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"...a market economy is essentially a genetic algorithm for solving resource allocation problems..."
- Charles Stross

Homorium  
  A kind of nursery that could bring a human being to maturity in a single year.  

This is an early use of the concept of accelerated growth. The last human beings were carefully grown by the swarming insects who had finally inherited the earth.

In hanging nursery homoriums thousands of men and women were yearly grown and instructed. The process of growth was unbelievably rapid. The growth-span of the human race had once embraced a number of years, but the swarming masters could transform a tiny infant into a gangling youth in six months, and into a bearded adult, strong-limbed and robust, in twelve or fourteen. Gland injections and prism-ray baths were the chief causal agents of this extraordinary metmorphosis...
Technovelgy from The Last Men, by Frank Belknap Long, Jr..
Published by Street and Smith in 1934
Additional resources -

Men were counseled not to take beautiful women (from the women's homorium) as mates; you know what happened to the most beautiful insects - pinned to an exhibit board.

Just two years earlier, Huxley wrote about an artificial womb that would permit a variety of modifications to be made to a fetus.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Last Men
  More Ideas and Technology by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.
  Tech news articles related to The Last Men
  Tech news articles related to works by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.

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