OK - BobbyDavis, this one is humorous, I just want to make sure that you see that I am teasing you rather than wanting to have a serious argument. So with this, here goes:

Oh wow, I sure am happy you weren't around in the 19th century - I never would have had a chance to receive the gift of life otherwise. My great great grandmother was married at 16, to a man who was 43 and just finished the army in which he served for 25 years, and my greatgrandmother was their first child, born when her mom was 17, and her mom and dad went on to have a huge family in which each child, both boys and girls, were educated at the university level, and they lived together until he died, and his widow lived for several more decades as a widow enjoying the love and respect of her grandchildren. Amen.

I mean, really, I always wonder when I see comments such as yours, BobbyDavis, what people are thinking as they type it, because I cannot believe that I am the sole person on that part of the planet where 15-17 year olds are considered minors who can say the name of one his or her not-so-distant-ancestors who was married before age 18 and yet survived fine into old age??

Also, do you not remember yourself at 16? I would not have liked being called a kid at 16, and I was not a kid - I was a highly responsible adolescent.

There is this great area called adolescence.

It is real.

It manifests differently in different cultures, but it exists - it is real.

The age limits are arbitrary, for crying out loud Shadix made a good point about affairs with 15-17 y.o. not being paedophilia, and some people are adults at 16 and others are not adults at 22, but the law cannot be so finely tuned so we have what we have, and once the rules are in place, everybody should follow them including the teachers, but, while understanding that those are arbitrary rules and arbitrary lines that we drew, as a society, to the best of our ability. It does not mean that anybody under the age of 18 is still a kid because it is not true - it is contrary to reality. Trace back to the times when the average lifespan was 30 years old and let us impose your limit on them ==> everybody under the age of 18 is still a kid and thus cannot mate.

OK, so you will allow them to mate at 18 and produce offspring at 19. Then, the firstborn would on average live with the parent for 11 years, the next child for 9 and the third child only for 7.

Do you think that it would be enough for the children? No child would live to be an adult (using your definition, at 18) while still having a living parent.

I simply do not think that such a regiment would have been really good for our civilization. In other words, I do not think that I would be sitting here and typing. I do not think that computers would have been invented. And numeration, too. And literacy. And without literacy, there would not have been Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet - the tale of two 14 year old adolescents.

Since I do very much enjoy being alive, sitting here and typing a letter to a real Australian, knowing that if I ever have money, I can visit Australia thanks to the existence of passenger air travel, I have to say that I am deeply thankful to the fact that my ancestry has been allowed to procreate outside of the bounds of what does not make you throw up, with which I remain, puzzled at how quickly people forget their roots,