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Science & technology | Testosterone and family life

Fatherless sons have more testosterone

That has implications for paternal care

Family on a walk at a nature park near the Chesapeake Bay in
Maryland.Family on a walk at a nature park near the Chesapeake Bay in
Maryland.
Jun 1st 2022 (Updated Jun 3rd 2022)
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Most males in the animal kingdom do little parenting. Their strategy
is simple: inseminate as many females as possible and hope for the
best. Sometimes, though, parental investment by a male pays off.
Songbird chicks are usually tended by both mother and father. Wolf
packs see alpha males and females collaborate to raise the cubs. And
in human beings, too, the children's father hangs around to lend a
hand in bringing up the kids.

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Sometimes.

Understanding why some men settle down to form families with the
mothers of their children, and others don't, is normally seen as the
prerogative of social science. But biology has a role, too. And work
just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, by Lee Gettler of the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana,
clarifies how part of that biological mechanism, testosterone,
operates.

Previous studies suggest that high levels of testosterone, the
principal male hormone, are bad for family life. Fathers with lower
testosterone levels provide more child care and are better partners
to the children's mothers. Indeed, fatherhood is often associated
with a drop in testosterone levels. Conversely, high-testosterone
males are less likely to stick around.

Dr Gettler has shown something further. This is that a man's adult
testosterone level seems correlated with whether his father was
present during his teenage years. His data come from a survey begun
in Cebu City, in the Philippines, in 1983. This monitored the health
and nutrition of 966 men enrolled as babies. It also collected
extensive information on whether the fathers of these men were around
and providing parental care in the households in which they were
brought up. It further documented whether participants got married,
had children and, if they did, whether they participated in child
care. Crucially, it also measured their testosterone levels at the
ages of 21, 26 and 30.

Overall, Dr Gettler and his colleagues found that on becoming
fathers, men had lower testosterone levels if their own fathers had
lived with them and been involved in their care during their teenage
years. Specifically, if that had happened, testosterone levels in
their saliva were 16% below those of men whose fathers had not stuck
around to help raise them.

This difference has two possible explanations. One is that it is
directly genetic, with high-testosterone fathers (those least likely
to stick around) begetting high-testosterone sons. In this case the
correlation with paternal absence would be a coincidence. The other
is that teenage experience actually modulates testosterone levels.
This explanation, which Dr Gettler favours, could lead to a vicious
circle of high-testosterone men abandoning their sons, who thus
become high-testosterone in their turn.

Testosterone levels are not, Dr Gettler found, completely
deterministic in the matter of parental care. Some of those in the
survey whose fathers were absent during their adolescence, and who
ended up with high levels of the hormone, did nevertheless became
nurturing parents. But they are indicative.

Why this pattern should pertain is an unanswered question. But a
zoologist looking at these data might be tempted to see in them an
example of developmental plasticity, in which the same genes produce
different, but appropriate, outcomes in different circumstances.

If nurturing young carries a cost in reproductive opportunities
forgone elsewhere (which it presumably does), then it would not have
been favoured by evolution in times of uncertainty--the sorts of times
that lead to early death. A dead man cannot care for his children,
and dead children cannot be cared for. Better, evolutionarily
speaking, to spread your genes far and wide while you can. Since the
absence of a father could, in turn, mark such uncertain times, for
that absence to trigger a high-testosterone developmental pathway
encouraging this would make sense, even if it is not appropriate to
the modern world.

That is speculation. But whatever the truth, Dr Gettler's discovery
surely throws a useful light on the problem of fatherless families,
and how to try to end it. #

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Simply Science, our weekly newsletter.

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the
print edition under the headline "Like father, like son?"

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