Thursday, January 05, 2006

I'm glad Australia's on our side.

Still doing a lot of research on neopagan ideologies in general and Wicca, particularly Eclectic Wicca, in particular. eCauldron looks promising for making a few connections--if online connections aren't the same as in-person ones, I've always been better at the online sort. Though part of me wonders if my faith isn't best described as just plain "eclectic."

This article is interesting in terms of the implications it has for height versus early puberty. My grandmother--I don't know how old she was at menarche--was my height, and I wore a brassiere at 7-8 and started menstruating a few weeks past my tenth birthday--whereas my mother hit both puberty and her last height-growth spurt fairly late in her teens (after her 16th birthday). I wonder if hitting puberty later might have made me several inches taller. I also wonder what my teenaged self would've been like without any sex hormones racing through my bloodstream (I refuse to contemplate what my adult self would be like without). I nevertheless harbor a certain amount of doubt for these claims. Has anyone done any sort of a study about the average age of onset of puberty in a state of nature? Is there any proof that it is not, in fact, a naturally cyclic number, or that earlier society hadn't artificially made puberty later than is natural for humans? And this is an average, anyway--you're always going to have five-year-olds who are biologically capable of reproduction (there's an old medical photo online somewhere of a pregnant seven-year-old) and nineteen-year-olds who aren't. Why does this have to be a disease to be treated?

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