...Largely because scientists, while brilliant in their fields, can be fucking retarded in other ways.
Yeah, I said it.
For quite a while now, scientists and statisticians alike (for they are indeed very different, as anyone who's ever requested demographic numbers on anything can tell you,) have been bemoaning the declining birth rate in Western nations.
They've studied, brainstormed, discussed ad nauseam, and still, the conclusion remains the same: across the spectrum of developed nations, the birth rate is declining steadily, and despite many theories, no-one's come up with anything concrete that explains it. (The United States is #124 in the world, and a large portion of its rank is made up of children of ethnic minorities.)
Hold on to that thought.
Recently, studies by other scientists completely unconnected to the folks studying declining birth rates have discovered a startling and (to some,) disturbing trend: girls in Western nations are hitting puberty earlier.
The evidence is incontrovertible; where previously - as recently as the 1990's - the average age for onset of puberty was between 14 and 15, now it is around 12.
This is a change of 3 years in the global average, in less than 20 years; it has dropped IN A SINGLE GENERATION by about 20%.
That's a change of staggering magnitude.
In fact, as many as 10% of Caucasian girls, 15% of Hispanic girls, and 25% of African-descended girls have hit puberty by age seven.
Again, science is stumped.
Theories are advanced, much hypothesizing is done, and there is much wringing of hands in the segments of the scientific community studying this phenomenon; but no concrete reason for this has yet been found.
Don't worry, I am here for that.
See, these two segments of the scientific communities don't talk much.
And that's a problem.
Because if they did, they'd notice that the two are tied together.
Whatever force is in control of our biological processes as a species, be it conscious guidance (God,) or "natural processes," whatever those are in the absence of a designer, nature - make that Nature - responds to stimuli.
For whatever reason, our species, at least in the West, is declining, and that's apparently not in the cards.
So, Nature is reacting, by increasing the years available for females to reproduce.
Also, I might add, doing a bang-up job of making said reproduction more likely; no matter how frank and honest their parents are, there are precious few seven (!) year olds who are emotionally equipped to make informed, rational reproductive decisions.
Which means that when they are suddenly assaulted by a flood of hormones driving their bodies to change in ways they aren't ready for, emotions they don't know what to do with, and sensations they don't understand but like a WHOLE LOT, they are likely to make, instead, uninformed, irrational, bad, stupid reproductive decisions.
See, Nature doesn't care about our child-rearing environments.
It DOES, however, care for our continued viability as a species, which is primarily represented by our number of surviving offspring.
If we're reproducing successfully, then we are a successful species.
Thus, we are presented by a situation in which our females - the single limiting factor on the number of offspring - enter childbearing age sooner, and remain in it longer.
See, men can impregnate essentially as many women as they can convince to sleep with them; in theory, several per day.
But once a woman gets pregnant, she stays that way until the child is born, thus removing her from the breeding pool until she delivers the child, recovers, and returns to "availability."
Thus, affecting the number of MEN has far lesser effect on the population as a whole.
But affecting WOMEN changes the entire dynamic.
Now, our Western cultural mores are an historical anomaly.
Follow along with me, here; rest assured, I have a point.
In the past, girls were frequently married off, and bearing children, as young as 11 or 12; particularly during periods of greatly reduced population. (As witness, the explosion of population growth that followed the Black Plague.)
The simple, albeit repulsive to Western sensibilities, rule has almost always been, throughout human history: "if there's grass on the field..."
Only since the growth of industrial civilization, and the concomitant advances in medical technology, have women truly gained any measure of equality.
Only since the advent of our recent (~200 years) technological advancement have we, as a species, had the LUXURY of having women as a group able to choose NOT to bear children; our notion that anything under 18 is "underage" is incredibly recent.
Bear also in mind that it is only in the last century that we have seen such massive cultural overspecialization that our children can remain so until they are 18 - and in many cases beyond. In an agrarian culture, based primarily around subsistence farming, every available hand is needed; children begin working from the time they can perform a task at all, because their help is required.
In the world that was, a girl of 14 was typically already a wife and mother.
In the world that is, a girl of 14 is just beginning to learn how to be a woman at all.
But our culture - that tolerant culture that allows adolescent rebellion to carry on into the mid-20's, and makes it illegal for children to be put to work until they are 16 - is about to meet up with a simple fact.
Nature does not care about our cultural sensitivities.
Nature does not care about our preferences, our ideas, or our childrearing plans.
Nature simply demands that we have more kids.
And the results of that have great potential to be harsh indeed on a cultural level for us.
Sex education is a touchy subject, particularly in our political climate; of our two major American political parties, we have one team who wants to inculcate children from birth with knowledge of everything under the sun about sex, thus virtually ensuring that they will have it as soon as possible; and one team whose idea seems to be that if we just tell them not to do it, and then pretend it doesn't exist, it'll go away.
Both ideas seem stupid to me, but I'm crazy, and therefore not to be taken as any sort of authority on this whatsoever. My own plan, for my son, is to wait until he asks me questions, and then answer them as honestly as I can, and hope he doesn't do anything stupid without asking Dad first.
Which I grant is probably as bad an idea as the ones espoused by our political monkeys.
But here's the thing.
Puberty makes girls look different.
Hell, it even makes them SMELL different.
And if we have girls who look, at 11, as mature as the girls we grew up with looked at 16, people will likely see them as older than they really are - and with the experience and maturity (or lack thereof, as the case may be,) to be expected not at their REAL age, but at the age they APPEAR to be.
As a culture, the impact of this cannot be underestimated.
Now, people go to jail for "she looked 18" when she was really 16 - and enthusiastically encouraging her partner to believe she was older, until he annoyed her in some way.
How much worse will that become, if girls can pass for 18, who are 13?
Girls are getting taller earlier; developing sexually mature features earlier; and most importantly, their sexual responses and instincts are turning on earlier, too.
Which means that they will - in their inexperience - be even more enthusiastic in their attempts to grab any reasonably cute guy, and find out what all the fuss among their friends is about.
Because they're not old enough to make rational decisions about sex at that age.
Because our culture teaches them not to be.
Which, ultimately, I guess, is where I'm going with this; as a culture, we have to brace for impact, and start - now - trying to figure out how to deal with it.
I am personally quite certain that both our political parties are wrong about it.
But we might need to rethink sex ed classes altogether; redesign from the ground up.
Because if girls are getting a head start this much earlier - and from the evidence, guys aren't experiencing similar changes - they ARE going to start pursuing older males. A 7-year-old girl who goes into puberty is NOT going to find a 7-year-old boy interested, or even capable, of making out with her.
He might try to wow her with his G.I. Joes, though.
And if we cannot treat the sexes THE SAME, we must begin to acknowledge that while they have equal value, and equal legal status, they are simply DIFFERENT.
For myself, personally, I am delighted that at this point I have a son, with at least a few years of Thomas the Tank Engine and Willy Wonka ahead of him before I need to worry about those questions.
But parents with daughters need to give this some serious thought.
Ten percent by age seven.
Something tells me Chris Hansen is going to be seeing a lot more work over the next few years, because our culture has convinced itself to step away from the practices of the past to such an extent that our children are not capable of adapting to a return to those practices.
We've cherished innocence to such a degree that we've enshrined it.
Nature doesn't care about it.
And our attitudes and expectations are about to run face first into that fact.
Brace for impact.
