The Seven Ages of Man
By: Alex Comfort
J. Geffen
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1.
One of the earliest and perhaps most disturbing things a human child has to
learn is that the course of human life follows the clock – it can be predicted in
advance. When he is twenty he will be grown up, when he is eighty he will be old,
and before he is a hundred he will die. We take this for granted because we are
familiar with it, just as we take for granted the fact that we have a characteristic size;
we plan our lives in terms of it, just as we plan our houses, so that the few people who
are more than 20 per cent taller or shorter than usual find them difficult to live in.
2.
I suppose the main reason this fixed programme affects us emotionally is that it
means we have a fixed life-span. After a certain age our vigour and resistance to
disease will begin to get less, and they will go on declining at a steady rate until some
stress, which earlier in life we could have resisted, kills us. This is the process we call
ageing. It is so statistically constant in man that insurance companies can guarantee us
against early death, and we can roughly – though only very roughly – guess at the
stage it has reached from a man’s personal appearance.
3.
Fixity of life-programme, if I can call it that, and fixed adult size are two things
which are typical of warm-blooded animals. In cold-blooded animals there is much
less fixity, especially in relation to growth. Many fish, for example, have no characteristic adult size; and some of them may possibly have no characteristic adult lifespan. But in every warm-blooded animal there is a set life-programme which is
adapted to the way in which that sort of animal lives. There is a set period of development before birth, a set period of pre-adulthood, then sexual maturity, and then, in the
larger animals, the beginning of a senile decline. In the wild state this decline is cut
very short compared with our old age; small mammals like mice never reach it at all,
for their accidental death rate is so high that the rise in it which we call ageing never
has time to show itself. But the horses on stud farms and mice kept in the laboratory
do show it; they age, in other words, roughly as we do, and their maximum life-spans
are fixed.
4.
The human life-programme has three things about it that are unique, and they
are, in fact, the three biological characteristics which contain the whole of human
development. They are the great length of the period of sexual immaturity and
dependence on parents, the great length of the life-span as a whole – longer than that
of any other mammal, and only approached by very much larger ones like the
elephant and the rhinoceros – and the fact that in women, though not in men, reproduction ends definitely a long time before they become senile.
5.
This pattern of the ages of man is unlike that of most other animals, though we
can begin to see something like it developing in the higher apes. The most
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characteristic difference is in our pattern of early growth. Man is born helpless, like a
kitten; he grows at about a typical rate for a warm-blooded animal up to the age of
four or so. If he followed the same programme as a sheep or a puppy, then allowing
for the different time-scale he would be sexually mature and fully independent at
about nine years old. But instead his growth becomes slower, and a whole extra
period of delayed growth and dependence on the mother is put into the growth curve,
between the ages, roughly speaking, of four and twelve. Then the tempo suddenly
quickens, growth and development become rapid, and adolescence leads on to sexual
maturity.
6.
This inserted period is one of the most important factors in making man behave
as he does. It accounts for his long childhood, his family pattern, which has been the
basis of his society, and his ability to use conceptual thought, since this depends on
learning and conditioning, instead of on simple instinct. At first sight it looks like a
simple marking-time period, but if we look closer we can see that it also covers more
radical changes. Human beings do not normally become able to breed until at least
their teens. And sexual behaviour – that is, behaviour associated with breeding –
appears in most mammals about the time that breeding itself becomes possible. We
used to think that the same was true of ourselves, and when Freud began to draw
attention to the existence of elaborate sexual impulses in early infancy he met with
much scepticism. But today these impulses are generally recognized, and they are
believed to play an important part informing the adult character.
7.
It looks, then, very much as if, with the development of this marking time
period in humans, a whole section of what, in lower animals, was purely reproductive
impulse, has become isolated, as it were, pushed back into childhood, a long time
before the human breeding age, and given a new function, connected this time with
family behaviour and character structure.
8.
The pattern of our development is fixed on the average, but it is not entirely
fixed. It can be affected by circumstances – illnesses, injuries such as fears or frights,
diet – and by inherited make-up. These things can affect, for example, the age of
puberty and the physical, social and mental development that goes with it. So far as
outside factors are concerned, the striking thing is the power of our timing-system to
keep to its programme – to catch up, for example, if physical development is checked
by illness or hunger. Checks like these are followed by a growth rebound; the children
who were starved during the last years of the war caught up in weight and development within the next two. But apart from outside factors there are constitutional
variations which we are only just coming to recognize. And these are specially
important because they affect performance in behaviour and in learning as well as
bodily growth.
9.
This question of rates of adolescent and childhood development is one on which
much research is being done, and much more is needed. The results of such research
may influence us a good deal in the future – in planning our schools, for instance.
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Some boys of twelve have the same physical and mental attainments as others of
fifteen, even when their final performance is going to be the same; they are different
not in intelligence or in ultimate physique but in pattern of development. And just as
there are giants and dwarfs who diverge greatly from the normal human size, so there
are extreme cases in which the rate of development varies. The most interesting of
these are the children, usually little girls, whose growth follows the same programme
as that of a puppy or a sheep: it lacks the human period of slowing down. At the age
of nine these children have the physical development of a normal sixteen-year old.
This is not an illness but a family character, and they come to no harm from it; their
life-span is normal and, more interesting still, the speed-up is selective. Their mental
development, and the eruption of their teeth, follow the normal timing.
10. To some extent early or late maturing, we know, depends on body build. We
study it by photographic and other measurements in children, and since we have to
follow individuals, and not averages, it obviously takes a long time. One confusing
thing is that the rate of development in all the privileged countries seems to be getting
quicker. In England and northern Europe the age of sexual maturity in girls has come
down by five years over the last century, and it is harder and harder to get choir-boys
with treble voices. This probably means, I think, that in the last century puberty was
delayed by bad social hygiene, and that it is now coming back to normal. But we
would very much like to know what the clock mechanism is that times puberty. At
present we do not know with certainty, though it appears to be in the brain. We would
equally like to know the mechanism which causes sexual life in the female to end in
middle age. Most of all, we would like to know the cause of that steady fall in vigour
and rise in mortality which we call ageing.
Seven Ages of Man / 4
Answer in your own words.
1.
Answer the question below in English.
What unpleasant fact must young children resign themselves to?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
2.
Answer the question below in English.
Why is the example of unusually tall men – paragraph 1 – given in this text?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
3.
Answer the question below in English.
How does stress – paragraph 2 – affect us at the various stages in life?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
4.
Answer the question below in English.
What is the example of insurance companies – paragraph 2 – meant to
illustrate?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
5.
How do warm-blooded animals – paragraph 3 – compare to cold-blooded ones
in terms of life programme?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
6.
Answer the question below in English.
How does the writer explain the fact – paragraph 3 – that many of the mammals
living in the wild state never reach the age of decline?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Seven Ages of Man / 5
7.
8.
9.
List the mammals comparable to human beings in terms of length of life spans.
Answer:
a. ______________________________________________________
b. ______________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
What are the three biological characteristics – paragraph 4 – that distinguish
Man from other animals.
Answer:
a. ______________________________________________________
b. ______________________________________________________
c. ______________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
At what age would Man be fully developed – paragraph 5 – if he were to
develop at the rate of sheep or puppies?
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
10. What does the extra period of delayed growth in Man – paragraph 5 – lead to?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
11.
Answer the question below in English.
When does the slowing-down period occur?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
12.
Answer the question below in English.
To what does the author attribute our ability to use conceptual thought?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
13.
14.
Answer the question below in English.
What expression does the writer use – paragraph 6 – as the equivalent of a
period of delayed growth?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
In what cardinal sense does the arousal of sexual instincts among non-human
mammals differ from that among humans?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Seven Ages of Man / 6
15.
Answer the question below in English.
What mistaken notions – paragraph 6 – about human sexuality was corrected by
Sigmund Freud?
Answer : ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in Hebrew.
16. a) What are the factors accountable for the differences in development patterns
– paragraph 8 – noticeable among people? b) which of those does the writer
consider most important?
Answer :
a)
b)
17.
18.
Answer the question below in English.
What period have those girls, who are as developed at the age of nine as others
would be at the age of sixteen, skipped? (Paragraph 9)
Answer: ____________________________________________________________
Answer the question below in English.
What would be suggested by the fact that in England and Northern Europe
sexual maturity has come down by five years over the last century? (Paragraph
10)
Answer : ____________________________________________________________