Re: Why were age of consent laws created?

If I wrote that, you'd call Naturalistic Fallacy.

Furthermore, it assumes that the only goal of sex is reproduction. What about the gays, then?

No, read my post again. You're jumping the gun. I'm not arguing that it is inherently morally right because of evolution. I am arguing that age of consent taboos and laws in human societies to some extent evolved out of these biological factors. In other words, I'm just pointing that this is a multicultural phenomenon that to some extent clearly has to trace back to our biology. Therefore, you can't dismiss this factor in the creation of these laws and mores.

Yes, but that also means that every woman should try to maximize their number of pregnancies because others will die without replacing. And maximizing is better done by starting early. So the argument really goes both ways.

Yes and no. Most cultures no doubt were aware of statistics, even if they didn't have a name or a formal methodology for it. Thus, they would've been aware that very young girls (I'm talking early puberty here) had a much higher chance of perishing by giving birth. Therefore, as cultures evolved, age of consent laws and taboos became more prominent and more defined as the statistical evidence for this fact of nature started to add up. But, beyond a certain point what you say is true, and, as we know, parents in most pre-modern cultures did exactly that.