[LINK] Well, it is April

[David Boxall]

On 17/04/2012 12:40 PM, grove at zeta.org.au wrote:
> ...
> Why not go the whole hog and delay children going through puberty and growing up
> at all? ...
> a pragmatic part of me (after having read a similar premise in an SF novel)
> thinks that perhaps delaying adulthood in *all* humans, so that they do not
> mature as fast, are smaller and less destructive on one another and the environment,
> might not be such a bad evolutionary principle.   That is, to permit intellectual
> and emotional development in a "child" but through the use of genetics and
> hormone therapy, keep them in an immature state until about 25 or so.
>
> I know it sounds quite bizarre, but this is actually achievable in a generation or
> so, with a few eugenic-style tweaks.  A lot more achievable than "cats eyes" for
> example.   Bizarre, extreme and unsavoury, all of it, but the potential is there
> and the fact someone already thought of it means others are already thinking of it.....
> ...
I believe it was W.C. Fields who said that children should be frozen at 
birth and thawed out, with care, at 21. That would have been the 1920s.

He was joking.

I think.

-- 
David Boxall                    |  When a distinguished but elderly
                                |  scientist states that something is
http://david.boxall.id.au       |  possible, he is almost certainly
                                |  right. When he states that
                                |  something is impossible, he is
                                |  very probably wrong.
                                                  --Arthur C. Clarke