Introduction: the Frame of Nature, Gerontology, and Law*

The frame set for us by nature is at least as fundamental as other—cultural and social—frameworks considered by legal scholars. “All cultures,” one anthropologist has told us, “constitute so many somewhat distinct answers to essentially the same questions posed by human biology and by the generalities of the human situation.” ¹ Or, as another put it, there exist “limits set to culture by physical or organic factors. The so-called ‘cultural constants’ of family, religion, war, communication and the like appear to be biopsychological frames variably filled with cultural content.” ² “We may,” some have concluded, “appropriating Marxian terms, call our physical needs a substructure on which a cultural superstructure of need satisfaction is created.” ³