ArticleBiology letters2015
Father's death does not affect growth and maturation but hinders reproduction: evidence from adolescent girls in post-war Estonia.
Article in Biology letters, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 9 citations in OpenAlex.
- Anthropometrics of Estonian children in relation to family disruption: Thrifty phenotype and Trivers-Willard effects.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2021Article
- Parents of early-maturing girls die younger.Evolutionary applications · 2019Article
- Cross-cultural evidence does not support universal acceleration of puberty in father-absent households.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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Abstract
The popular concept of predictive-adaptive responses poses that girls growing up without a father present in the family mature and start reproduction earlier because the father's absence is a cue for environmental harshness and uncertainty that favours switching to a precocious life-history strategy. Most studies supporting this concept have been performed in situations where the father's absence is caused by divorce or abandonment. Using a dataset of Estonian adolescent girls who had lost their fathers over the period of World War II, we show that father's death did not affect the rate of pubertal maturation (assessed on the basis of development of breasts and axillary hair) or growth. Father's death did not affect the age of first birth but, contrary to predictions, reduced lifetime reproductive success. Our findings thus do not support the concept of predictive-adaptive responses and suggest that alternative explanations for covariation between fatherlessness and early maturation are required.
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