Incest

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iambmetammy wrote on Jun 11Interesting. Weird, but interesting. .


mercedo wrote on Jun 11

Incest was forbidden because it is the easiest way for mating. Probably before civilisation, many humans kept on practicing this for too many years. Incest became taboo mainly from economic reasons. Suppose if we got married to one of our parents, we can inherit their property. But remember we can automatically inherit their property because we are their child, so we don't have to get married to them in order only to inherit their property. If we got married to a person from other family, we can inherit property that belongs to other family. From the same reason even if we got married to one of siblings, we find no economical merit on this since our siblings merely inherit a part of our parents' property. That's why we are always encouraged to get married to a person from other family that owns more property than us anyway, and that explains why incest was not taboo amongst nobles in Hawaii. They needed to monopolise their wealth.

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markzero wrote on Jun 12

yay, eugenics, kill everyone with a birth defect!

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eglamkowski wrote on Jun 12, edited on Jun 12

In the case of the Hawaiian nobility, it was such a small gene pool to begin with that it was more a matter of survival than anything else. Yeah, yeah, they could have liberalized their marriage laws and let them marry commoners, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a royal system anywhere that allowed that as a matter of course, for better or worse that's just not how it works, not in Hawaii, not anywhere.


mercedo wrote today at 2:15 AM

Today if the kids born as a result of violating incest taboo were born with some birth defects, it might be not because incest itself brought such birth defects, but because those who practice such heinous act must have had problems in their genes, so simply can we assert that those who had defects in genes are more likely to give birth to kids with some birth defects? Incest is not a cause, but a symptom. And that explains why incest is taboo for sure. Incest might be an atavism appears in a very rare frequency.

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lpetrazickis wrote on Jun 12

Of course incest was forbidden before civilization -- it's forbidden in your genes. Do gorillas practise incest? No. Do gorillas have civilization? No. QED.And the incest-avoidance algorithm is much simpler than you think. It's "Did you play as a kid with someone? Then it's yucky." In species where the child grows up with only one of the parents, the incidence of the child mating with the absent parent is relatively high.


mercedo wrote today at 1:45 AM

Incest was not a taboo before civilisation - this is a hypothesis specifically viewed from economic standpoint. I believe that we had had such a state in stages of human development, though, of course I have no way to confirm.
Aside from that argument, incest has been a taboo at least after civilisation. Simply because it is the act that brings about disorder to the smallest unit of the society. Two people meet and marry, have kids. In this smallest unit only one sexual relation is allowed. Family is the place where children learn how to socialise other than sexual love. Children need to seek for their mate other than the member of their family. That is how to adjust in society apart from their family.
What was a society like before the dawn of civilisation - more than 10000 years ago allows us a lot of assumptions. Assuming they had kept on steady population and lived in a limited area, cave or something, I still think incest was not a taboo those days.

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eglamkowski wrote today at 2:11 AM

Indeed, we see small, isolated populations even in historic times where incest was practiced out of necessity, or at least out of the interest of the family not seeing its family line die off. Even in colonial North America it was not uncommon in the 17th and 18th centuries to see family members marrying close relatives (not necessarily sisters or daughters, but nieces and cousins were not unheard of), simply because there weren't any other families around for hundreds of miles, it was marry back into your own family or the family line goes extinct.There's a reason why Jeff Foxworthy includes in his "You might be a redneck if..." the line "If your family tree does not fork..." It's funny only because it has a kernel of truth to it! It may be extremely rare here in the US today, but most people realize that even in the recent past, even in the US, it wasn't all that uncommon after all.Depending on where in space youi go, there were no doubt places where it was common at various times in history, and I tend to agree with mercedo - in prehistory it no doubt was also quite common, for the same reason it often was common in historical times, lack of anybody else in the vicinity to get married to.