Incest Taboo

Incest is a word that is often misunderstood but universally considered taboo. While incest is listed as a criminal offense, many health care professionals have no clear idea of what constitutes incest or some incestuous acts are reportable by law. There are endless academic writings on the subject, yet may confuse rather than clarify because of lack of adequate definitions. Incest may be considered one of the only universal taboos, however, there is no uniformity as to which degrees are involved in the prohibitions. Through this paper I intend to further examine the different definitions of incest and I hope to clarify what incest may or may not be.
First we must look at why incest is considered harmful to our societies. The primary concern with incest is that the family members are too genetically linked. Inbreeding does not lead to congenital birth defects per se; "it leads to an increase in homozygosity, that is, the same allele at the same locus on both members of a chromosome pair. This occurs because close relatives are much more likely to share the same alleles than unrelated individuals. This is especially important for deleterious recessive genes, which are harmless and inactive in a heterozygous pairing, but when homozygous can cause serious developmental defects. Such offspring have a much higher chance of death before reaching the age of reproduction, leading to what biologists call inbreeding depression, a measurable decrease in fitness due to inbreeding among populations with deleterious recessives" (wikipedia.org). There are three other theories that attempt to explain the taboo's existence. One theory suggests that the taboo expresses a psychological revulsion that people naturally experience at the thought of incest. Most anthropologists reject this explanation, given that incest does exist. However, the taboo itself may be the cause of this psychological revulsion. Another theory, suggested by Claude Levi-Strauss and others, has suggested