How does the body know when it’s time to start puberty, or when to stop a growth spurt, for example? A lot of these things are pretty hereditary, so presumably it’s mostly genetic rather than environmental, but how does the body measure time? How does it know “this is tall enough”?
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Short answer: signals from the environment, whether that be the cellular environment and/or the physical environment (they aren’t completely separated anyway). These signals tell DNA to do certain things. That includes to stop growing. If we’re talking about a genetically determined level of height where malnutrition is not stunting growth then it’s absolutely something in the cellular environment telling certain cells to stop producing whatever they are that is causing growth.
Detailed mechanistic scientific answer: I have no fucking clue but it’s cool.
Time is measured by telomeres in cells. But its more how many times have the cell divided into new cells.
>A telomere is a region of repetitive DNA sequences at the end of a chromosome. Telomeres protect the ends of chromosomes from becoming frayed or tangled. Each time a cell divides, the telomeres become slightly shorter. Eventually, they become so short that the cell can no longer divide successfully, and the cell dies.
It doesn’t. There are no countdown timers in your body that signal when certain developmental steps should start or end. It’s just feedback loops and certain processes triggering other processes.
Let’s consider height. During childhood, your bones are able to get longer because they have growth plates at the end where new bone can be formed. As long as those plates are there, the bone will keep getting longer. During puberty, one of the processes that gets triggered is the closure of the growth plates. At the same time as the closure happens, you also go through your pubertal growth spurt. Now it’s a race over how much growth you can achieve before the plates close. So you don’t stop getting taller because you hit some predetermined height, you are as tall as you are because that is when the plates closed and you couldn’t grow anymore.
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