• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Incest Is Best?

That may well be one of the main reasons to marry outside the family. as it were. To increase the healthy gene pool and try to eradicate the unhealthy genetics but exactly what mechanisms are involved may need further study, as it certainly woud not be a conscious choice in this respect. As mammals pheromones etc may act to repel close family and attract outsiders. Not sure about apes etc.
 
Apparently all Golden Hamsters are descended from 3 individuals captured in Syria in 1930 (Shuker, "The Lost Ark"). It would be difficult to imagine a group of animals more inbred, yet I don't think they suffer any particular defects. On the other hand, cheetahs have low genetic diversity due to a "population bottleneck" at some point in their history, and I believe this has caused some problems, such as low fertility.
Anyone know any more about this?
 
A few years back, when I was in America, I joked to a relation (second cousin? We share a Great grandmother) of mine that we could get married and not end up with three-legged kids, but I was told that under American law we wouldn't be allowed to marry as we were too closely related ...

I know in the equestrian world it's not unheard of for someone to breed a filly back to her sire (father) or a colt back to his dam (mother) to produce a spectacular looking third generation. It doesn't necessarily work tho' as the resulting offspring can have deformities
 
I can only figure that maybe level of defective genes varies between species, so those that have fewer could be inbred with a lower risk of producing a defective phenotype.

That said, a woman I used to work with told me one about her son inbreeding his mice until they all ended up hidously deformed.
 
Scarlett said:
There was a recent study done in Ireland that claimed that the tradition of marriage to first cousins, popular in the Traveller (Irish Gypsy) community, did not result in poorer health or genetic defects among the resulting children. Traveller children do have a higher than average rate of illnesses such as asthma, skin ailments, etc. but it was found that these were due to poor living conditions and nutrition.

Right, the reason why 'kissin' cousins' dosen't cause any noticible amplifacation of genetic defects is that cosins are not close genici relatives compared to a brother or sister.

Click on the jpeg below...
A and B are brothers, C and D are sister and brother as are E and F. if for example C and D were to have children up to 100% of the genetic material that is mixing is going to be the same (unlikly but thats the maximum possible in anycase). if D and F were to marry then you only have a potentule of 1/2 of the genetic material being the same. therefore with cousins the gene pool is greater resulting in less chance of potentully damageing gene combinations (not a bad job at explaneing that for 1 in the morning:snore: so please don't blame me if i left something vital out there I'll sort it out tomorrow sometime)
 
Hmmm

If a population is decreased in a situation such as an Ice Age and populations become localised, then surely interbreeding means an increase in the chance of mutations, and adaptations may develop faster...? So life could adapt quicker in a situation with such incest...?

Is that logical?
 
unfortuntly when those mutations (mutations in phenotype (outward apereance) as mutations in genotype (genetic sequence) are a different thing) include things like hamophillia for example (a girl with haemophillia who recives no medical treetments for it will definatly die from it by the time they reach puberty not to put too fine a point on it ) you can see the problems a small gene pool causes to isolated populations. the smaller the gene pool the more likly it is that an offspring will suffer from a debilitateing combination of genes (in most cases homozygus combinations (ie too genes that are the same as each other)).

A good analagy to use would be mixing a drink. take 2 glasses of cola one one double measure off a pint and the other one double measure off i/2 a pint. add a double rum to each drink. nest the fun part, drink your rum and cokes. Hopefully you're not squiffy at this point (if you are shame on you :p ), and will remember that the rum tasted stronger in the smaller glass.
think of the cola as the gene pool (the number of different combinations of genes available) and the double rum as the bad gene combinations, hense smaller gene pool and they'll be expressed more.

there are very few "mutations" in phenotype that give you a better chance of survival to pass on your genes so a smaller gene pool is much more likely to ultimatly make a species localy extinct rather than advance them in any way.
 
One of the recent 'Walking with Cavemen' type programmes on telly recently looked at the 'Out of Africa' migration, and claimed that all humans (or maybe all non-african humans - it wasn't too clear) are descended from a single tribe who crossed from Somalia to Arabia about 100,000 years ago. DNA extrapolation has shown that their numbers went right down to a thousand or so.

Considering the variety of humans now on the planet, (reminding ourselves that Halle Berry and Bernard Manning are members of the same species) we haven't done too badly from this bottleneck.

Of course if you're a fundie creationist type, you'll believe that all humans were descended from the incestuous relationships between the offspring of Adam & Eve, and then again from Noah's kids.
 
Emrys said:
Of course if you're a fundie creationist type, you'll believe that all humans were descended from the incestuous relationships between the offspring of Adam & Eve

Who were both male...:confused:
 
Inverurie Jones said:
Aside from that, which one bloody well gave birth???

To quote the Cosby Show where Cliff Huxtable dreamed he and all the Huxtable men were pregnant:

"And when the doctors said where the baby came out - IIIEEEEEE!!!"

:p
 
Inverurie Jones said:
Aside from that, which one bloody well gave birth???

This is a well-known Biblical problem with a simple answer. The Bible states quite clearly that Adam lived to be 930 years old, and that he "begat sons and daughters" (Gen.5:4). So he may have had dozens or even hundreds of children, both male and female. See this site.
I'm posing as a Creationist/Fundamentalist here, which I'm not, but I'm pointing out the answer that they would give.

Big Bill Robinson
 
From memory, largely because I can't be bothered checking at the moment, Cain and Abel turned into a dead-end for obvious reasons. The next two children (also male) married women who came from elsewhere, although it is not explained exactly where, or indeed how, as Adam and Eve were supposed to be the only people to start with.
 
This is half remembered from RE lessons at school.
God made man in his image, I was told this meant that he had a soul, not that he looked physically like god. After Adam and Eve ate fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and were then expelled from Eden, this meant that there were only two people who had souls and a sense of morality. God made other people (or should that be almost people) when creating the rest of creation. This made Adam and Eve's descendents 'special' and why he intervened in their favour over time.
Though it doesn't explain where other people have come from after Noah. (another dead end theory brought to you by Caroline) :rolleyes:
 
Our RE lessons were mostly about Sikhism and Buddhism, so Christianity is a bit of a weak point in my education....
 
I wish mine had been.:(

All I can remember is starting with Judaism at the beginning of each year for 5 years, and I blank out the rest. it's probably for the best. :cross eye
 
I think they reckoned we'd run into Christianity, Judaism and Islam plenty of times but maybe not those two so often.
 
Caroline said:
Though it doesn't explain where other people have come from after Noah. (another dead end theory brought to you by Caroline) :rolleyes:
What? Fundamentalist doctrine is full of inconsistencies? Imagine my surprise!
 
INBREEDING

I know its supposed to be all legal and above board to marry ones own cousin, but I don,t feel too easy with it. I knew a couple who were cousins who married and had three kids. All three kids had some sort of physical disability . My gripe with the couple was that they had the first child knowing that there was a problem and then had two more. All the kids had suffered considerable pain because of medical procedures they had to undergo ie operations to break and reset bones to help them walk. Its unlikely that they,ll ever be independent and I can,t help feeling a bit angry with the parents who I thought had been selfish. Surely if you marry your immediate cousin then you should,nt have kids?
 
Oedipus Schmedipus

caroleaswas said:
"Incest must be the biggest taboo of all. I suppose there is common sense behind this view, because any child of such a union stands a chance of having defects due to inbreeding."

But is this neccessarily so? I've had in my family some really good breeders of expensive hunting dogs and they don't seem to have experienced birth defects in putting into practice what would surely be considered incest in human terms.

And the ancient Persian Magi seem (according to the Greek historians, at any rate) to have promoted son-mother sexual unions in order to keep the priestly bloodlines as pure as humanly possible and to have done so without any major ill effects.
 
stuneville said:
carole said:
She told me later that one of the waitresses had sidled up to her and whispered, 'It's not one of them funny weddings, is it?'

Carole
What, with all the guests on one side of the church? :D

Known in my part of the world as 'Sheppey weddings' ;)
 
Re: Oedipus Schmedipus

OldTimeRadio said:
caroleaswas said:
"Incest must be the biggest taboo of all. I suppose there is common sense behind this view, because any child of such a union stands a chance of having defects due to inbreeding."

But is this neccessarily so? I've had in my family some really good breeders of expensive hunting dogs and they don't seem to have experienced birth defects in putting into practice what would surely be considered incest in human terms.

And the ancient Persian Magi seem (according to the Greek historians, at any rate) to have promoted son-mother sexual unions in order to keep the priestly bloodlines as pure as humanly possible and to have done so without any major ill effects.

On the other hand, hip displacia in German shepherd dogs and eye problems in lutino cockatiels are said to have been caused by inbreeding.
 
I read a study about ten years ago, about in breeding within the Japanese Christian community. Which, due the small number of members, was very interbred, but, they also had very good records.

The conclusion made was that there was little evidence over four hundred years of the traditional claims of feeblemindedness or other supposedly hereditary problems.

On the subject of brother/sister incest, in my days as a community nurse, (for what it's worth), I got the the impression it was fairly common in my area, although I don't know how representative this is.....

The relationships, seemed to be mutually consented to & in some, (possibly many), cases continued after both siblings were happily married!!!
 
FelixAntonius said:
"I read a study about ten years ago, about in breeding within the Japanese Christian community. Which, due the small number of members, was very interbred...."

I have to seriously question this. The number of Japanese Christians is high enough that I don't see how inbreeding would be a problem at all. (No more so, certainly, than for Jews or Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses or Muslims in the United States.)

According to my former Baptist pastor, when he attended the World Baptist Convention in Tokyo in the 1960s "THOUSANDS of Japanese Baptists attended, as delegates, volunteers and spectators."

And that's just ONE Christian demomination out of many, and not even the largest.

During World War Two the Japanese government issued New Testaments to its Christian soldiers! In fact, one of the best-kept secrets of World War Two was the fact that a good number of the Japanese pilots shot down at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, were carrying New Testaments! (I've never been able to find out the exact percentage.) The US Government didn't want word to get out to the American people that there were CHRISTIANS among the attackers.

PS Felix, could your author have been writing about a specific Christian denomination, small in size, which doesn't believe in intermarriage iwith other Christians? There is, for example, a sect known as "secret' or "hiding" Christians which was formed as a "catacomb"-style church during the few anti-Christian persecutions of centuries ago and remains so even though the group has been perfectly legal for hundreds of years.
 
Percentage

Years ago, pre-Internet, I was requested to come up up with at least a ballpark figure for the actual frequency of mother-son incest ("in the real world - not just in pornography"). This was to include both consumated coital incest and heavy petting leading to mutual orgasm.

I found dozens of educated guesstimates in books and magazine articles and for many months had speculative figures running 'round and 'round in my brain - "Three percent of European prison inmates....six cases currently under therapy by Hennepin County (Minneapolis), Minesota, social services....most cases don't require therapy....no nore than one case in a hundred is ever reported....the number of incestuous mothers is consistently under-estimated but we don't know by how much."

I finally gave up the project entirely and put everything out of my mind. Or so I thought.

Nearly a year afterwards I awoke from a deep nighttime sleep and leapt out of bed screaming "EIGHT-TENTHS OF ONE PERCENT OF THE MALE POPULATION!! EIGHT-TENTHS OF ONE PERCENT OF THE MALE POPULATION!!" over and over again.

(It then took me a few minutes, a pipeful of tobacco and a glass of Coke, to recall precisely what that figure meant.)

I still believe that number is fairly accurate.
 
Code of Hammurabi

The Old Testament orders the death penalty for any male who "uncovers the nakedness" of his mother. (I've never been certain of all the ramifications of that particular locution.).

On the other hand, the Code of Hammurabi invoked the death penalty ONLY when the son had sex with his mother AGAINST HER WILL. Otherwise there was no crime.

Both cases, of course, required the mother to REPORT the crime for the penalties to become effective. (There might be, of course, the single lightning bolt zotting down from a clear sky.) And you know mothers, especially with the death penalty for their child involved.
 
A short extract from the obitury of Lord Ackner, the former Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, who died recently, the whole obitury is worth a read, he seems to have been a sensible bloke:-

"....One of Ackner's first cases on the bench involved a young married couple who had found out they were half-brother and sister after their relationship started but had refused to believe it. Ackner said that although their incestuous relationship was "a successful one", they must end it immediately. But he added: "Do not go away with any sense of serious guilt...."

Source:- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... db2301.xml
 
Back
Top