Jones James Holland
Department of Anthropological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA.
Am J Hum Biol. 2005 Jan-Feb;17(1):22-33. doi: 10.1002/ajhb.20099.
Fetal programming is an ontogenetic phenomenon of increasing interest to human biologists. Because the downstream consequences of fetal programming have clear impacts on specific life-history traits (e.g., age at first reproduction and the general age-pattern of reproductive investments), a number of authors have raised the question of the adaptive significance of fetal programming. In this paper, I review in some detail several classical models in life-history theory and discuss their relative merits and weaknesses for human biology. I suggest that an adequate model of human life-history evolution must account for the highly structured nature of the human life cycle, with its late age at first reproduction, large degree of iteroparity, highly overlapping generations, and extensive, post-weaning parental investment. I further suggest that an understanding of stochastic demography is essential for answering the question of the adaptive significance of fetal programming, and specifically the finding of low birth weight on smaller adult body size and earlier age at first reproduction. Using a stage-structured stochastic population model, I show that the downstream consequences of early deprivation may be "making the best of a bad start" rather than an adaptation per se. When a high-investment strategy entails survival costs, the alternate strategy of early reproduction with relatively low investment may have higher fitness than trying to play the high-investment strategy and failing.
胎儿编程是一种日益引起人类生物学家关注的个体发育现象。由于胎儿编程的下游后果对特定生活史特征（如首次繁殖的年龄和生殖投资的总体年龄模式）有明显影响，一些作者提出了胎儿编程的适应性意义问题。在本文中，我将详细回顾生活史理论中的几个经典模型，并讨论它们在人类生物学中的相对优缺点。我认为，一个适当的人类生活史进化模型必须考虑到人类生命周期的高度结构化性质，包括首次繁殖年龄较晚、多次繁殖程度较高、世代高度重叠以及断奶后广泛的亲代投资。我进一步认为，理解随机人口统计学对于回答胎儿编程的适应性意义问题至关重要，特别是低出生体重对较小成年体型和较早首次繁殖年龄的影响。使用一个阶段结构随机种群模型，我表明早期剥夺的下游后果可能是“从糟糕的开端中做到最好”，而不是一种本身的适应。当高投资策略需要生存成本时，相对低投资的早期繁殖替代策略可能比试图采用高投资策略但失败具有更高的适应性。
