The totality of the DNA of a zygote — that is, its genome — comes into existence at the time of fertilization. The DNA in the zygote's nucleus comprises genes (specific DNA sequences) from both its parents, 50-50, but this particular combination of genes has never been seen before and will never be again.
Most genomes, including all human genomes, have aging and death built into the program. All die sooner or later. A few survive until their program has fully unfolded and reached its end.
Stages of human development
Development begins in the zygote and continues until death. There's no universally agreed-upon definition of the development stages (although two milestone events — birth and, for females, the onset of menstruation — are universally acknowledged), and the age range at which a person passes from one stage to the next is wide. Change is more or less continuous through life, and different organ systems undergo significant changes on their own development timetable. However, conventionally in human biology, the development milestones that mark the stages are based on developments in the nervous and reproductive systems.Dimensions of human development
The structural and physiological changes that happen during human development include an increase in size, the acquisition of some specialized abilities, and the loss of some other specialized abilities continuously throughout life. When all goes well, senescence (aging) is the final stage of development.The following sections assume an organism for whom all is going well, biologically speaking: no fatal errors in the genome itself and adequate resources to sustain nutrition, thermoregulation, and all the rest of the life-maintaining physiological reactions.
Growth in human development
Part of human development involves an increase in size. Increased size is primarily accomplished by the growth of organs that exist in some form in the embryo: The heart grows larger, the brain grows larger, and the bones get longer and heavier. The organs grow by building more of their own tissues, and tissues get bigger by adding cells or increasing cell size. Everything (well, almost everything — there are always exceptions in biology!) grows together, mostly by adding cells.However, not everything grows equally. Different stages of development are characterized by different proportions of tissue types. For example, both the brain and the skeletal muscle increase in size from infancy to adulthood, but the proportion of muscle tissue to brain tissue is much higher in adulthood.
When a three-dimensional object such as a living body increases in size, the surface-to-volume ratio decreases. (Or, to put it another way, the volume-to-surface ratio increases — more of your inside parts are dependent on fewer of your outside parts to interact directly with your environment.) The size of a human body strongly influences thermoregulation, fluid balance, and other key aspects of homeostasis.
Differentiation during human development
For humans, the acquisition of new abilities or improvements in existing abilities is part of development. New physiological abilities come about usually because of cell and tissue differentiation (function specialization). Tissue specialization begins in the pre-embryonic stage. A newborn has some version of more or less all the cell and tissue types, but many fully differentiated cells must be generated and integrated functionally into tissues at appropriate stages of development.Lots of human body functions aren't "learned" but "developed." The ability to digest starch, for example, is acquired during the first year of life, when the body starts producing the necessary enzymes — not when someone teaches a baby how. Toilet training is more about the maturity of the nervous system than the diligence of the parents. The acquisition of a new skill, structure, or process is sometimes accompanied by the loss of existing abilities. A young adult is better at planning than a teenager but has most likely lost some stamina for all-nighters, parties, and road trips. The stages of human development can be characterized by these abilities gained and lost.
Among many aspects of development research, brain research has yielded very interesting data in recent years, aided by advanced imaging technology (see Chapter 1). In the late 1990s, the decades-old doctrine that humans don't generate any new brain cells after birth was definitively shown to be false. Data from many different kinds of studies since then have indicated that the human brain is plastic (capable of change and development) well into old age.
Senescence during human development
According to recent theories, age-related decline in specialized and even basic physiological functions is built into new genomes right at the start. Structures at the ends of the chromosomes called telomeres, which get shorter and shorter as a genome ages, control the number of times the genome can replicate. Gradually, cells lose the ability to divide. The number of aged and dying cells in a tissue eventually exceeds the number of new cells of their type being made to replace them. The tissue loses its ability to function, which impairs the organism's survival.The aging processes are an active area of research in anatomy and physiology. In recent decades, therapies and devices to counter aging's effects have dominated the medical products marketplace worldwide.