Incest

[Lord Mhoram]

But if Cain and Able were the only sons (that I can remember) of the only people on earth (Adam and Eve), how did Cain and Able reproduce?

[SoulBiter]

I just consider it unexplained theology. There is tons of speculation out there as to where other people came from but its all speculation and one hypothesis is as good as another.

Some say that Adam and Eve had many kids (heck Adam was supposed to be 130 years old when Seth was born and Adam lived like 800 years) So they could have easily had many children in that time who then had children... etc etc etc.

I have also heard that he took one of his sisters with him to Nod and there he 'knew' his wife..

Or perhaps God didnt create just Adam and Eve and there were others created as well.

[Menolly]

I think Kabbalah comes into play here with the advent of Lilith...

[emotional leper]

I think Kabbalah comes into play here with the advent of Lilith...

Yep yep. Just another reason to learn Hebrew is so I can scan even more texts in their original language.

[Menolly]

"Sometimes you just know someone too well,"

That's a large part of it. If left to a purely physical standpoint, you're likely to be more attracted to them than if you weren't related.

There seems to be olfactory issues involved as well.

cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15014908

[Cybrweez]

LM, why would you think Cain and Abel were the only sons of Adam and Eve?

[emotional leper]

"Sometimes you just know someone too well,"

That's a large part of it. If left to a purely physical standpoint, you're likely to be more attracted to them than if you weren't related.

There seems to be olfactory issues involved as well.

cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15014908

I believe it was Pheasants, that a study was conducted on, that found they prefered to mate with 1st cousins, but detested mating with 1st degree relations (parent, sibling, child.) I think this was referenced in the book "The Red Queen."

[Gil galad]

I don't think that there is nothing objectively wrong in consensual sex between any adults, no matter what social taboos may be broken in the process. If the incestual sex produces no offspring then I will even more strongly support the claim.

The reason why it's not considered a good idea to produce incestual children is because of the risk of genetic deformities. There is also a known risk of genetic inheritance of diseases such as haemophilia, cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy; yet the people suffering from these diseases are not legislated against from having children, in fact some of them do. They simply acknowledge the risk involved and get on with it.

It would be interesting to see a study showing the genetic defect rate of incestually born children, to use as a comparison to the known defect rates for genetically inherited diseases. I doubt there is sufficient data avaliable to produce a statistically significant result.

[Baradakas]

In the Apocryphals it states that an entire nation of people lived on the opposite side of the mountain from which Adam and Eve lived, and that Cain took many wives there, aside from his sister. It also states that Cain killed his brother out of jealousy, since he was forced by his father Adam to marry the ugly sister, while Abel married the attractive one.

On a brief aside, the Apocryphals of Adam and Eve are, IMHO, some of the funniest stories you will ever read. Turns out that Adam was a dolt, (Satan tricks him into killing himself several times, including pushing him off a mountain...), Eve was just as bad, (she had a frightening tendency to kill herself anytime Adam bit it...)

Not to mention the apocryphals of Jesus' youth! If you get the opportunity, I suggest reading them, it shows an aspect of Christ that I believe might be enlightening to some...

And it's good for a laugh...

-B

[Harbinger]

But if Cain and Able were the only sons (that I can remember) of the only people on earth (Adam and Eve), how did Cain and Able reproduce?

According to Genesis, after Cain killed Abel, he went to the land of Nod and lived with the people there. Which brings up an interesting point. Where the hell did they come from?

The first "experience" (not intercourse) I had was with my fourteen year old first cousin. I was thirteen. It was hot. We never made out again. She is still pretty hot, though. But I can't imagine thinking about my sister like that.

[exnihilo]

Women are the primary reason incest is taboo. Because women invest so much time and resources into each offspring, they have adapted to become repulsed by unions which offer reduced viability and behave in ways which prevent them (see the olfactory link Mennolly posted... the female sense of smell is about 3 times more acute than the male). The male aspect of this taboo is likely little more than a cultural artifact based on this earlier female adaptation.

[Baradakas]

Thought this might be relative to our discussion...

The following excerpt from Notes and Queries, the most well-established field manual for ethnographic research, illustrates the scope of ethnographic investigation into the matter.

Incest is sexual intercourse between individuals related in certain prohibited degrees of kinship. In every society there are rules prohibiting incestuous unions, both as to sexual intercourse and recognized marriage. The two prohibitions do not necessarily coincide. There is no uniformity as to which degrees are involved in the prohibitions. The rules regulating incest must be investigated in every society by means of the Genealogical Method. The prohibition may be so narrow as to include only one type of parent-child relationship (though this is very rare), or those within the elementary family; or so wide as to include all with whom genealogical or classificatory kinship can be traced. The more usual practice is that unions with certain relatives only are considered incestuous, the relationships being regulated by the type of descent emphasized. In some societies unions with certain persons related by affinity are also considered incestuous.
What penalties fall on (a) the individuals concerned; (b) the community as a whole? Are such penalties enforced by authority, or are they believed to ensure automatically by all action of supernatural force? Is there any correlation between the severity of the penalty and the nearness of the blood-tie of the partners in guilt? Should children be born as the result of incestuous unions, how are they treated? Are there any methods, ritual or legal, by which persons who fall within the prohibited degrees and wish to marry can break the relationship and become free to marry?
As this excerpt suggests, anthropologists are interested in the gulf between cultural rules and actual behavior, and many ethnographers have observed that incest occurs in societies with prohibitions against incest. It should be further noted that in these theories anthropologists are generally concerned solely with brother-sister incest, and are not claiming that all forms of incest are taboo (these theories are further complicated by the fact that in many societies people related to one another in different ways, and sometimes distantly, are classified together as siblings). Moreover, the definition restricts itself to sexual intercourse; this does not mean that other forms of sexual contact do not occur, or are proscribed, or prescribed. It should also be noted that in these theories anthropologists are primarily concerned with marriage rules and not sexual behavior. In short, anthropologists were not studying "incest" per se; they were asking informants what they meant by "incest," and what the consequences of "incest" were, in order to map out social relationships within the community.

This excerpt also suggests that the relationship between sexual and marriage practices is complex, and that societies distinguish between different sorts of prohibitions. In other words, although an individual may be prohibited from marrying or having sexual relations with many people, different sexual relations may be prohibited for different reasons, and with different penalties.

For example, Trobriand Islanders prohibit both sexual relations between a man and his mother, and between a woman and her father, but they describe these prohibitions in very different ways: relations between a man and his mother fall within the category of forbidden relations among members of the same clan; relations between a woman and her father do not. This is because the Trobrianders are matrilineal; children belong to the clan of their mother and not of their father. Thus, sexual relations between a man and his mother's sister (and mother's sister's daughter) are also considered incestuous, but relations between a man and his father's sister are not. Indeed, a man and his father's sister will often have a flirtatious relationship, and a man and the daughter of his father's sister may prefer to have sexual relations or marry.

Examples from other societies further reveal the variation in local understandings of incest. In Chinese societies, there is a strong taboo against marriage of persons with the same surname no matter how distantly related. There are often local taboos against marriage between people of certain surnames on the grounds that these surnames belong to clans which were closely related in the past. Similarly, although marriage between first cousins is forbidden in some contemporary jurisdictions it is both legal and acceptable in others.


[edit] Explaining the incest taboo
Although anthropologists have observed and studied violations of incest taboos (in other words, cases of incest), all anthropological theories of the incest taboo are concerned with the formal proscription against incest (as defined locally), not with actual cases of incest (however defined). These theories are motivated by two major questions: first, given the variation in how different societies define incest, and in which relationships are proscribed, is there any general pattern or universal function of incest taboos? Second, given that people do commit incest, why do so many (indeed, arguably, all) societies proscribe certain forms of incest? These questions are not concerned with the specific effects of incest on specific people — a matter usually left to psychologists.


[edit] A social response to the costs of incest
One theory is that the observance of the taboo would lower the incidence of congenital birth defects caused by inbreeding. A society that had noticed this might tend to form an incest taboo.

Anthropologists reject this explanation for two reasons. First, inbreeding does not directly lead to congenital birth defects per se; it leads to an increase in the frequency of homozygotes. A homozygote encoding a congenital birth defect will produce children with birth defects, but homozygotes that do not encode for congenital birth defects will decrease the number of carriers in a population.

One might complain that a society would have to have a fairly advanced understanding of genetics to recognise this potential "benefit" of incest, whereas the increased prevalence of birth defects is relatively easy to spot.

Second, anthropologists have pointed out that in the Trobriand case a man and the daughter of his father's sister, and a man and the daughter of his mother's sister, are equally distant genetically. In that particular case, the prohibition against relations is not based on or motivated by concerns over biological closeness.

Sociologist Ian Robertson gives three main social reasons why incest taboo exist as a cultural universals. The first is that early human beings-living primarily in small kinship groups of hunters and gatherers- needed to protect themselves by forming alliances with other groups. By forcing their children to marry into families outside their own, each group widened its social links and provided itself with allies in time of famine or other hazards. These groups faced the alternatives of marrying out or dying. Marriage in most traditional societies ia a practical alliance between groups, not a love match between individuals. That is why marriages are arranged by the parents, often when their offspring are still children and sometimes even before they are born. The second reason for the incest taboo is that the family itself could not function without it, for the statuses of family members would be utterly and hopelessly confused. As Kingsley Davis points out: " The incestous child of a father-daughter union would be a brother of his own mother, i.e. the son of his own sister; a stepson of his own grandmother; possibly a brother of his won uncle; and certainly a grandson of his own father." The third reason is that without an incest taboo, sexual rivalry among family members would disrupt the normal roles and attitudes of the various relatives. the father, for example, might experience role conflict as both the disciplinarian and the lover of his daughter; the mother might be jealous of both; and the child, of course, would be caught in the middle. Faced with constant conflict and tension, the family institution might simply disintegrate. The incest taboo has developed over time because it is vital to the survival of the family and thus of society itself. Of course, neither traditional nor modern societies consciously appreciate the reasons for the taboo. They and we simply accept it as natural and moral.


[edit] Evolutionary psychology and the Westermarck effect
Another theory suggests that the taboo expresses a psychological revulsion that people naturally experience anyway at the thought of incest.

Under this view, advanced by evolutionary psychologists, the incest taboo is primarily caused not by social condemnation, but rather by genes for incest avoidance, which would tend to prosper, by ensuring that an individual's children (possibly containing those same genes) are not unhealthy due to inbreeding. Furthermore, the benefits of sex (as opposed to asexual reproduction) are mysterious (see evolution of sex), but whatever they are, they would tend to be reduced by incest. Genes that prevented incest would tend to inhabit bodies that had more of these benefits, and therefore tend to become more widely spread.

Evolutionary psychologists (e.g. Steven Pinker in How the Mind Works) suggest that genetic influence is at work in the Westermarck effect, whereby people raised in close proximity (whether related or not) tend to feel little sexual attraction to each other, after maturity.

Most anthropologists reject this explanation, since incest does in fact occur. They suggest that the taboo itself may be the cause of the psychological revulsion.


[edit] Endogamy and Exogamy
Claude Lévi-Strauss has argued that the incest taboo is in effect a prohibition against endogamy, and the effect is to encourage exogamy. Through exogamy, otherwise unrelated households or lineages will form relationships through marriage, thus strengthening social solidarity. Lévi-Strauss first exposed this Alliance theory in the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949).

This theory was debated intensely by anthropologists in the 1950s. It appealed to many because it used the study of incest taboos and marriage to answer more fundamental research interests of anthropologists at the time: how can an anthropologist map out the social relationships within a given community, and how do these relationships promote or endanger social solidarity? Nevertheless, anthropologists never reached a consensus, and with the Vietnam War and the process of de-colonization in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, anthropological interests shifted away from mapping local social relationships.

[exnihilo]

Baradakas, that is an interesting sociological take on it, but I think it's important that the question of incest predates humans, and that many creatures have adaptations that inhibit the practice. In chimpanzees and bonobos for instance, their societies are structured in ways that minimize the opportunity and incidence of incest. There is also a lot of evidence that the females of these species actively avoid and resist the amorous advances of their brothers (who do not seem to feel the same degree of aversion). In both chimps and bonobos, the adolescent female will usually relocate to another kin group or clan. So, the roots of our own aversion are very likely to be more than cultural, although culture can of course alter and blur the rules.

[exnihilo]

Thus, sexual relations between a man and his mother's sister (and mother's sister's daughter) are also considered incestuous, but relations between a man and his father's sister are not. Indeed, a man and his father's sister will often have a flirtatious relationship, and a man and the daughter of his father's sister may prefer to have sexual relations or marry.

I just realized something. A man cannot share chromosomes with his father's sister since she is XX and the father donated the Y... while a man could have the same X chromosome as his mother's sister, resulting in a homozygote. Interesting how culture twists around to prevent that kind of union, but permit the other, isn't it? Maybe in this case "culture" is the surface veneer of an inner biological necessity.

[Mortice Root]

exnihilo wrote

A man cannot share chromosomes with his father's sister since she is XX and the father donated the Y...

As far as genes that would be transmitted on the sex chromosomes, that's right, ex, but as for the genes that are transmitted on the other 22 pairs of chromosomes, you would expect them to be a closer match between a man and his father's sister than between that man and the general population.

[Baradakas]

Ex, are you suggesting a genetic aversion to incest? Interesting...


(Heh, "Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?")

Couldn't help it...

-B

[emotional leper]

Ex, are you suggesting a genetic aversion to incest? Interesting...


(Heh, "Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?")

Couldn't help it...

-B

We do have a genetic aversion to incest.

The Westermarck Effect[/url]

[iQuestor]

I dont think thats how it started. I dont have a bible in front of me but isnt this one of those inconsistancies (or unexplained) things from the bible. Cain killed Able but then he went into the land of Nod and took a wife.
So obviously there were more people created or there would have been no people in the land of Nod for him to go take a wife.

Yep, this is an example of "inconsistency" in the Bible. A typical example, in other words, easily explained. The law for incest came from Moses. Before, there was no such thing. So, sister and brother together, no problem. And if there's a genetic issue with it, wouldn't it make sense? Adam and Eve were perfect, so the genetic issue wasn't there. After many generations, it becomes a problem. In any case, the law came long after Adam and Eve.

But, its a typical "inconsistency", b/c its much like other ones in that its frequently mentioned, although a simple reading of the actual text w/understanding easily answers the issue.

I guess I never thought about it, but, Biblically speaking, were Adam And Eve definately of the same genetic stock? ANd does it matter?

I guess we can assume that if Eve were made from Adam's Rib, then she had the same (exact same) Genetics. But since they were the first humans, there were no recessive (bad) traits to gang up and cause defective babies. I guess that came later.

By the time of Moses, enough radiation and other factors had their way with our genome for taboo to be a good idea.


As far as Incest, no way. Its just wrong in my book. It seems to go against our nature and our hard-wiring about the natural functions of sex and society. It is patently unnatural. If siblings engage in sex with each other at home, that means (to me) that they are either way outside of the developmental norm for humans, or been exposed to some pretty serious trauma, or both.

[emotional leper]

Doar -- Please think hard about using the phrase "patently unnatural" in regards to anything that is physically possible.

[Holsety]

I just consider it unexplained theology. There is tons of speculation out there as to where other people came from but its all speculation and one hypothesis is as good as another.

Some say that Adam and Eve had many kids (heck Adam was supposed to be 130 years old when Seth was born and Adam lived like 800 years) So they could have easily had many children in that time who then had children... etc etc etc.

I have also heard that he took one of his sisters with him to Nod and there he 'knew' his wife..

Or perhaps God didnt create just Adam and Eve and there were others created as well.

There's a passage at some point in the very early bible in which the "sons of god" went down to the "daughters of man" and had children with them.

LM, why would you think Cain and Abel were the only sons of Adam and Eve?

Because he hasn't read the biblE !!! But there is only one more AFAIK, Seth.