rationalskepticism.org

zoon wrote:Most of us would be capable of murder if there were no social stigma whatsoever. Social stigma is a natural instinct for us; it's one of the mechanisms that enable human societies to operate effectively, and it tends to be especially strong where harm is caused to the other person. 12 year old girls are usually too young to have children safely, so any society which takes enough interest in the welfare of their children to raise girls to the age of 12 is likely to attach stigma to underage sex. History has a tendency to be about the top levels of society, where marriage was often used for political alliances, and the political usefulness of marrying children might override their safety (I'm guessing).

As you point out, there are very good reasons for the social stigma around underage sex. In the past, it was merely fierce protectionism, particularly from fathers and other older, male relatives over their teenage daughters. This is no doubt an instinct that responded to protect girls from getting pregnant at an age when it would be dangerous to their lives. But obviously this could only be an issue if a significant number of heterosexual men begin to find girls attractive before the age of safe pregnancy. And I would guess that this applies to the vast majority of men. Ask any woman at which age she first started getting attention from adult men, and it's almost always before she was able to legally consent, and if she developed early, it can be significantly earlier than that. Biology isn't perfect, and so in the same way that a male frog's sexual urges will cause it to attempt to mate with another male frog in the absence of a female, so too a male human's sexual urges may cause him to be sexually attracted to someone before the age that they could reliably carry a baby to term. It's obviously an area where evolution hasn't quite done the perfect job that God would have if he existed.

When you ask is it natural, I assume what you're getting at is whether it's a function that has a clear evolutionary reason and advantage, and whether it applies to everyone. I would suggest that finding post-pubescent girls attractive (which isn't to say you necessarily find them as attractive as a 25 year old), even if they are not capable of reliably delivering a baby is relatively universal amongst heterosexual men, although I'd be interested to see if anyone's done an actual study on this. I've seen studies where they're able to measure sexual attraction, so it presumably wouldn't be too difficult to use the same procedure to work out the average age that men start to find girls attractive. Although it might not be a popular answer, hence why it hasn't been done, or if it has, hasn't been widely publicized. Anyway in the sense I'd argue it's normal. Actual paedophilia of finding pre-pubescent children attractive would seem to be more of a disorder in the traditional sense, that being that there's no obvious evolutionary advantage to such an urge existing and it only affects a tiny minority of people (to my knowledge).

In a vaguely related story, did anyone see the David Attenborough documentary about wolves in North America? There was one scene where the young female had to sneak away from the pack in order to mate with a lone male, only they were caught half way through the act and the lone male barely escaped with his life when the females relatively chased him away. Seems very similar to the social dynamic of humans in respect to the sexuality of their younger female relatives.