Why are humans so obsessed with recreating themselves? . . . Children have always been excluded from the customary standards of human behavior, if you define humans as beings who possess a conventional identity and act out of free will. Then what are children who endure in the chaos preceding maturity? They differ profoundly from ‘humans,’ but they obviously have human form. The dolls that little girls mother are not surrogates for real babies. Little girls aren’t so much imitating child rearing as they are experiencing something deeply akin to child rearing. . . . Raising children is the simplest way to achieve the ancient dream of artificial life. At least, that’s my hypothesis.