I’m not asking this from a biology lens, I get that aspect, but more from the sociology/anthropology lens. My question is which culture started using 18 as this hard cutoff, when, and under what reasoning.
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The line is arbitrary, so why not there? Not everything has to have a concrete scientific basis.
The number is very arbitrary. Part of it is the amount of power that’s conferred once a person reaches age of majority and in general, people have a tendency to restrict power from others that are different from them. In this case, it’s younger people. We see this a lot with any laws proposed to allow younger people to vote or drink. This is why you are seeing new laws pass to raise the age of buying cigarettes or vapes.
In the past, women and blacks weren’t allowed to vote either because it gave power to a group that previously didn’t have it and those who had the ability to vote felt threatened by people different from themselves.
It’s only a suggestion from what I can tell. Plenty of DAs charge people way below 18 as adults! What’s the point of having an age of majority if you can just charge anybody you want as an adult. I was close to 18 when the drinking age was changed to 21. I don’t disagree with that, but the age of majority should be moved to at least 21.
Literal dice throw, age of majority could have been any age between 10 and 30.
Now this is not the only reason, but its the primary reason in the western world, and many followed after, but other might have come to the same conclusions.
So way back in the good old days of no OSHA or Child Labour laws, there was no definition of adult or child, at least not to the degree and children under 9 was denied the mines and factories while 9-16 could work a short 16 hours per day i believe it was.
Adulthood back in the ancient old days of jolly rome roughly when you hit puberty, 14 when boys became men, and 12 when girls became women, however voting was denied you untill your 20s, and this lasted for a very long time, untill there are still people alive who remember the before times.
However that was not the Primary cause, the Primary cause was Big Military, in the before times when you could get conscripted at 12 that was fine, but then humans invented cool new toys, and fought in the first world war and went “Well, we should probably set a proper minimum age right” and they discussed it and figured 18 sounded right for physical growth and maturity, a couple of years before your growth ends, and a few years untill you are a fully mature and ripe human being.
However, this was just the start, I mentioned voting yes, and thats where it came in, Old enough to fight, Old enough to Kill, but not old enough to vote, now this came a few years after the world wars in the 50s 60s when this started to be a thing, but it was first with the vietnam war it fully fired off, and the age of voting was reduced from 21 to 18.
However, there are tons of cultures that have other or event he same age of adulthood, and to list a few; You got sweet 16 in the us, quinceanera at 15, vision quests are 14-16, bullet ant glove at 13, jugendweihe at 14, bat mitzcah at 12 and bar mitzvah at 13, kikuyu tribe has a circumcision cermony at 15-18, the maasai has one too at 14-16, and the xhosa one at 18-21, over in asia we got seijin no hi at 20, ji li at 15 and guan li at 20, gyerye at 15 and gwan rye at 15-20, in hindu there is upanayana for boys at 8-16, the australian aboriginals have a walkabout at 15-16, islam got takleef at 15, nomadic cultures has a first horse ride at 11-13, the pacific island got nangol at 20ish, and another at 16-18, in bepal you got bratabandha for 8-16, ritu kala samskara in the tamil part of sri lanka at age of menstruation from 13-15, and lastly inuits got a hunting test at 11-13, you also got your adult baptism called confirmation i think in christianity and thats at 14?
Which shows you the age of adulthood could have been basically anything.
tl;dr military decided 18 was the youngest age for you to fight in war, then they also wanted to vote, and the goverments said ok, and everyone followed after.
So now the age of majority is any age from 18-21 depending on where you are from
In the US, we asked 18 yo’s to go to war, kill others, and to potentially get killed themselves. But we didn’t even let those poor bastards vote for the assholes that sent them to war, or could have potentially voted against it.
There’s a long lead up to this, we used to let 16 year olds go to war back in the 19th century, then 17 with your parent’s permission. We used to marry off 13 and 14 year old girls. That was never the standard but it wasn’t unheard of either. We used to put to death 14 year olds accused of murder. 18 is actually a little older than what we considered an adult historically. But from the US’s founding, 21 was always the age the vote until after the Vietnam war.
This age was established as a transition point to adulthood, marking when individuals are considered legally responsible.
I think it’s primarily about the **rate of change** (derivative) w.r.t. time.
Most people have completed the time in their lives where their outward physical appearance (including height) changes most rapidly. The rate of change slows down by to 1/1000th (or something like that) of their peak childhood rate for the rest of their adult lives. For instance,
similarity(age_18, age_40) >> similarity(age_10, age_18)
Physical appearance often dictates our first impression of a person’s character. Age is often a good predictor of behavior, so we use that to help us bin them into a particular category.
Ages <18 are usually pretty easy to pin-point within a guess of +/- 2 years. On the other hand, a person that looks 30 +/- 10 could very well be anywhere between 20 and 40. Since it’s much more difficult to visually determine the age for >18 year olds, we throw them into the same broad category of “non-senior adult”.
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Disclaimer: This is just my own armchair redditor theory.
You gotta pick something. Or maybe come up with a critica different than ago. Is 18 the best maybe not but at 18 you can do most adult things, but will probably also do stupid kid things, I know I did.
I’m curious what you mean by “not asking this from a biology lens, I get that aspect.” What is the biological reason that would single out the age of 18?
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