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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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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