After a beautiful sunrise, the temperature rises to fifty degrees, and the wind begins to blow from the south, stirring life out of nooks and crannies. A red admiral butterfly sports about my patio and spider silks are in the air, even this early in the year. Hatchling spiders are dispersing. They use their silk strands as balloons to carry them away from competition with each other, adult spiders, and other predators attracted to concentrations of prey, such as masses of baby spiders. Dispersal means survival and reproductive opportunity for the young of all species, including humans.

Many offspring show instinctive dispersal tendencies written in their genes. The desire for independence by human teenagers was surely adaptive prehistorically, when they didn't need to know so much to survive -- when only the nature at hand provided resources. But today's suburban teenagers are economic infants who cannot make it without education and are afforded at home the resources their parents buy from afar. Unfortunately, teenage genes don't know that cultural evolution requires ever more learning and rushes past biological evolution geared to an earlier, simpler existence.