Peccei 2000). Finally, early reproduction increases
total lineage reproduction, which of course is
important from the standpoint of inclusive fitness, due
to abbreviated generation times.
All this is not to say that delayed reproduction is
without benefit. In fact, competing selection pressures
favour delayed reproduction: Slower developing
organisms usually attain larger adult body size which
itself is generally related to lower risk of death,
greater energy production and stores to channel to
reproduction across the lifespan and, perhaps most
importantly, increased chances of succeeding in
intrasexual competition for mates (Charnov 1993;
Clutton-Brock, 1991; Hill & Kaplan 1999). It should
be clear, then, that no one means of organising life-
history traits is likely to maximize inclusive fitness
across all species and ecological niches.
A. Variation in human reproductive strategy
Two general life histories—r and K-- reflecting the
co-occurrence of a suite of life-history traits are often
discussed when cross-species variation is considered
(Pianka 1970), even if there is some sense that these
may mask as much variation as they presume to
illuminate and thus are somewhat dated. K-selected
species are relatively long lived; spend a considerable
portion of that lifespan as juveniles; and tend to bear
and rear relatively few young while investing heavily
in them (e.g., elephants). In contrast, r-selected
species generally follow the opposite pattern—short
lifespan, brief juvenile period, heightened fecundity,
and limited parental investment (e.g., rabbits).
Although humans obviously qualify more as a K- than
an r-selected species, r/K thinking that has typically
been used to characterise and explain cross-species
variation in life histories has been applied to within-
species variation (Stearns & Koella 1986), including
aboriginal human populations (Hill & Hurtado 1996;
see also Rushton 1985). Indeed, it was within this
context, though limited to considerations of
biogeography, that MacAthur and Wilson (1968)
originally discussed r/K.
When humans become the focus of concern,
terminology often shifts to discussions of
457
reproductive strategy. Thus, some individuals are
observed to mature sooner than others, mate earlier
than others, establish less enduring pair bonds than
others, bear more offspring than others and invest less
intensively in them than others. Rather than speaking
in terms of r/K life histories (but see Rushton 1985),
such variation is typically discussed in terms of
quantity/quality reproductive strategies (Figueredo et
al. 2006) or, when applied to men, in terms of
involved fathers who provide for their children (i.e.,
dads) or those who do not and spend their time
seeking additional mates and matings (i.e., cads)
(Draper & Harpending 1982).
1. The role of heritability
The reality of variation in human reproductive
strategy raises the question of determinants. This will
be the principle focus of the remainder of this paper,
with emphasis placed on childhood experience.
Because individual differences in virtually every
measurable psychological and behavioural trait has
been shown to be at least partly heritable (Bouchard
2004), including core life-history traits like pubertal
timing (e.g., Rowe 2002, Treloar & Martin 1990), the
role of the genotype merits consideration as well. But
before a simple genetic explanation of variation in
reproductive strategy is embraced, three things must
be acknowledged.
First, even though variation in the timing of
menarche has been linked to an androgen-receptor
gene (Comings et al. 2002), an oestrogen receptor
gene (Stavrou et al. 2002) and still other genes
(Kadlubar et al. 2003), a first effort to replicate
Comings et al.’s molecular-genetic results in two
epidemiological studies using samples drawn from the
general population failed to do so (Jorm et al. 2004).
This is not an uncommon result in studies
endeavouring to link specific genes to development
(Caspi et al. 2002; Kim-Cohen, Caspi, Taylor,
Williams, Newcombe, Craig & Moffitt, 2006).
Second, when Rowe (2000) specifically sought to
disconfirm Belsky, Steinberg and Draper’s (1991)
developmental theory of reproductive strategies
discussed below (and hereafter referred to as BSD
theory) in a behaviour-genetic study, he proved
unable to administer a “knock-out punch”, as some
evidence of environmental influence emerged (see
also Ellis, 2004, p. 922). Moreover, as Belsky et al.
(1991) speculated, the secular trend in pubertal timing
that has reduced the age of reproductive maturation
over the past 150 years in the western world and is
largely attributed to improvements in nutrition and
hygiene, may well have attenuated a great deal of
variation which had, in ancestral times and beyond,
been more susceptible to environmental influence
than may appear to be the case in the modern world
today (see also, Ellis 2004, p. 922).
458 心 理
Third, Belsky (2000; 2005a,b) argued that rather
than thinking in terms of genetic or environmental
effects, it might make the most sense to think in terms
of nature and nurture in the case of reproductive
strategies, because for some individuals such suites of
life-history traits may be “born” (i.e., fixed strategists)
whereas for others they may be “made” (i.e., plastic
strategists). Within the context of behaviour-genetic
research designs, any such “differential susceptibility”
to developmental experiences would attenuate shared
environmental effects, because these require different
children in the same family to be affected in exactly
the same manner and to the very same degree by
family experiences. Drawing on evolutionary bet-
hedging logic, Belsky (2000, 2005a,b) further argued
that such differential susceptibility would make
biological sense—to parents, children and siblings—
because efforts by parents to shape their children’s
development could prove misguided, especially from
the standpoint of enhancing reproductive fitness,
given the inherent unpredictability of the future (see
also Ellis, Jackson & Boyce, 2006; Flinn, 2006). For
this reason, it would make evolutionary-biological
sense for children to vary in the extent to which
parental efforts to guide their development proved
successful (see also Boyce & Ellis 2005).
Certainly not inconsistent with the notion of
differential susceptibility to rearing influence is the
ubiquity of nonshared, as opposed to shared,
environmental effects in behaviour-genetic studies of
development (Bouchard 2004; Turkheimer &
Waldron 2000); these are effects indicating that
shared family experiences (e.g., divorce) affect
different children growing up in the same household
differently. Also pointing in the same direction (i.e.,
toward differential susceptibility) is recent molecular-
genetic evidence showing that the anticipated effect of
child maltreatment in promoting antisocial behaviour
in adulthood varies as a function of an individual’s
genotype (Caspi et al. 2002).
In sum, although it would be foolish to argue that
heritability plays no (or even just a marginal) role in
human reproductive strategy, there seems no grounds
for concluding at the current time that developmental
programmes are not at least somewhat malleable with
respect to life-history traits, though this may be more
true for some individuals than for others and less so in
the present than in the past. Indeed, as Ellis (2004,
p.925) recently observed, any number of scholars
have argued that “selection can be expected to favour
adaptive developmental plasticity of mechanisms
(within genetic capacities and constraints) in response
to particular ecological conditions….” Attention is
now turned to theory development and some evidence
pertaining to humans on just this score.
学 报 39 卷
III. Childhood experience and reproductive
strategy
In a seminal paper that would eventually stimulate
a (somewhat delayed) cascade of theoretical
developments and empirical studies over the past
decade and a half pertaining not just to variation in
human reproductive strategies but, more importantly,
to the role of childhood experiences in shaping it,
Draper and Harpending (1982) argued that girls
growing up in father-present and father-absent homes
pursue distinctive reproductive strategies. Whereas
father-absent girls develop behaviour profiles
consistent with an expectation that paternal
investment in childrearing will not be forthcoming
and that pair bonds will not be enduring, those from
father-present households develop as if anticipating
the opposite, deferring sexual activity once they reach
biological maturity while seeking to establish and
maintain enduring, close, heterosexual relationships.
What was unique to the Draper and Harpending (1982)
argument, especially from the standpoint of traditional
theories of child development, was the casting of
early-experience influences within the family in
evolutionary terms emphasizing reproductive fitness,
parental investment, pair bonds, and reproductive
strategy. Gone was any moral approbation about
“problem” behaviour and in its place were the
potential reproductive-fitness benefits of varying
mating and parenting behaviour (i.e., reproductive
strategy) to fit the ecological context.
Two things were lacking in this most provocative
and original paper, at least from the perspective of
students of child development. First, no
developmental process was offered to explain how the
particular childhood experience in question (i.e.,
father absence) would shape later functioning in
adolescence and adulthood. And second, although the
Draper and Harpending (1982) argument cast old data
linking father-absence in childhood with sexual,
mating and parenting behaviour in adulthood in new
theoretical terms, it failed to generate any new
predictions. Was it more, then, than just old wine in a
new bottle? Why, in fact, embrace evolutionary
theorising about “reproductive strategy” when a
myriad of widely-acknowledged theoretical
perspectives dating back to Freud himself already
offered accounts of why the later-life developments
addressed by Draper and Harpending (1982) would
result from father absence in childhood?
A. Belsky, Steinberg & Draper’s (1991) (BSD)
critical prediction: Pubertal timing
Considered reflection on these limitations led
Belsky et al. (1991) to advance “an evolutionary
theory of socialization” (i.e., BSD theory) linking
childhood experience, interpersonal orientation and
reproductive strategy, building directly on the insights
3期 Jay Belsky. Experience in Childhood and the Development of Reproductive Strategies
of Draper and Harpending (1982). Central to BSD
theory was the thesis that stressful and supportive
extra-familial environments influenced family
dynamics, most especially parent-child and
marital/pair-bond relations, thereby shaping children’s
early emotional and behavioural development and,
through it, subsequent social development, including
sexual/mating behaviour, pair bonding and parenting.
Moreover, BSD argued, this complex and
environmentally sensitive developmental system
evolved as a means of fitting the organism to its
environment in the service of promoting reproductive
fitness (i.e., not psychological well being).
Of central importance to the BSD theory was the
view that parenting, the parent-child relationship and,
in particular, the attachment relationship mediated the
influence of stressors and supports external to the
parent-child relationship on the child’s general
trustful-mistrustful outlook on the world and
opportunistic vs. mutually-beneficial orientation
toward others, as well as his/her behaviour. But what
fundamentally distinguished BSD from all other
theories of, or perspectives on, early experience and
human development was the explicitly-labelled
“uncanny prediction” that these developmental
experiences and psychological orientations would
influence somatic development by affecting the
timing of puberty; and that this cascade of
developments shaped, in adolescence and adulthood,
sexual behaviour, pair-bond orientation and parenting.
More specifically, while noting that it remained
unclear whether environmental processes and the
development of reproductive strategies should be
conceptualized dimensionally or typologically (i.e.,
continuous vs. discrete phenotypic plasticity), BSD
posited two distinctive developmental trajectories for
purposes of presentation. A quantity-oriented
reproductive strategy was most likely to arise, BSD
argued, in the context of a variety of stressors which
would undermine parental well being and family
relationships, including general stress, marital discord
and/or inadequate financial resources. These forces
would, probabilistically, give rise to harsh, rejecting,
insensitive and/or inconsistent parenting, which
would foster insecure attachment, a mistrustful
internal working model and an opportunistic,
advantage-taking interpersonal orientation. These
developments would stimulate an earlier timing of
puberty than otherwise would be the case (i.e., within
the organism’s range of reaction) and an earlier onset
of sexual activity, short-term and unstable pair bonds,
and limited parental investment.
The alternative, quality-oriented developmental
trajectory was fostered by exposure to a supportive
rearing environment, characterized by spousal
harmony and adequate financial resources. These
ecological foundations would give rise, again
459
probabilistically, to sensitive, supportive, responsive
and positively affectionate styles of mothering and
fathering and, thereby, secure attachments, a trusting
internal working model and a reciprocally-rewarding
interpersonal orientation. Collectively, these
developments would delay pubertal maturation
(within the range of reaction) and defer the onset of
sexual activity while fostering enduring pair bonds
and greater parental investment.
As BSD made clear at the time, a great deal of
traditional developmental research provided evidence
that stressful rearing milieus, whether conceptualized
in demographic terms (e.g., low income, lone
parenthood), relationships terms (e.g.,
harsh/neglecting parenting; marital conflict, divorce)
or psychological terms (e.g., depressed mother,
insecure attachment), predict developmental
“outcomes” that are regarded by mainstream child
developmentalists—and many others—as
“unfavourable” and certainly not “optimal.” These
included, among other things, precocious and
promiscuous sexual behaviour; aggressive/antisocial
behaviour, depression, relationship instability and
unsupportive, if not harsh parenting. The opposite
tends to be true of rearing environments that are well
resourced and emotionally and relationally supportive
(e.g., Bradley & Caldwell 1988; Cicchetti & Carlon
1989; Emery 1988; McLoyd 1990; Patterson 1986;
Pettit & Bates 1989). In the decade and a half since
BSD advanced their theory, the publication of
evidence highlighting such environmental effects has
continued unabated (e.g., Amato 2001; Belsky &
Fearon 2002; Buehler & Gerard 2002; Parke et al.
2004; Seccombe 2000).
As already noted, what made BSD distinctive—and
purposefully so—was the hypothesis that social-
developmental experiences within the family would
influence the timing of sexual maturation (i.e.,
puberty). Because this is a core life-history variable
and because it is a feature of development that no
other theory of, or perspective on, human
development suggests would be affected by social-
developmental experiences in the family, it
highlighted the potential “added value” of an
evolutionary approach to human development.
As it turns out, a good deal of evidence has
emerged since BSD promulgated their “uncanny”
hypothesis that, at the least, is not inconsistent with it.
First, greater parent-child warmth, cohesion and
positivity predict later pubertal development--in both
prospective longitudinal studies (Ellis et al. 1999;
Graber et al. 1995; Steinberg 1988) and retrospective
or concurrent ones (Kim & Smith 1988a; Kim et al.
1997; Miller & Pasta 2000; Romans et al. 2003; Rowe
2000). Second, greater parent-child conflict and
coercion predict earlier timing of puberty, again in
both prospective longitudinal work (Moffitt et al.
460 心 理
1992) and in research adopting retrospective or
concurrent-assessment designs (Jorm et al. 2004; Kim
& Smith 1988a,b; Kim et al. 1997; Mezzich et al.
1997; Weirson et al. 1993). Finally, and with respect
to marital/partner relations, the happier and/or less
conflicted the relationship between mother and father,
the more delayed pubertal maturation—in both
prospective-longitudinal studies (Ellis et al. 1999;
Ellis & Garber 2000) and investigations adopting
weaker research designs in which predictor and
outcome data are gathered at the same time and/or
retrospectively (Kim & Smith 1998b; Kim et al. 1997;
Romans et al. 2003).
It is important to note that virtually all the relevant
findings come from studies of girls, basically due to
measurement difficulties in demarcating pubertal
development in boys. Of importance as well is that
while there is a good deal of data linking quality of
parent-child and marital relations with pubertal timing,
not all tests derived from BSD theory have supported
it. Ellis et al. (1999), Miller and Pasta (2000) and
Steinberg (1988), for example, failed to document the
hypothesized linkage between family conflict and
coercion and accelerated pubertal timing.
Nevertheless, when considered in their entirety, the
results of the work cited above led Ellis (2004, pp.
935-936) to conclude in a recent and comprehensive
review of research on the determinants of pubertal
timing that “empirical research has provided
reasonable, though incomplete” support for BSD
theory.
That said, it must be acknowledged that with rare
exception (e.g., Figueredo et al., 2006; Rowe 2000),
relevant work has not been positioned to discount the
possibility that common genes account both for why
some families function the way they do and why
children in the family mature at the rate they do. In
fact, one previously cited molecular-genetic inquiry
found that associations like those under consideration
might reflect little more than genetic effects, as an X-
linked androgen receptor GGC-repeat polymorphism
being associated with parental divorce, father absence
and earlier age of menarche (Comings et al. 2002).
The fact, however, that Jorm et al.’s (2004)
aforementioned effort to replicate such results failed
to do so cautions against prematurely embracing the
conclusion that genetic effects are masquerading in
all-too-much of the cited work as environmental
effects of rearing experiences on pubertal timing.
Moreover, even if it ultimately proves to be the case
that common genes play a role both in shaping both
putative causes (e.g., father absence, parental divorce)
and consequences (e.g., age of menarche), this does
not mean, when considered from the standpoint of
developmental process, that experience plays no role
whatsoever in the causal process.
学 报 39 卷
B. The distinctive influence of the father
From an empirical perspective, Bruce Ellis has
undertaken the most systemic research endeavouring
to test propositions derived from BSD theory,
especially those dealing with its theory-defining and
distinctive pubertal-timing prediction. Notably, Ellis
and associates have tracked girls from early childhood
into adolescence in a series of investigations (Ellis et
al. 2003; Ellis & Garber 2000; Ellis et al. 1999). One
important result of this work and Ellis’ (2004) review
of pubertal-timing research has been to highlight the
potentially unique influence of the father-child
relationship and stepfather presence (Ellis 2004).
Whereas Draper and Harpending (1982) exclusively
addressed the role of father absence during childhood
in shaping reproductive strategy, BSD expanded upon
their model, arguing that father absence was an
indicator of a stressful family environment and that
Draper and Harpending’s (1982) narrow
conceptualisation of the influential rearing milieu
could be expanded to consider a larger set of stressors
and supports which contribute to the development of
reproductive strategy. Thus, BSD called attention to
attachment security/insecurity, parental sensitivity/
insensitivity, harsh vs. warm parenting and
harmonious vs. conflicted pair bonds, drawing no
particular distinction between contributions of
mothers and fathers in shaping offspring reproductive
strategy.
Upon repeatedly detecting effects of father
presence vs. absence and even unique effects of the
quality of fathering, father-daughter relationships and
the presence of a stepfather on pubertal timing (see
below), Ellis et al. (1999, 2003; Ellis & Garber 2000)
concluded that fathers may have a special role to play
in the development of girl’s reproductive strategies, or
at least their pubertal development. In fact, rather than
being a marker of stress, father absence and stepfather
presence operate as a paternal-investment cues
indicative of low-quality paternal investment: “girls
detect and internally encode information specifically
about the quality of paternal investment during
approximately the first 5 years of life as a basis of
calibrating …the timing of pubertal maturation and
certain types of sexual behaviour” (Ellis 2004, p. 938).
Such processes should be understood in the broader
context of human evolution, argued Ellis (2004); not
only are humans the only great ape in which males
engage in provisioning or care of offspring, but such
paternal investment is highly variable, with the
contribution of fathers to the family determined by the
trade off between paternal and mating investment in
the service of fitness goals (Geary, 2005).
Rather consistently, father absence has been related
to accelerated pubertal development in girls,
demarcated either in terms of age of menarche or the
development of secondary sexual characteristics; and
3期 Jay Belsky. Experience in Childhood and the Development of Reproductive Strategies
this is so across rather diverse studies, including
prospective inquiries following girls from childhood
into adolescence (Campbell & Udry 1995; Ellis &
Garber 2000; Ellis et al. 1999; Hetherington & Kelly
2002; Moffitt et al. 1992; Rowe 2000; Wierson et al.
1993) and retrospective research using adult samples
(Doughty & Rodgers 2000; Hoier 2003; Jones et al.
1972; Jorm et al. 2004; Kiernan & Hobcraft 1997;
Quinlan 2003; Romans et al. 2003; Surbey 1990).
Although effects of father absence have emerged in
work conducted in a variety of western countries, it is
noteworthy that they have not been detected in
African American samples (Campbell & Udry 1995;
Rowe 2000); Ellis (2004, p. 940) suggests this could
be the result of the “extraordinary secular trend” in
this population. (The “secular trend” refers to the
dramatic acceleration in the timing of pubertal
maturation that has occurred over the past 150 years
throughout the western world and which is typically
attributed to improved nutrition.)
There is evidence to suggest that both timing of
father absence and stepfather presence are important
to understanding effects of an absent father. The
earlier in the child’s life that father absence occurs,
perhaps especially in the first 5 years of life, the more
potent an impact it appears to have on female pubertal
development (Jones et al. 1972; Ellis 2004; Ellis &
Garber 2000; Quinlan 2003; Surbey 1990). The
conditions under which stepfather presence exerts its
influence may also be important, perhaps even
accounting for effects of father absence (Ellis 2004).
Given what has already been stated about relationship
quality more generally and father absence in
particular, it should not be surprising that conflicted
relations between mother and stepfather and early
onset of stepfather presence have been found to be
particularly influential in accelerating pubertal
development in girls (Ellis & Garber 2000).
Discussion of father absence and stepfather
presence should not distract from the fact that
biological fathers seem to matter, too. Consistent with
BSD’s original emphasis on the quality of parent-
child relationships, Ellis et al. (1999) found that the
more time such men spent caring for their daughters
across the child’s first five years of life and the more
they engaged in positive interaction with their
daughters at age five, the more delayed were girls’
pubertal development when followed up around 12
years of age. Given all the evidence considered
through this point regarding relationship influences on
(female) pubertal development, the apparently
important role which males in the family play in
influencing girls’ pubertal maturation should not be
read to imply that mothers and marriages are
unimportant. What the work of Ellis and others
clearly indicates, however, is that there are strong
empirical and theoretical grounds for not treating
461
mother and father as interchangeable agents of
influence when it comes to understanding how
childhood experiences may shape reproductive
strategy and for paying especial attention to the
presence of a biologically unrelated male figure in the
home of a prepubescent girl.
C. Mortality rate, time preference and attachment
Not long after BSD extended Draper and
Harpending’s (1982) thinking about the role of
developmental experience in shaping human
reproductive strategies, Chisholm (1993, 1996, 1999)
further developed this line of theorising about the
human life course; and he did so in three specific
ways, each of which is considered in turn.
1. Local mortality rates.
First, whereas BSD highlighted economic and
marital resources, or the absence thereof, as forces
shaping parenting, attachment and thereby nascent
reproductive strategies, Chisholm (1999) called
attention, following Stearn (1992), to the importance
of local mortality rates. Such information, he argued,
afforded organisms unconscious if not conscious
insight into the relative risk and uncertainty of the
developing child surviving until maturity to bear its
own offspring. Furthermore, as already noted,
initiating reproduction earlier rather than later in life
makes especially good biological sense when the risk
of dying before reproducing is high or, probably more
importantly, perceived to be high.
Several notable findings appear consistent with
Chisholm’s (1999) theorising, though the research in
question was not carried out in direct response to it.
First, Wilson and Daly (1997) found that as life
expectancy declined across Chicago neighbourhoods,
the probability of a woman reproducing by age 30
increased. Similarly, Johns (2003) found that teen
mothers in Gloucestershire (in the United Kingdom)
expected to die at younger ages than did women who
became mothers after their teenage years. Such results
not only accord with Geronimus’ (1996) qualitative
interviews with poor, African-American teen mothers
which reveal their awareness of their risks for an early
death, but also with her “weathering hypothesis”
suggesting that early birth is a strategic response to
the rapid decline in health of these women in their
third and fourth decade of life. Finally, extending the
line of inquiry to parenting and the child’s
development, meta-analytic research on attachment
shows that when a mother experiences the loss of a
loved one through death sometime in her life and this
loss remains emotionally “unresolved”, the likelihood
of her own offspring developing a type of insecure
attachment increases, namely, disorganised
attachment which is defined by the absence of an
organised strategy for co-regulating emotion with the
parent and often involves tendencies to
462 心 理
simultaneously or sequentially avoid and approach the
attachment figure (vanIJzendoorn 1995). Considered
together, these illustrative results highlight the value
in considering local mortality rates as an important
feature of the broader ecology shaping reproductive
strategy.
2. Time preference.
Whereas BSD highlighted the role of interpersonal
orientation, behavioural development and pubertal
timing in mediating the effect of rearing environment,
parenting and attachment security on future mating
and parenting, a second contribution of Chisholm
(1999, p. 135) was to call attention to an additional
psychological mediator linking childhood experience
and reproductive strategy, time preference: “Time
preference is the degree to which people prefer to or
believe they will achieve their desires (i.e., benefits or
consequences of action) now, more-or-less
immediately, or later, at some point in the future.”
Theoretically, individuals living in highly risky and
uncertain environments in which waiting for a reward
might prove to be a “fool’s errand” should opt for
immediate payoffs even when delayed ones would be
greater (Wilson & Daly, 2005). In such circumstances,
they are presumed to be hedging their bets against the
risk that they may not be around to collect the larger
reward. Here, of course, payoff and reward refer to
the likelihood of reproducing.
According to Chisholm (1999), then, time
preference should be regarded as an evolutionary
important psychological construct that is sensitive to
rearing experience and influences future reproductive
functioning, broadly conceived (i.e., mating,
parenting). Evidence that children growing up in more
economically-, socially- and psychologically-
disadvantaged families have a more difficult time
waiting to secure a more attractive reward and are
more inclined to settle for a lesser reward sooner (i.e.,
difficulty delaying gratification) would seem
consistent with Chisholm’s argument about influences
on time preference (e.g., Evans & English 2002;
Lengua 2002).
3. Attachment styles.
A third notable contribution that Chisholm (1996)
made to thinking about developmental influences on
human reproductive strategies involved his
elaboration of the role that BSD attributed to
attachment security in entraining the development of
the most appropriate alternative reproductive
strategies. In addition to reiterating the influential role
BSD and attachment theory more generally accord
warm-sensitive-responsive parenting in shaping
attachment security and, thereby, the child’s
orientation toward others and relationships, Chisholm
(1996) distinguished two different manifestations of
insensitive parenting while theorising that each had
distinctive developmental consequences. Insecure-
学 报 39 卷
resistant attachment, which reflects a strategy of
exaggerating emotional neediness to evoke care and
support, he speculated, arose in reaction to a parent’s
inability to invest, whereas insecure-avoidant
attachment, which reflects a strategy of dampening
communications of emotional need, derived from a
parent’s unwillingness to invest. In a not unrelated
vein, Belsky (1997, 1999) further refined thinking
about the opportunistic-advantage-taking
interpersonal orientation central to the BSD typology,
suggesting that while it was most likely promoted by
insecure-avoidant attachment, insecure-resistance
may have evolved to promote helper-at-the-nest type
behaviour and thus foster in the child emotional and
behavioural dependency on the mother well beyond
the infancy years.
To date, a rather large body of evidence
highlighting the potential role of attachment security
in predicting features of reproductive strategy has
emerged, though rarely has it been cast in such life-
history terms or has it been stimulated by
evolutionary thinking. Two different sets of findings
merit consideration, one linking adult attachment with
sexual behaviour, mating and pair bonding and the
other linking adult attachment with parenting. Before
summarising relevant results of this work, it must be
noted that very little of the research actually tracks
children prospectively from childhood into adulthood.
With this important caveat in mind, it remains of
theoretical significance that self assessments of
attachment security in the context of romantic
relationships, presumed to be shaped at least in part
by rearing history, systematically relate to a variety of
aspects of sexual behaviour, mating and pair bonding
in a manner consistent with BSD theorising. With
respect to sexual attitudes and behaviour, individuals
self-classified as secure are less likely to endorse
promiscuous sexual behaviour (Brennan et al. 1998)
or to engage in one-night stands or extra-pair sexual
liaisons (Brennan & Shaver 1995; Hazan et al. 1994,
as cited in Kirkpatrick 1998). One study, in fact,
showed that over a hypothetical 30-year period, males
and females with secure attachment orientation
ideally desired only one romantic partner (Miller &
Fishkin 1997), less than those with insecure
orientations. Related work further indicates that in the
case of females, attachment security is associated with
an older age of first sexual intercourse (Bogaert &
Sadava 2002).
Turning to consideration of pair bonding and
relationship processes, one consistent finding
pertinent to this analysis of attachment and
reproductive strategy is that self-reported relationship
satisfaction is greater when individuals describe
themselves as secure rather than dismissing (i.e., the
adult form of insecure-avoidant) or preoccupied (i.e.,
the adult from of insecure-resistant) (e.g., Davilia et al.
3期 Jay Belsky. Experience in Childhood and the Development of Reproductive Strategies
1999; Feeney 2000; Milkulincer et al. 2002).
Moreover, higher scores on dismissing-avoidant
attachment predict lower levels of marital quality,
both reported and observed (Shaver & Mikulincer
2002). Observational research also indicates that
secure partners manifest less negative affect, less
avoidant nonverbal behaviour, and more constructive
conversation patterns in response to their partners’
distancing behaviour (e.g., Feeney 1998; Rholes et al.
1998). These findings are consistent with related
results showing that attachment security predicts
greater communication levels within close
relationships in adulthood (Collins & Read 1990),
including greater self-disclosure to the romantic
partner and responsiveness to the partner’s self
disclosure (Collins & Read 1990; Kobak & Hazan
1991; Mikulincer & Nachson 1991). Such findings
can be meaningfully interpreted as reflecting the BSD
view that security promotes a mutually-beneficial
interpersonal orientation (as opposed to an
opportunistic-advantage-taking one).
In light of the findings just summarised and the
interpretation offered, it seems almost
commonsensical that secure individuals prove less
likely to get divorced or separated from their romantic
partners (e.g., Hazan & Shaver 1987; Kirkpatrick &
Hazan 1994); have longer lasting relationships (Hazan
& Shaver 1987; Kirkpatrick & Davis 1994;
Kirkpatrick & Hazan 1994); and manifest greater
levels of commitment to and trust of their partners,
irrespective of whether they are dating (Brennan &
Shaver 1995; Levy & Davis 1988; Pistole 1989;
Pistole & Clark 1995; Simpson 1990) or married
(Feeney 1994; Feeney et al. 1994; Fuller & Fincham
1995; Kobak & Hazan 1991). In sum, the data suggest,
consistent with evolutionary theorising (Belsky et al.
1991; Belsky 1997; Chisholm 1996; 1999) and
attachment theory more generally, that attachment
orientation in adulthood is systematically related to
sexual behaviour, mating and pair bonding processes.
What about parental investment? When it comes to
linking attachment in adulthood with this aspect of
reproductive strategy, investigators stand on
somewhat firmer ground, basically because the
methodology used for measuring adult attachment in
this body of work, the Adult Attachment Interview
(George et al. 1985), has been found to capture
variation that is itself predicted by attachment
measured in the opening years of life in prospective
longitudinal research (Hamilton 2000; Waters et al.
2000). It would be mistaken to conclude, however,
that continuity inevitably characterises the
developmental process with respect to attachment
security, as such continuity has not always been
detected (Lewis et al. 2000; Weinfield et al. 2000) or
has been found to be contingent on events and
experiences transpiring—or not transpiring—after
463
early childhood (Fraley 2002; Hamilton 2000;Waters
et al. 2000).
With respect to the parental investment component
of reproductive strategy, evidence indicates that
parents classified as autonomous-secure and thus
presumed (but not demonstrated) in the relevant
studies to have experienced supportive rearing
environments while growing up, parent their offspring
in a more supportive, sensitive manner. Such a
parenting style is indicative of higher parental
investment than that rendered by parents who
manifest insecure internal working models of
attachment in adulthood. More specifically, security
has been linked to more warmth and appropriate
structuring of the child’s learning environment for
both mothers and fathers (Adam, Gunnar & Tanaka,
2004; Cohn et al. 1992) and to greater provision by
mothers of emotional support in a variety of contexts
(Crowell & Feldman 1988, 1991), less negativity
(Slade et al. 1999; Adam et al., 2004), along with
greater sensitivity to the child’s needs and states (Das
Eiden et al. 1995). In sum, then, not only is adult
attachment security related to mating and pair
bonding processes in social-psychological research, it
is also related to presumptive indices of parental
investment in developmental research.
Work on the intergenerational transmission of
parenting that is not carried out within an attachment
tradition is also of relevance to this discussion, as a
central idea underpinning BSD thinking is that
childhood rearing experiences shape psychological,
behavioural and even somatic development, including
attachment security. Moreover, these effects are
themselves considered to influence parental
investment when children become parents themselves.
Studies pertaining to the intergenerational
transmission of parenting typically focus upon child
abuse and neglect by means of retrospective designs
or involve prospective follow ups in young adulthood
of teenagers at risk for criminal careers (for reviews,
see Belsky & Jaffee, in press; Serbin & Karp 2003).
Consistent with the results of such research, there is
evidence from prospective studies beginning in
childhood that harsh, inconsistent and unsupportive
parenting (Caspi & Elder 1988), as well as sensitive-
warm-stimulating parenting (Belsky et al. 2005), is
transmitted across generations. Importantly, as in the
work on the transmission of child maltreatment across
generations, continuity is by no means inevitable,
underscoring the important point that developments
later in life are a function of both early and
subsequent experience. Perhaps as important as that
observation is that the intergenerational transmission
of harsh parenting seems to be mediated by antisocial
and problematic child behaviour which can certainly
be conceptualised, within the BSD framework, as a
form of opportunistic-advantage taking (e.g., Capaldi
464 心 理
et al. 2003; Conger et al. 2003; Thornberry et al.
2003).
IV. Conclusion
Even though a great deal of mainstream
developmental psychology is devoted to
understanding whether and how experiences in
childhood shape psychological and behavioural
development later in life, little theoretical attention
has been paid to why such cross-time influences
should characterize human development. This is
especially true with respect to the well-studied
determinants of mating, pair bonding and parenting.
Theoretically, Draper and Harpending (1982), Belsky
et al. (1991), Ellis (2004) and Chisholm (1996) have
all addressed this lacunae, stimulating research on
linkages between childhood experience and
reproductive strategy. Concern for experiential effects
on pubertal timing distinguishes this line of inquiry
from more traditional developmental studies because,
as already noted, an evolutionary perspective suggests
that experiences in the family might affect somatic
development. Fifteen years since BSD advanced their
“uncanny” prediction, it seems clear that this pubertal
timing, at least in females, is related to selected
aspects of early family experience (Ellis, 2004).
BSD theorised that this would be the case because
pubertal timing more or less mediates linkages
between experiences in childhood and reproductive
functioning later in development. Ellis (2004, p. 947)
recently questioned this proposition, arguing that (a)
while family experiences do predict pubertal timing
(in girls) and, independently, other reproductive-
strategy-relevant outcomes, (b) pubertal timing does
not itself predict important features of reproductive
strategy that BSD stipulates it should. Most critically,
he commented, “although earlier timing of puberty
clearly predicts earlier onset of major forms of sexual
experience and reproduction”-- meaning age at first
dating, kissing, petting, and engaging in sexual
intercourse, as well as increased rates of teenage
pregnancy and even first birth in natural fertility
populations—“there is currently no empirical basis
for the hypothesis that earlier timing of puberty leads
to a more unrestricted sociosexual orientation,
unstable pairbonds, greater number of sexual partners,
or lower parental investment.” With only six studies
addressing the latter issues, none of which
longitudinally follow individuals from childhood,
Ellis (2004) appropriately acknowledged that “more
research is needed.”
But would there still be grounds for casting aside
BSD thinking in exchange for an alternative model of
adaptive human development offered by Ellis (2004)
(see below) even if the data base were larger and
remained consistent with Ellis’s (2004) analysis of
what the currently available evidence (i.e., six studies)
学 报 39 卷
does and does not show? The answer to this question
would have to be “no” were the research carried out
in the same manner as the six studies underpinning
Ellis’ (2004) conclusion. This is because neither these
studies nor Ellis (2004) takes account of a critically
important qualification of BSD’s evolutionary theory
of socialisation.
Even though Belsky et al. (1991) presented their
developmental-trajectories’ model of reproductive
strategies as a linearly sequenced one with one event
or process (e.g., attachment security) contributing to
the one immediately subsequent to it (e.g.,
interpersonal orientation) in a simple and linear chain
of causation (i.e., A B C D…), they explicitly
raised the prospect that an alternative model might
more accurately capture the complex dynamics of
human development. None of the six studies cited by
Ellis (2004) considered this alternative model, nor did
Ellis (2004) himself.
The alternative model offered by Belsky et al.
(1991) was a conditional probability one. Instead of
any link in the causal developmental chain being
solely or even principally a function of the
immediately preceding link (i.e., A B, B C, C D),
or even an earlier link (i.e., A C, B D), each
development in the sequence could be a function of
the co-occurrence of multiple previous links in the
chain of causation (i.e., A × B C; B × C D).
Thus, even though pubertal timing might not, in and
of itself, directly predict the mating, pair bonding
and/or parenting outcomes that Ellis (2004) regards as
critical for substantiating BSD thinking, it might
nevertheless do so in interaction with developments
prior to puberty (e.g., attachment insecurity,
opportunistic interpersonal orientation) or thereafter
(e.g., early onset of sexual activity).
In fact, the latter and highly likely possibility would
be perfectly consistent with Sroufe’s (1988) argument
that development is a function of both early and more
contemporaneous experience. Were it to be the case,
then, that pubertal timing influences mating, pair
bonding and parenting principally in interaction with
other factors and forces, assessments of only direct
effects of pubertal timing on these features of
reproductive strategy--such as those examined in the
six available studies-- would simply not be in position
to detect its impact on reproductively strategic
behaviour.
All this is not to say that Ellis’ (2004) alternative
model of evolutionarily adaptive developmental
pathways does not merit serious consideration.
According to his “child development” theory of
pubertal timing, even though family experiences
shape age of menarche and, independently, adult
reproductive strategy (e.g., pair bonding, parental
investment), pubertal timing does not mediate the
linkage between childhood experience and adult
3期 Jay Belsky. Experience in Childhood and the Development of Reproductive Strategies
reproductive strategy, as postulated by BSD. And this
is because, as already noted, pubertal timing has not
(yet) been found to predict “qualitative aspects of
mating and parenting strategies, independent of age at
onset of sexual and reproductive events” (Ellis 2004,
p. 48, emphasis added). Although it remains unclear
why pubertal timing must operate in such a way (i.e.,
independent of age of first sex) to be legitimately
conceived as part and parcel of the development of
reproductive strategy, Ellis (2004) provocatively
argues that childhood experiences influence the
duration of childhood, serving to abbreviate it (via
accelerated pubertal timing) when family social
resources are limited and extend it (via delayed
maturation) when family resources are relatively
abundant. Under the former conditions, he theorises,
nature has designed development to move the child
out of the family and into the world of peers when the
family’s capacity to enhance the child’s competitive
advantage is limited. In contrast, under higher-
resource conditions, an extended childhood serves to
increase the time that children can benefit from
parental investment. Thus, children “should be
selected to capitalize on the benefits of high-quality
parental investment, and to reduce the costs of low-
quality parental investment, by contingently altering
the period of growth and development prior to
reproductive maturity” (p. 947). Important to note, in
closing, is that irrespective of whether one embraces
Ellis’ (2004) reconceptualisation of BSD’s uncanny
prediction linking social-developmental experiences
in the family to pubertal timing (i.e., as just
terminating childhood rather than facilitating mating,
pair bonding and parenting), the fact remains that he,
just like Draper and Harpending (1982), Belsky et al.
(1991) and Chisholm (1996), regards early
experiences in the family as playing an influential role
in shaping human reproductive strategy. This remains
an all-too-uncommon way of thinking about
development within the field of developmental
psychology.
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