Your Environment Changes Your Manliness
What makes a man a man? Nature or nurture? That’s a question that could quite quickly become divorced from anything empirical and quickly stray into philosophy. But staying strictly in the world of biology and chemistry, the answer is a little of both.
A new study published by the scientific journal, Nature Ecology & Evolution, titled Childhood ecology influences salivary testosterone pubertal age and stature of Bangladeshi UK migrant men, has found a link between the affluence of where men live and their testosterone levels. Initial findings in a previous study had already given this indication, but the new study wanted to find out exactly when and where this occurred in our life cycle.
The conclusion was that adult hormone levels were actually set later in childhood. But how did the team discover this? And how would economics and money change how many hormones someone has?
Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Kesson Magid and his co-authors drew their sample from guys who trace their heritage from Sylhet in Bangladesh and had moved to London at various life stages, as well as men who hadn’t been lured away from their hometown by the promise of high rent. The findings were that men who spent more time in Bangladesh were shorter than their counterparts who grew up in the UK. The basis of their study was something called Life History Theory, which seeks to explain the differences in timings of life events of different living things for stuff like feeding, nurturing and death. According to the theory, the timing of these events can be seen as a “complete description” of the organism. But a component of the theory is concerned with “trade-offs”. A human child, for example, spends more time doing nothing but eating up resources and growing than a juvenile primate. That longer time spent growing means we end up with a brain that can make a spaceship rather than a brain that just knows how to open bananas.
So for these subjects who came from Bangladesh, it’s hypothesized that the trade off of hormone production may have been for immunities to their local environment back in Bangladesh. Interestingly, children of these migrants who grew up in the UK, didn’t just get the same level of testosterone as their anglo-saxon brethren, they got more. This overcompensation doesn’t just mean deeper voices and higher natural vantage points, it also has possible health ramifications. These next generations may be at higher risk of prostate issues. Our environment impacts us on such deep levels and in varying ways across generations and age groups, that it makes you really think twice about the world we’re creating for ourselves and making sure it’s as good as it could possibly be.