The Origin of Taboo

Incest for fun and profit!
Jun 11, '07 10:07 PMby Edward Glamkowski for group circularrefuge
Well, not really. But it was used in ancient Hawaii amongst the nobles to maintain the purity of their bloodline, since the nobles who came to rule Hawaii were part of the second wave of immigrants to the islands who didn't want to mix with the earlier wave of immigrants.Amongst these nobles it was considered highly desirable to marry as close a family relation as possible. Most desirable was for a Prince to marry his sister. Failing that, the next most desirable was to marry his neice. Third on the list would be to marry his own daughter! And lastly is any other noble. Marrying your own daughter?! And yet, the noble lines in Hawaii showed no wide-spread signs of genetic defects...Of course, you have to consider that polygamy was the norm, and therefore your own sister probably had at least one different parent from you (it went both ways - a female noble could have multiple husbands as well as a male noble having multiple wives), so it may not have been quite as appalling as it sounds. Even so... Plus, the ancient Hawaiians also practiced infanticide (not abortion, they gave birth to the child and then killed it if it was unwanted) as well as human sacrifice, so I would guess they probably just immediately killed any infant showing serious defects. They also had rigorous testing of young nobles as well, which a healthy individual would pass no problem, but which a genetically defectively individual could very well die as a result of, such as running over bare lava rock, which would result in many cuts on the feet from which a healthy individual would recover, but would cause a hemophiliac (who might appear outwardly healthy and thus avoid the infanticide) to bleed to death.The interesting thing about the whole situation is that apparently once such genetically defective individuals have been repeatedly culled from the population over a long enough period of time, it turns out to be relatively safe for such close relatives to have kids together. The longer such in-breeding goes on, as long as the genetically defective kids don't reproduce, those who are healthy who do go on to reproduce have less chances of producing genetically defective children themselves. The problems occur where the genetically defective children do reproduce and thus keep the bad genes in the population. The ancient Hawaiian nobles were just ruthless in culling the defective genes and thus keeping the population healthy despite the intense inbreeding. Indeed, the inbred population actually got increasingly healthier over time, not less!Of course, such inbreeding was strictly limited to nobles - it was a crime for anyone not a noble to engage in such behavior. Some people in the west like to talk about male privilege or white privilege, but damn we ain't got nothing on that explicit tabu system the Hawaiian nobles used!

Comments:Chronological Reverse Threaded


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


mercedo wrote on Jun 11Incest 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.


markzero wrote on Jun 12yay, eugenics, kill everyone with a birth defect!


eglamkowski wrote on Jun 12, edited on Jun 12In 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 on Jun 13Today 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.


lpetrazickis wrote on Jun 12Of 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 on Jun 13Incest 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.


eglamkowski wrote on Jun 13Indeed, 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.