Are y'all ready to have a knee-jerk response? Ready to hate the pedos? Please take a moment to actually read and consider my point.
One thing that separates human beings from all other species is that we don't start mating at puberty, because adolescent humans are still children for years afterward. Anyone who doubts this fact needs only to observe any randomly selected group of teenagers, and those still in doubt are invited to consult any randomly selected study on human brain development. We may be biologically capable of mating at puberty, but our society bans that behavior because young humans are broadly immature.
So goes popular opinion. But suppose we have confused cause and effect. Suppose young humans are broadly immature because our society bans mating at puberty.
After all, it wasn't always this way. For the vast majority of human history, and in all probability the entirety of prehistory, human beings did start mating at puberty, or shortly thereafter. That was back when we matured faster. And we had to mature faster back then, because most people were dead before 35, right? Actually no, the average lifespan was skewed lower only because of the high infant mortality rate, and those who survived to puberty lived on average nearly as long as we live today.
So what caused us to mature so much faster back then? Or rather, seeing as how it's normal among species to mature at puberty, what has caused our age of maturity to become so delayed?
An adolescent thrust into parenthood may be forced to grow up fast, but that doesn't alter the fact that their brain is still developing. Yet a brain still in development doesn't prohibit generally mature behavior.
I hope we someday discover how to promote additional brain development throughout the entirety of life. If a brain continued to develop past menopause, then at what age should we set the Age of Consent? Do we want to develop a culture in which everyone in their 20s acts childish and is socially and legally considered to be a child?
Maturity is not gained instantaneously because it requires experience attempting to be mature. And the longer we spend acting as children, the more time it then takes for us to break old habits and learn how to act as adults. My opinion is that we would become a culture of mature and responsible people if we were to encourage adolescents to reproduce.
