First, it was ew, then we figured out that there were also rational reasons against it.
Well, actually, it’s the other way around. Evolutionary speaking, there was a disavantage to inbreeding, so the “ew” evolved because of that. We think inbreeding is wrong because evolution taught us that it lowers the chance of survival for our offspring.
Actually, that’s assigning too much rational complexity to a blind system. Less the aversion to inbreeding and more the selection of genetic robustness of external mate mingling. To a certain degree.
The histocompatibility of another gauged through smell and taste (i.e. kissing) ensures a preference for a certain degree of separation from one’s genetic pool to ensure protection from local viral and bacterial adversaries. But not too far away! Or it is too alien and doesn’t confer the advantages of mixed immunities.
The ‘ew’ factor is just the societal reinforcement of the Westermarck effect. While surely there is some genetic component at play there it appears to be primarily motivated by the primate social adaptation system.
This can be seen by studying peer groups. Even people far removed from one’s genetic pool will feel like icky siblings if they are raised together. Conversely, many cases of siblings and other relations separated at birth who later meet and fall in love/have relations.
While surely there is some genetic component at play there it appears to be primarily motivated by the primate social adaptation system.
This seems like a strange argument, because “the primate social adaptation system” is also ultimately governed by evolution. Obviously a primate group with a social tendency towards incest would have worse survival rates than a primate group with a social aversion to incest, and that social fabric definitely is tied to evolution (unless you mean to imply that our social fabric did not arise from evolution, but I don’t think that’s what you’re saying).
Also, I don’t see how this can have anything in particular to do with primates and their social constructs as incest is avoided by all animals, as far as I am aware. It is not a purely human or primate thing, incest is bad for all animals and so they have all evolved via evolution to avoid it. I’d say the Westermarck effect is just the result of that evolution - obviously humans can’t directly read genetic code, so the mind assumes that whoever you grew up with must be your close relatives, and that’s good enough of a signal in 99% of cases, so that’s what evolution went with.
The point I am making is that there isn’t a aversion away from something, there is simply a preference towards something. We don’t eat wood chips and don’t like the way they taste, not because they are bad for us, but rather because we would rather eat potato chips. The potato chips are more advantageous to our survival.
This may seem I am splitting hairs but it’s important to make that distinction because the following arguments are based on such distinctions and it’s important to assign the correct motivation to our evolutionary drives.
It’s not that our blind systems somehow know that screwing our siblings makes disadvantaged babies (which it doesn’t know that and nor does it compared to mating with someone with a more prominent genetic issue- at least not for the first few generations) it doesn’t code that far ahead for cause and effect. It only instills a preference for slightly exogenous mates to confer immunity advantages.
The Westermarck effect shows strong evidence for a higher (socially speaking) system influencing our mate preference BECAUSE it can be “circumvented” by the evidence that even siblings raised away from each other show no inhibitions towards mating. If there were purely a genetic aversion towards inbreeding there wouldn’t be a statistically significant event of long lost relatives copulating. I’m stretching a bit on the statical significance but it happens often enough to be reported on.
Also, inbreeding is very common in the animal kingdom. Less between direct descendants, like mother/child, but on the whole most creatures make little distinction between relations. Which makes sense if the options are mate with your brood or potentially die without performing our evolutionary imperative command of passing on our genes.
We don’t eat wood chips and don’t like the way they taste, not because they are bad for us, but rather because we would rather eat potato chips.
I’m sorry but I find this premise completely ridiculous - obviously we don’t like how they taste because they are bad for us. Evolution isn’t only about preference, it’s also about avoiding stuff, like poison or rotten food or woodchips or whatever. I don’t think we can come to an agreement on such a premise.
Again, that is exactly the point I am making. Wood chips are not “bad for us” in an isolated scenario. You can eat wood chips all day and be perfectly fine. Aside from starving to death, lol. We eat potato chips because we can digest them and gain nutrients.
Evolution did not code us to avoid wood chips. There’s no “wood chip aversion” gene. It coded us to seek out potato chips.
This distinction, while built on a silly premise, is important so that we can be accurate about what evolution drives us to and away from.
We risk mischaracterizing the nature of evolutionary forces by assigning to it a level of forethought it does not have. And explaining social concepts by simply assigning the wide sweeping “evolution must have made us like/dislike thing” and then coming up with reasons after the fact, without evidence, leads us down an incorrect path.
So the whole point I am making is that aversion towards incest is not rooted in primary drives but rather in the socio-primate drives.
It’s there for a good reason but to find out why we need to shed simple explanations which, while plausible on the surface, do not lend evidence to the facts.
You can’t really definitively prove a theory like that I think. I’m no biologist so I’m not an expert by any means, but we can’t go back in time to see why evolution did what it did. We can only guess from what we have right now.
That said, such an “ew” response to incest surely is not just coincidence. It must have arose for a reason, just like all of our emotions evolved for a reason. For example, we also experience disgust when smelling or tasting rotten milk, because drinking rotten stuff is bad for survival too, so evolution made us have that response, because it would lower the chance of us drinking spoiled milk. There’s nothing “inherently disgusting” about incest or spoiled milk. We only find those things disgusting because they are bad, evolutionarily speaking.
And btw this isn’t restricted to humans obviously, all animals avoid having offspring with their close family, so this is a very deep-rooted behavior.
Yes but that is also a rationalization after the fact. First, it was ew, then we figured out that there were also rational reasons against it.
Well, actually, it’s the other way around. Evolutionary speaking, there was a disavantage to inbreeding, so the “ew” evolved because of that. We think inbreeding is wrong because evolution taught us that it lowers the chance of survival for our offspring.
Actually, that’s assigning too much rational complexity to a blind system. Less the aversion to inbreeding and more the selection of genetic robustness of external mate mingling. To a certain degree.
The histocompatibility of another gauged through smell and taste (i.e. kissing) ensures a preference for a certain degree of separation from one’s genetic pool to ensure protection from local viral and bacterial adversaries. But not too far away! Or it is too alien and doesn’t confer the advantages of mixed immunities.
The ‘ew’ factor is just the societal reinforcement of the Westermarck effect. While surely there is some genetic component at play there it appears to be primarily motivated by the primate social adaptation system.
This can be seen by studying peer groups. Even people far removed from one’s genetic pool will feel like icky siblings if they are raised together. Conversely, many cases of siblings and other relations separated at birth who later meet and fall in love/have relations.
Edit: link for the curious. Fascinating stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect
This seems like a strange argument, because “the primate social adaptation system” is also ultimately governed by evolution. Obviously a primate group with a social tendency towards incest would have worse survival rates than a primate group with a social aversion to incest, and that social fabric definitely is tied to evolution (unless you mean to imply that our social fabric did not arise from evolution, but I don’t think that’s what you’re saying).
Also, I don’t see how this can have anything in particular to do with primates and their social constructs as incest is avoided by all animals, as far as I am aware. It is not a purely human or primate thing, incest is bad for all animals and so they have all evolved via evolution to avoid it. I’d say the Westermarck effect is just the result of that evolution - obviously humans can’t directly read genetic code, so the mind assumes that whoever you grew up with must be your close relatives, and that’s good enough of a signal in 99% of cases, so that’s what evolution went with.
The point I am making is that there isn’t a aversion away from something, there is simply a preference towards something. We don’t eat wood chips and don’t like the way they taste, not because they are bad for us, but rather because we would rather eat potato chips. The potato chips are more advantageous to our survival. This may seem I am splitting hairs but it’s important to make that distinction because the following arguments are based on such distinctions and it’s important to assign the correct motivation to our evolutionary drives.
It’s not that our blind systems somehow know that screwing our siblings makes disadvantaged babies (which it doesn’t know that and nor does it compared to mating with someone with a more prominent genetic issue- at least not for the first few generations) it doesn’t code that far ahead for cause and effect. It only instills a preference for slightly exogenous mates to confer immunity advantages.
The Westermarck effect shows strong evidence for a higher (socially speaking) system influencing our mate preference BECAUSE it can be “circumvented” by the evidence that even siblings raised away from each other show no inhibitions towards mating. If there were purely a genetic aversion towards inbreeding there wouldn’t be a statistically significant event of long lost relatives copulating. I’m stretching a bit on the statical significance but it happens often enough to be reported on.
Also, inbreeding is very common in the animal kingdom. Less between direct descendants, like mother/child, but on the whole most creatures make little distinction between relations. Which makes sense if the options are mate with your brood or potentially die without performing our evolutionary imperative command of passing on our genes.
https://theconversation.com/incest-isnt-a-taboo-in-the-animal-kingdom-new-study-160937
I’m sorry but I find this premise completely ridiculous - obviously we don’t like how they taste because they are bad for us. Evolution isn’t only about preference, it’s also about avoiding stuff, like poison or rotten food or woodchips or whatever. I don’t think we can come to an agreement on such a premise.
Again, that is exactly the point I am making. Wood chips are not “bad for us” in an isolated scenario. You can eat wood chips all day and be perfectly fine. Aside from starving to death, lol. We eat potato chips because we can digest them and gain nutrients.
Evolution did not code us to avoid wood chips. There’s no “wood chip aversion” gene. It coded us to seek out potato chips.
This distinction, while built on a silly premise, is important so that we can be accurate about what evolution drives us to and away from.
We risk mischaracterizing the nature of evolutionary forces by assigning to it a level of forethought it does not have. And explaining social concepts by simply assigning the wide sweeping “evolution must have made us like/dislike thing” and then coming up with reasons after the fact, without evidence, leads us down an incorrect path.
So the whole point I am making is that aversion towards incest is not rooted in primary drives but rather in the socio-primate drives.
It’s there for a good reason but to find out why we need to shed simple explanations which, while plausible on the surface, do not lend evidence to the facts.
i don’t know how you could possibly prove this, but i would love to see you try.
You can’t really definitively prove a theory like that I think. I’m no biologist so I’m not an expert by any means, but we can’t go back in time to see why evolution did what it did. We can only guess from what we have right now.
That said, such an “ew” response to incest surely is not just coincidence. It must have arose for a reason, just like all of our emotions evolved for a reason. For example, we also experience disgust when smelling or tasting rotten milk, because drinking rotten stuff is bad for survival too, so evolution made us have that response, because it would lower the chance of us drinking spoiled milk. There’s nothing “inherently disgusting” about incest or spoiled milk. We only find those things disgusting because they are bad, evolutionarily speaking.
And btw this isn’t restricted to humans obviously, all animals avoid having offspring with their close family, so this is a very deep-rooted behavior.
It’s been the norm in many countries for centuries, so can’t have been seen as EW as you claim