•  57
    Early stress predicts age at menarche and first birth, adult attachment, and expected lifespan
    with Julie A. Quinlivan, Rodney W. Petersen, and David A. Coall
    Human Nature 16 (3): 233-265. 2005.
    Life history theory suggests that in risky and uncertain environments the optimal reproductive strategy is to reproduce early in order to maximize the probability of leaving any descendants at all. The fact that early menarche facilitates early reproduction provides an adaptationist rationale for our first two hypotheses: that women who experience more risky and uncertain environments early in life would have (1) earlier menarche and (2) earlier first births than women who experience less stress…Read more
  •  35
    Attachment and time preference
    Human Nature 10 (1): 51-83. 1999.
    This paper investigates hypotheses drawn from two sources: (1) Belsky, Steinberg, and Draper’s (1991) attachment theory model of the development of reproductive strategies, and (2) recent life history models and comparative data suggesting that environmental risk and uncertainty may be potent determinants of the optimal tradeoff between current and future reproduction. A retrospective, self-report study of 136 American university women aged 19–25 showed that current recollections of early stress…Read more
  •  24
    Evolution, attachment, and cultural learning
    with Noel Wescombe
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4): 778-779. 1994.
  •  18
    Does Early Psychosocial Stress Affect Mate Choice?
    with Nicole Koehler
    Human Nature 20 (1): 52-66. 2009.
    Early psychosocial stress (e.g., parental divorce, abuse) is conjectured to place individuals on a developmental trajectory leading to earlier initiation of sexual activity, earlier reproduction, and having more sex partners than those with less early psychosocial stress. But does it also affect an individual’s mate choice? The present study examined whether early psychosocial stress affects preferences and dislikes for opposite-sex faces varying in masculinity/femininity, a putative indicator o…Read more
  •  15
    Navajo Infancy: An Ethological Study of Child Development
    British Journal of Educational Studies 33 (2): 193-195. 1985.
  •  11
    Two reviews of Death, Hope and Sex in Vol. 29 of this journal revealed some limitations in their authors' understanding of basic principles of evolutionary ecology and life history theory. Amin and Thompson's review criticized my model of the contingent development of alternative reproductive strategies as (1) being too strong, (2) being too mentalistic, (3) being too reliant on the flawed optimality assumption, (4) committing the Naturalistic Fallacy, and (5) ignoring group selection arguments.…Read more
  •  8
    Whose reproductive value?
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (3): 519-520. 1991.
  •  8
    Mother–infant cultural group selection
    with David A. Coall and Leslie Atkinson
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39. 2016.
  •  5
    Current versus future, not genes versus parenting
    with David A. Coall
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (4): 597-598. 2000.
    Gangestad & Simpson's model of the evolution of within-sex differences in reproductive strategies requires a degree of female choice that probably did not exist because of male coercion. We argue as well that the tradeoff between current and future reproduction accounts for more of the within-sex differences in reproductive strategies than the “good-genes-good parenting” tradeoff they propose.
  •  4
    The evolutionary ecology of attachment organization
    Human Nature 7 (1): 1-37. 1996.
    Life history theory’s principle of allocation suggests that because immature organisms cannot expend reproductive effort, the major trade-off facing juveniles will be the one between survival, on one hand, and growth and development, on the other. As a consequence, infants and children might be expected to possess psychobiological mechanisms for optimizing this trade-off. The main argument of this paper is that the attachment process serves this function and that individual differences in attach…Read more
  •  3
    Fascinating and controversial examination of how evolutionary theory sheds light on human nature using reproductive issues as a focus.