Next week in the series on Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health
Tuesday November 13 at 4 pm in Room 1775 SPH I
The long reach of childhood: Why does experience in early-life have such a big effect on adult behavior?
Co-director of the Centre for Behaviour & Evolution, Newcastle University.
Associate Editor, Evolution and Human Behavior
Talk abstract: People who experience adversity in early-life grow up to become adults who are more prone to stress-related illness, are more impulsive, and reproduce younger than their peers. Evolutionary accounts of these effects are based on the idea that early experience predicts the environmental conditions which will the individual will face as an adult, and so it is adaptive to calibrate behaviour accordingly. I will present data on the effects of early life on adult behaviour, and propose a slightly different evolutionary explanation for them based partly on the idea that the bodies of people who experience early adversity weather less well than those whose early circumstances are more benign.
Talk abstract: People who experience adversity in early-life grow up to become adults who are more prone to stress-related illness, are more impulsive, and reproduce younger than their peers. Evolutionary accounts of these effects are based on the idea that early experience predicts the environmental conditions which will the individual will face as an adult, and so it is adaptive to calibrate behaviour accordingly. I will present data on the effects of early life on adult behaviour, and propose a slightly different evolutionary explanation for them based partly on the idea that the bodies of people who experience early adversity weather less well than those whose early circumstances are more benign.
