(April 19, 2016 at 12:42 am)TheRocketSurgeon Wrote:Agreed.(April 18, 2016 at 7:37 pm)AJW333 Wrote: I'm not in favour of child or adolescent sex or marriage, but I would be interested to know from an evolutionary point of view, why it is wrong for biologically able people to engage in sexual activity before the government-approved age. If you have sexual maturity, why is it "wrong" to use it? Doesn't natural selection indicate that sex at 12 or 13 is normal?
What we do biologically because we can does not make it something we should condone as a society. Yes, in a time when disease and other privations made it hard to survive past 30 (and often, to full adulthood), it would be beneficial to allow for reproduction at a young age like 12-13. That does not mean that, given our understanding of the development of the brain and of child psychology, that we must therefore ignore the damage that can be done to children by the actions of adults-- damage they may not realize is occurring, at the time, because of the lack of brain development (and thus decision-making ability) that they have available when young.
Quote:You are the only person in this entire conversation who genuinely thinks that because something was Naturally Selected for the human race, in the past hundreds of thousands of years of our evolutionary development, that it's a good thing for our society.I didn't say it was a good thing, I was suggesting that for those who follow evolution and natural selection, that it logically follows that a species should reproduce as when it was physically able to.
Quote:Xenophobia (tribalism) and hatred of "The Other" is wired into our genes, for the same reason--we developed as a tribal species--but it does not mean we should be trying to harm one another on the basis of their differences. We play sports like football, instead.But xenophobia keeps the earth's population down to manageable levels. All those wars and starvation has to be good for the overall survival of the planet right? I mean, if the earth's population levels keep rising, there will be nothing left for anyone.
