one of those shower thoughts

[egypturnash]

Once you're a few years past the age of sexual maturity, evolution is pretty much done with you: you've bred, you've raised your children to the point where they're likely to survive to breeding age; there's no need to optimize for you to live any longer. But we have this complicated intellectual structure on top of biological structure called "society", and it takes at 25-35 years to get to the point where you can really work in that. We're ready for breeding before we hit high school; we're not ready to navigate society until somewhere after college. We have a lot of tools to prop up the decay, but we're basically built to start deteriorating around thirty years.

So here's a bit of mad scientist thinking: What if we twiddled our genes to delay the onset of sexual maturity until we were likely to be equipped to have some measure of "success" in our current environment?

Even more mad-scientisty, what if someone built and released a virus that tweaked our genes to do that?

(Also, while in the shower, I washed off last night's wing test. I was sad to see it go!)