Incest in a lift

HansMustermann said:
I see your point, but you probably also understand that certain senses are easier to evolve than others.

E.g., detecting heights is a by-product of vision and quite easy, while for example a sense like seeing which food or water hole has harmful bacteria would have helped even more but it never evolved because it's hard. It would make a lot of sense from an evolutionary standpoint to be wired to stay away from that, but it somehow never happened.

It's even harder for incest. it's not easy to recognize that that hot woman over there has a significant number of shared alleles with me, while that other hot woman doesn't. The reaction which would tell you "stay away from that one, unless you want kids with sloped foreheads and flippers" is lacking an input.
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People know who their family members are. There is plenty of input.
 
Information Analyst said:
You shifting the goalposts doesn't alter the fact that marriage between cousins was not uncommon in the past - or even currently - in many places.
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Indeed.

I wonder how many reading this thread actually had 16 great great grandparents.

I'd bet a fair chunk of money it's not many at all.
 
3point14 said:
Indeed.

I wonder how many reading this thread actually had 16 great great grandparents.

I'd bet a fair chunk of money it's not many at all.
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I did, but that's probably due to the geographic distribution of my ancestors.

The Habsburgs didn't so much have a gene pool, more of a gene puddle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain

A lot of Charles II's lady ancestors really were uncle *******
 
3point14 said:
Indeed.

I wonder how many reading this thread actually had 16 great great grandparents.

I'd bet a fair chunk of money it's not many at all.
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Yes I do (Mormons are big on geology). That aside, is this an argument from personal incredulity or do you have a rational basis for the rhetoric?
 
3point14 said:
Indeed.

I wonder how many reading this thread actually had 16 great great grandparents.

I'd bet a fair chunk of money it's not many at all.
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Well I haven't had all 16 of them...
...some were cremated.

(Bizarrely on topic)
 
Furcifer said:
Looks like a commercial for Reebok.

It's not all that depraved, most of the reaction is based on social norms. I don't think it warrants being placed on a sex offenders list (especially if it's incest, is the public really isn't at risk with this particular "crime"?) It sure it weird.

All kidding aside, having seen the offenders, it makes you wonder if it's actually a crime of necessity. I don't subscribe to this notion that there's "someone for everyone". More so now.
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There is that.... "crime of necessity"... those two were made for only each other.
 
3point14 said:
Indeed.

I wonder how many reading this thread actually had 16 great great grandparents.

I'd bet a fair chunk of money it's not many at all.
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.
That's almost a sucker bet. :(
How was milk delivered generations back? :)
 
Professor Yaffle said:
I think if there is a hereditary incest taboo it applies just to family members you were raised with - siblings, parents etc. Wasn't there some research that showed that it is rare for children raised in a kibbutz to marry eachother because the other kids were equivalent to siblings, psychologically speaking. And I think sexual attraction between reunited siblings (due to adoption for example) is relatively common too. So it looks like our brains use a heuristic - if you were raised with them, don't fancy them.
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Maybe. Most species have their own behaviours that encourage a bit of spread of the genes. But, as you note there, the reverse imprinting actually works more by who you grew up around, rather than by who would really be a case of incest.
 
RandFan said:
Damn! :mad:

Rule 1: Don't post drunk.
Rule 2: Don't post in the morning without coffee.
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Hee hee! Sorry, I couldn't resist yanking your chain on this one.

Don't feel bad, I am terrible at spelling and typing both. What i don't misspell, I wreck with typos. :D
 
RandFan said:
People know who their family members are. There is plenty of input.
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Yes, but stuff you consciously know, is hard to evolve a biological reflex for or against. If nothing else, because the latter would have to happen at a much lower level than the former.

In fact there is plenty of evidence that stuff you consciously know is pretty much out of the equation for such stuff that happens at lower levels. E.g., watching people on TV has actually been shown to make people less lonely. You may know they're not really there with you, but the circuitry which decides "yay, I'm in a group of people" is at a lower level and gets triggered anyway.
 
HansMustermann said:
Yes, but stuff you consciously know, is hard to evolve a biological reflex for or against. If nothing else, because the latter would have to happen at a much lower level than the former.
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I don't believe that is true at all.

In fact there is plenty of evidence that stuff you consciously know is pretty much out of the equation for such stuff that happens at lower levels. E.g., watching people on TV has actually been shown to make people less lonely. You may know they're not really there with you, but the circuitry which decides "yay, I'm in a group of people" is at a lower level and gets triggered anyway.
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You assume that we can generalize from the specific. No. It doesn't work that way for one thing and another is that the mind is far more complex than you are accounting for. It's a kludge of modules that evolved at different times to perform different tasks. It's designed from the ground up to treat every problem in the same fashion. You can't take a simple phenomenon of the mind and apply it to everything else about the brain.

In any event, read Dawkins' Selfish Gene. We can calculate the likelihood of people helping children over siblings, siblings over cousins, cousins over friends. It's predictable and experiments verify the prediction. This can only work if we evolved a rule for favoring individuals with more shared genes than others. Since there is not a lot of cues for shared genes then our only basis for delineation is knowledge. BTW: Similarities of siblings is often visually apparent as siblings do in fact share alleles.
 
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RandFan said:
Yes I do (Mormons are big on geology). That aside, is this an argument from personal incredulity or do you have a rational basis for the rhetoric?
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Well, if you go back about 50 generations then you'd need over a million billion people, so at some point in the past the doubling each generation breaks down.

I'd make a fair bet that, given that communities were far more geographically restricted 100 years ago, I suspect I've put enough greats in there to be sure. Another few more and I'd be damn certain.

I'll see if I can find something concrete to back it up, but I'd still put money on it.
 
3point14 said:
Well, if you go back about 50 generations then you'd need over a million billion people, so at some point in the past the doubling each generation breaks down.

I'd make a fair bet that, given that communities were far more geographically restricted 100 years ago, I suspect I've put enough greats in there to be sure. Another few more and I'd be damn certain.

I'll see if I can find something concrete to back it up, but I'd still put money on it.
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Thanks. But we aren't talking about 50 generations, right? Or am I missing something. You said 16 great great great. Perhaps there is some ambiguity in the time frames.
 
RandFan said:
Yes I do (Mormons are big on geology). That aside, is this an argument from personal incredulity or do you have a rational basis for the rhetoric?
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Rational basis is that there were fewer people in the past than today. Since every generation back doubles the number of your ancestors, it does not take long before the theoretical number of your ancestors exceeds then-population of Earth. Solution to this paradox is that some of your ancestors on mother's side were also your ancestors on father's side. And more so as you go farther back.
 
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