Re: Serious Question that will really make you thi
Atomw7 said:
You say you aren't into incest yourself, so how can you speak so devotedly about something you are not into or know much about?
That's hardly a fair statement, Atomw7.
Is that to say that your straight friends don't know what they're talking about when they stand up for gay relationships as equivalent to straight ones?
It's not hard to talk about incest without having done it any more than it is for me to talk about what women are known to go through during pregnancy.
Marley's point is that incest is a relationship in which two individuals choose to engage in. They are attracted, and they choose to either engage or not engage.
Likewise, gay relationships are those in which two individuals choose to engage in. They are attracted, and they choose to do something about it or not.
In that sense, they are similar.
However, my opinion on the flaw in that argument is that homosexuals are predisposed to being attracted to members of the same sex. It does not matter if they are unrelated, friends, or blood relatives.
Incest is a social category based on shared genetic material. People are not born attracted to their relatives, but they are born with the capacity to be attracted to their relatives by virtue of the fact that their relatives are of one sex or another. Individuals can be attracted to their relatives by way of being socialized to it, or because they are socially close to their relatives, but they are not predisposed to be attracted to them. In order for it to be comparable, there would have to be some way that two related individuals would be able to detect their shared genetic material and not just phenotypically, but genotypically.
So unless humans can automatically detect who their mothers, fathers, brothers, sister, cousins, etc. are, then it's impossible for someone to be born predisposed to incestuous acts. I think we've seen enough daytime talk shows to know that people can't tell who they're related to beyond scrutiny based on superficial appearance.
As for the OP's question, incest is largely a universal taboo because procreation within incestuous relationships (once or over a steady course within a population) generally leads genetic maladies or negative traits, such as congenital diseases. From an evolutionary standpoint, prolonged incest in a population would cause it to lack in diversity, meaning that populations would lack the ability to adapt to changing environments.
For instance, if there was no (or limited) incest, insider, Person A may mate with outsider, Person B who carries the gene that provides added protection from UV rays. Then, the gene is introduced to the population and after several matings and time, many individuals in the population will have the gene that protects them from UV rays. If the earth is exposed to more UV, then the people in that population have a better chance to survive.
However, if incest is high, then most likely insider Person A will only mate with other insiders, none of which carry that gene, so if more UV rays appear, that population will probably die or be at a sever disadvantage.
So due to this gene fitness perspective, incest is bad because it limits diversity thereby lowering populations fitness. It is also "bad" because recessive traits, which are usually less favorable or malignant, are more likely to show up if populations mate over and over again with the same gene types. That doesn't stop incest from occurring in nature, but natural selection tends to phase out populations (in the manner described above) that are exclusively or largely incestuous, since they lose genetic robustness.
Because of this, most people believe that incest moved from being a biological aversion to being a social taboo. People noticed these problems arising from incest (such as in the Royal Families in the olden days) and then decided that incest was not to be allowed because of the consequences it can have. That is also why it was deemed acceptable to marry your 3rd or 4th cousin (I don't understand the English system of cousin numbers) because you would be so genetically removed/different from those cousins that the chances of negative recessive traits due to shared genetic material is low.
Since this is therefore a social taboo because of reproductive reasons, the issue becomes complicated because we live in a social world where sex isn't just for procreation.
So if a brother and sister are attracted to each other and they're sterile, are the problems associated with incest valid in their case since they can never have a child?
What about a brother and sister whose possible offspring would carry no negative gene traits?
Do same-sex relatives have to worry about the incest taboo, since they can't procreate and therefore could not create any offspring?
At the same time, since incest is a
social taboo as well, one can argue that there are social reasons to be against incest. One could argue that social development is hindered by forming sexual/romantic relationships exclusively with family and not branching out to other people. In doing so, one might lose the networking that comes from bridging two social pools together.
I personally look to the biological reasons for why I find incest inappropriate among reproductively-capable heterosexuals, and social for everyone else. However, if I encountered people on an individual level who were in incestuous relationships with no possibility for any of the aforementioned negative consequences, then I guess I'd say that i wouldn't object to their relationship, provided it's not out of hand, like some all-family sexual orgy. It just wouldn't be for me.
Homosexuality carries few biological stigmas. Scientists theorize that homosexuality arises as a natural social occurrence, or even a population control mechanism. One large bio stigma that homosexuality can carry (and probably the only one) is because homosexuality results in no procreation, meaning individual fitness goes to zero. However, if one believes the population control mechanism, then homosexuality wouldn't benefit the individual necessarily in terms of fitness, but would benefit the population by maintaining numbers at a level that is able to be supported by the resources in the environment.
In the modern age, homosexuality's social stigmas are either based out of that one biological stigma (one can thus argue that Leviticus prohibits homosexuality because it was in the Jews' interest to increase their population as much as possible, being a persecuted and relatively small people during that time) or out of social prejudice based out of ignorance such as that homosexuals will get HIV, that homosexuals are child molesters, or that homosexuals are evil and sinning.
In light of the fact that homosexuality for the individual has no biological consequences beyond the lack of procreation nor any true social consequences, I find it to be alright. That's the way I felt about it when I was a middle schooler before I realized I was gay, and though I may be biased now, I'd like to think that a straight me would use the same logic.
Since incest generally has negative consequences on the individual level when sex is procreative, I am generally against it. However, it's not a hot button issue I'm going to start protesting about.
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