I don't recall who first said that quote, but I recall that Markaba is the one who keeps quoting it here.

But you talk about children as blank slates - and I know you didn't necessarily mean that in the traditional way - but I figure this is as good an opportunity as any to bring it up.

For a couple centuries that was a popular theory, that our minds begin as a blank slate upon which knowledge is written. It was a central tenet of the movements toward gender equality in the 1960s and 1970s. It was why, in the famous case of David Reimer ⚠️ ↗, it was considered possible to raise a boy who lost his penis as a girl and expect him to adapt to his new gender. It was the source of the gender neutral toys and trying to keep boys from playing with toy guns that failed so spectacularly in the 1970s. It was the source of the widely cited claim that "humans have no instincts".

But it is all false. In his one notable service to humankind, Noam Chomsky recognized and proved that humans have an instinct for language, a mental structure that allows us to learn a language - or, in the absence of one, to invent one. More recent evidence suggests that not only do humans have instincts, but that we have far, far more instincts than any other species - and what passes for intelligence is actually this huge number of overlapping instincts. [None of us have all these instincts, which goes a long way towards explaining differences in intelligence, and also why people who are geniuses in one field (like Noam Chomsky, coincidentally) can also be complete morons in another field (also like Noam Chomsky).]

This means that children come into this world, not necessarily knowing everything they need to know, but already having the mental framework necessary to absorb and apply that knowledge.

Now, we have this idea of "innocence" which we are told that a child can "lose" by being exposed to bad influences. We might ask whether this is not the intended and healthy path for children, to seek and attain the information that allows them to become fully functioning adults. We might also ask what makes up this quality of "innocence", because I am not sure that it is limited to mere ignorance.

Rather, I think our idea of innocence is linked to another idea that we have often discussed here: Neoteny, or the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood. In short, juveniles in most species are notably different than adults, including in behavior. Juveniles are less aggressive, less competitive, more friendly, more cooperative, better able to learn new things, and are generally more pleasant to be around than adults. Humans are incredibly neotenous compared to most species, but not completely so - and at that point of demarcation we might see what is called the loss of innocence, and this even in the original sense of "harmless". At adolescence we see the rise of competitiveness as young men and women start competing for the best mates - at the expense of their peers. Generations may have connected this transition as occurring with the acquisition of knowledge of the world, but that is only a correlation. This transition still occurs among the most ignorant, and if anything is often delayed among the most intelligent and knowledgeable children.

Now, here is the thing: pedophilia is inextricably linked with neoteny as a driving force that selects for neotenous traits which include lowered competitiveness and lowered aggression. If these are the traits that we link with "innocence", then pedophilia is the enabler of innocence, not its destroyer.

Of course, those who hate us don't care about that, and they don't really care about innocence either. They belong to the competitive and aggressive breed that see their doom and are trying to crowd these more innocent qualities out. They claim to defend innocence, but in fact they despise such traits. Nothing we didn't already know. ;-)