Incest Red

Although the "new information" that changed Aberle et al.'s minds indicated that inbreeding was at least as dangerous as Bittles's estimates imply, they rejected the possibility that primitive man recognized this danger.

Law and instinct. In Sir James's words, It is not easy to see why any deep human instinct should need to be reinforced by law. There is no law commanding men to eat or drink or forbidding them to put their hands in the fire.

The law only forbids men to do what their instincts incline them to do; what nature itself prohibits and punishes, it would be superfluous for the law to prohibit and punish. Crime and natural propensity. Accordingly, we may always safely assume that crimes forbidden by law are crimes that many men have a natural propensity to commit. If there was no such propensity there would be no such crimes, and if no such crimes were committed what need to forbid them?

we ought rather to assume that there is a natural instinct in favour of it, and that if the law represses it, as it represses other natural instincts, it does so because civilized men have come to the conclusion that the satisfaction of these natural instincts is detrimental to the general interests of society.

"Nuer say that marriage to persons standing in certain relationships is forbidden because it is rual, incestuous," but E. E. Evans-Pritchard argued that "we may reverse this statement and say that sexual relations with persons standing in these relationships are considered incestuous because it would be a breach of the marriage prohibitions to marry them. I would hold that the incest taboo can only be understood by reference to the marriage prohibitions, and that these prohibitions must be viewed in the light of their function in the Nuer kinship system and in their whole social structure." Putting exogamy before the incest taboo led to the remarkable conclusion that the incest taboo is the means by which human beings transcended their animal nature.

Cooperation between families cannot be established if parent marries child; and brother, sister. A way must be found to overcome this centripetal tendency with a centrifugal force.

If persons were forbidden to marry their parents or siblings they would be compelled to marry into some other family--or remain celibate, which is contrary to the nature of primates. The leap was taken; a way was found to unite families with one another, and social evolution as a human affair was launched upon its career. It would be difficult to exaggerate the significance of this step. Unless some way had been found to establish strong and enduring ties between families, social evolution could have gone no further on the human level than among the anthropoids.

As Tylor has shown almost a century ago, the ultimate explanation is probably that mankind has understood very early that, in order to free itself from a wild struggle for existence, it was confronted with the very simple choice of "either marryingout or being killed-out." The alternative was between biological families living in juxtaposition and endeavoring to remain closed, self-perpetuating units, over-ridden by their fears, hatreds, and ignorances, and the systematic establishment, through the incest prohibition, of links of intermarriage between them, thus succeeding to build, out of the artificial bonds of affinity, a true human society, despite, and even in contradiction with, the isolating influence of consanguinity.27

It requires the elimination of some younger members from the family, in spite of emotional attachments, and entrusting these members to groups where stable relationships do not yet exist. It also requires that primitive man understand the advantages of exchange--or else must assume that familial exogamy and the familial taboo arose as a chance "mutation" and survived because of their adaptive character.29

They accepted the evidence indicating that inbreeding is injurious, but they also accepted Freud's claim that human beings are naturally inclined to mate and marry within the family.

The new organization would have collapsed in a struggle of all against all, for none of them was of such overmastering strength as to be able to take on his father's part with success. Thus the brothers had no alternative, if they were to live together, but--not, perhaps until they had passed through many dangerous crises--to institute the law against incest, by which they renounced the women whom they desired and who had been their chief motive for dispatching their father. In this way they rescued the organization which had made them strong.30

Discovering that his sister has no penis, every little boy fears that he will suffer the same fate if he persists in wanting his mother. And thus, if one can accept that fear of castration is universal, a natural preference for incest is turned into incest avoidance.

Thus, for Durham, what Williams calls the representation problem is not a problem at all. The incest taboo is not a representation. It is a creation.

Sexual reproduction seeks variety. Inbreed violates this doctrine. The most important biological cost of excessive inbreeding is that it negates the benefits of the genetic variation generated by sexual reproduction.

Scientists collaborating on the Human Genome Project have elucidated nearly all the DNA sequences of all the genes on all twenty-three pairs of chromosomes found in every human cell. It is a staggering achievement. But the excitement about what is being done should be greatly moderated. "The Book of Life," as one leading scientist called it, will not provide the complete story about human nature.

The human genome is like a cook's larder list. Working out all the dishes that cooks might make from the ingredients available to them is another matter. If you want to understand what happens in the lifelong process from conception to death, you must study the process. The starting points of development include the genes. But they also include factors external to the genome, and of course, the social and physical conditions in which the individual grows up are crucial.

The language of a gene "for" a particular characteristic is exceedingly muddling to the nonscientist--and, if the truth be told, to many scientists as well. What the scientists mean (or should mean) is that a genetic difference between two groups is associated with a difference in a characteristic. They know perfectly well that other things are important and that, even in constant environmental conditions, the outcome depends on a combination of many genes. Particular combinations of genes have particular effects, and a gene that fits into one combination may not fit into another. Unfortunately, the language of a gene "for" a characteristic has a way of seducing the scientists themselves into believing their own sound bites. The language rests on a profound misunderstanding.

While genes obviously matter, even a cursory glance at humanity reveals the enormous importance of each person's experience, upbringing, and culture. Nobody could seriously doubt the remarkable human capacity for learning from personal experience and from others. It is obvious that experience, education, and culture make a big difference, whatever an individual's genetic inheritance. Individuals are not like the dry Japanese paper fl

The notion that genes are simply blueprints for an individual human is hopelessly misleading. In a blueprint, the mapping works both ways: starting from a finished house, the room can be found on the blueprint, just as the room's position is determined by the blueprint during the building process. This straightforward mapping is not true for genes and individual human behavior patterns, in either direction.

Genes do not make behavior patterns or physical attributes. Genes make proteins. Each human has about 30,000 genes, each of which is an inherited molecular strand (or set of strands) that may be translated into a protein molecule (or part of one). The proteins are crucial collectively to the functioning of each cell in the body. Some proteins are enzymes, controlling biochemical reactions, while others form the physical structures of the cell. These protein products of genes work not in isolation but in a cellular environment created by the conditions of the local environment and by the expression of other genes. Each gene product interacts with many other gene products.

Any characteristic of an individual, such as a behavior pattern or psychological attribute, is affected by many different genes, each of which contributes to the variation between individuals. In an analogous way, many different design features of a motor car contribute to a particular characteristic such as its maximum speed. A particular component such as the system for delivering fuel to the cylinders may affect many different aspects of the car's performance, such as its top speed, acceleration, and fuel consumption. A broken wire can cause a car to break down, but this does not mean that the wire by itself is responsible for making the car move.

The image of a genetic blueprint also fails because it is too static, too suggestive that adult organisms are merely expanded versions of the fertilized egg. In reality, developing organisms are dynamic systems that play an active role in their own development.

The idea that familiarity of a certain kind does reduce sexual attractiveness may be applied rewardingly to explain one striking feature of divorce statistics. For instance, in British women who married before the age of twenty, the proportion of marriages that ended in divorce has been approximately double that of the marriages of women who married between twenty and twenty-four. The difference is found at any time between four and twenty-five years after marriage. Many factors, such as differences between social classes in attitudes toward marriage, could explain or contribute to explaining the difference. However, early marriages may involve a great deal of intimacy but relatively little sexual satisfaction. Indeed, people often report that their early sex lives were relatively unrewarding. If the effects of habituation are not powerfully offset by rewarding sexual experience, the partner may lose his or her attractiveness and become the equivalent of a sibling.

If these ideas are correct, human incest taboos did not arise historically from deliberate intention to avoid the biological costs of inbreeding. Rather, in the course of biological evolution, two separate mechanisms appeared. One was a developmental process concerned with striking an optimal balance between inbreeding and outbreeding when choosing a mate. The other was concerned with social conformity. When these two propensities were put together, the result was social disapproval of those who chose partners from within their close family. When social disapproval was combined with language, verbal rules appeared that could be transmitted from generation to generation, first by word of mouth and later in written form.

The days of both genetic and environmental determinism are numbered. The center of intellectual activity is now focused on process and how the individual develops.

With very few exceptions, they accepted Sigmund Freud's contention that "an incestuous love-choice is in fact the first and regular one, and that it is only later that any opposition is manifested towards it, which is not to be sought in the psychology of the individual."