Old habits die hard

Obligatory Alabama comment

@Zenon

Obligatory reply that cousin marriage is Legal in NY without any restrictions, but only Legal in Alabama if the couple can prove they are infertile.

@CorruptUser
In his defense he's a Kiwi (I think I can't see the stars on the flag too well) so he probably doesn't know too much about the dynamics between US states other than Alabama incest jokes in popular culture.

@CorruptUser Could it be argued, that the NY law is more relaxed because cases of this happening there are low and not something that comes up very often while Alabama has to spell theirs out more explicitly due to previous issues? I heard that most if not all safety codes regarding buildings, fires, electrical setup, etc were created due to someone getting killed/hurt.

@Zenon

Obligatory reply that cousin marriage is Legal in NY without any restrictions, but only Legal in Alabama if the couple can prove they are infertile.

Many nations still have this problem with incest.

In Saudi Arabia (and all the other Arabian countries such as Oman, Yemen, UAE, etc), the tradition is for the men to marry their father's brothers' daughters, i.e., their paternal cousins. Many people think this is a fine tradition and refuse to let it die, as it ensures there's more women for the clan, something that's extremely important in a country where polygyny is the norm which means that there simply aren't enough women to go around. Their historical 'solution' is to send the extra men Somewhere Else to cause trouble. A few of those men end up joining the Taliban, ISIS and similar, but as long as those young men are causing trouble Somewhere Else and not home, Saudi Arabia and the others don't care.

@CorruptUser ........... I don't think a lack of wives is what drives people to join terrorist groups xD If that was the case we'd be knee high in Chinese terrorists. Also, while polygyny might be legal in those countries, I severly doubt that it's a wide spread practice. Some people probably does it, but it seems pretty obvious that most people in the Middle East are in monogamous relationship - having several wives would probably be waaaaaaaaaay to expensive to most middle class and lower class people.
Also, you write 'send the extra men somewhere else to cause trouble' and that 'as long as they're somewhere else and not home, Saudi Arabia etc. won't care', but then you also write 'a few of those wife-lacking men end up joining the Taliban, etc.' ...... so wouldn't that mean that the majority of the men without wives stay in their home country? Sooo ... they're not somewhere else. They're at home. In Saudi Arabia or whatever. Being a problem there.

@ACVE

1) China does have a horrendous problem in the countryside, with gangs of men causing trouble. They don't join terrorist groups but they are an internal crisis that you don't hear a lot about, 'cause China. China has been turning a blind eye to sex trafficking from North Korea as a result, i.e., Korean women pay smugglers to get to the South, but end up being kidnapped and sold as "brides" to Chinese families. It's actually much, much more horrific if you realize that the vast majority of Uighurs in "reeducation camps" that absolutely don't exist are men, and Chinese men are living in the Uighur homes with the Uighur women "encouraged" to marry Chinese.
2) The latest stats show that half a million Saudi men have more than one wife, in a country with a grand total of 30 or so million people. That's... a pretty common thing, and it really doesn't take too many men having multiple wives to ensure there's a huge chunk of the men who can't have ANY wives, especially more when you consider that KSA imports lots of men to do all the actual work
3) The men go to other countries, but don't always join terrorist groups. Remember, "Jihad" is not exclusively a violent action, more often it's the Islamic version of The Salvation Army or other missionary work. It's only "Jihad of the Sword" that Westerners are familiar with. However, it's not uncommon for those men to marry locals.
4) Many of the men marry wives from other countries. Remember, the Saudis are filthy rich in a country that's basically socialist, so long as you ignore the millions of pseudo-slaves that are imported to do all the actual work.

@CorruptUser

The other catch is that while the occasional offspring from cousins have almost no genetic danger, if your father and his brother married cousins, and your grandfather married cousins... sooner or later you will have a few too many great grandparents and start to get closer and closer to having "cousins" that look genetically closer to "siblings".

[First] cousin marriage is banned in a few US states, but mostly thanks to being abused by families trying to create a closed aristocracy by continually marrying cousins within small families. Not sure if they hit genetic damage or outsiders got real tired of it, but a few more generations and they'd get like Charles II.

@wumpus

Well, there is genetic danger depending on which chromosomes you and your cousin share. Genes are actually a bit more random, it's easy to say "you have half your mom's DNA, and she has half her mom's DNA, ergo you have one quarter your grandmom's DNA". In reality, you inherit 23 chromosomes from your mom, but it's a coin flip for each chromosome as to whether that one came from your grandma or grandpa. Flip a coin 23 times and count how many times you get heads, could be 12, could be 8. It's very common to get 10 chromosomes from grandma, it would not be unusual to get 16, rarely you could get 3. Getting absolutely none has a chance of 1 in 8 million, which makes it incredibly unlikely but hey, that means there are 1000 people out there with no (nuclear) DNA from their maternal grandmother. A cousin is expected to 1/8th of your DNA, but it could be a bit more or less. So you don't know just how much danger there is in first cousins. Best to, you know, date outside the family instead of simply hoping the nasty genes will breed themselves out.

@CorruptUser oh boy there is a lot of cringy misinformation in that post. I don't know where you gathered that information from but I would highly recommend you actually look into this before passing it all off as fact...

@infr

Which bit of information is incorrect?

@CorruptUser I'm pretty sure cousin marriage is common anywhere that (historically) did not have a high population. Up until a few decades ago Saudi could only support a limited number of people. Think of villages where your water source comes from a single well, drawn by a camel slowly walking back and forth all day. Most food can't be grown there due to the climate and you can only survive on so many dates and goats.

If population is limited, of course even if you try not to, you'll end up marrying a distant cousin just because options are limited.

Tradition also varies by family. In my (Saudi) husband's family people might marry 4th or 5th cousins but I don't know anyone who married a first cousin. They also all only have one wife. There are perhaps 2-3 cousins who are in a family with multiple wives but that's because they married into a completely unrelated family where that was more common.

Vice is nice, but incest is best. So put your sister to the test.

@Humility You, Sir, just nailed the obligatory Alabama comment.

Fun incest facts.

1. Every. Single. Gene required a ton of incest to go from an expressed mutation all the way to well actually having a place in the genome.

2. Slightly over half of everyone has an incest fetish. The other half however are EXTREMELY disgusted by it. And this seems to be determined by a mother inherited gene.

3. Back in the 1800s to the early 1900s incest was so fashionable that people would not only have faux romances with their siblings, but theaters would cast actors and actresses with the same last names into leading romantic roles with each other because just the suggestion of incest there would result in better ticket sales.

@Humility As a biologist and history minor, I call BS on all of this.

@Cygnata literally elementary school level biology. The genetic square and the peas.

@Cygnata

In case none of that rings a bell let me be more specific .

An expressed mutation will recess and then completely vanish within 3-4 generations unless two people with the same mutation mate.

And that means incest. Because you aren't going to find anyone else in the world with the same mutation who isn't a close relative.

@Cygnata In fact most mutations start recessed anyway. Regular incest helps express them. This is key to evolution. Especially bubble evolution. Of course the downside of expressed mutations is they are more likely to be hurtful than helpful.

@Cygnata Several years ago, I remember earing a biologist explaining that you need a liiiittle bit of incest in your genes, something like a grand-grand-grand parent in common. More (and less) incest makes a weaker child either by permitting diseases or weaknesses.

I've never been able to confirm that or no.

I think incest is highly exaggerated. It is true that too much incest will cause more genetic diseases but if we take the most famous example of the Habsburgs then you see that only after repeated cases of incest it becomes a problem.

For example In 1946 the Argentinian government imported fifty beavers from Canada. According to a June 2011 NPR report, 200,000 beavers are living in the area. That are 200.000 beaver from the same starting 50.

If incest was as big a deal as it is always made out to be these beavers would have gone extinct from all the diseases not flourish as they did.

@unit5421 but its still bad.

@unit5421 Beavers have a more diverse gene pool than humans. Humans almost became extinct about 70,000 years ago due to a massive volcanic eruption. Only about 5,000 people survived it is thought. Then 40,000 years ago only a few thousand migrated out of Africa. 98% of the genetic diversity is in Africa, only 2% in the rest of the world. As people spread out, each group had less diversity than the parent group. By the time you get to the edges of the Eurasian world island, places like Norway, you are a tiny splinter of a splinter of humanity.

Even more inbred than pure breed Leonberger who all descent from the same 8 dogs that survived WWII?

@nroejb More than twice as much.
https://www.instituteofcaninebiology.org/blog/inbreeding-of-purebred-dogs-determined-from-dna

There were only 50 lundehunder at the outbreak of WWII, and it has experienced two bottlenecks since then.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5249080/

@Ferrari27 In that graph they use the re-breeds of Leonbergers though, they had other breeds like Newfoundlands mixed in against the incest. There are (or at least were) some breeders who never included these though and their Leonbergers are (or were, it's almost 20 years old news by now) a lot more inbred.
50 is actually a rather huge bottleneck compare to that the Leonbergers had after both World Wars (5 after WW, 8 after WWII).

@nroejb Reading the Lundehund page on wikipedia in a couple of different languages, I pieced together that it had already gone extent from everywhere except one village by 1900, which IMO implies it was already somewhat inbred by then. Then it "was nearly extinct around WWII" with "only a few individuals remaining" (due to a disease affecting all dogs in the area), but I didn't spot a precise number for that. And then in 1963, the disease struck again, with *only 6 dogs surviving, 5 of them from the same mother*. So at least that bottleneck was worse than the post-WWII 8 the Leonbergers had, if not also worse than the previous one, because nearly all of them were already so closely related. Besides 5 of them being half-siblings, I assume at least some of those were full siblings, which would mean the whole population all descended from fewer than 6 individuals if you look at the parents of the 5. Admittedly it may only have been that bad once, not twice as for the Leonbergers, but again, the Lundehunds had already had two successively tighter bottlenecks prior to 1963 as well.

P.S. You kind of missed the fact that the 50 was at the start of WWII, not the actual bottleneck caused by WWII.

@anyllama
Well, for health reason I probably wouldn't buy either breed. But I'd suggest the same solution for the Lundehund as for the Leonberger, mix in other related breeds in a controlled way and accept the mix as new status quo. Not everybody will accept it for them either but it would be better for the dogs.

@Ferrari27 My family used to breed Lundehund when I was a kid back in the 70s and 80s, and from what my parents told me at the time only 5 Lundehund (1 dog and 4 bitches) survived WW2, I think due to an outbreak of canine distemper.

If a couple is incestuous, then it should be illegal to have kid, IE anyone who is a married/partnered with in whatever way incestuous couple both should be snipped and tied respectively.
If it's a gay incest then it doesn't matter at all.

You are also far less likely to have issues with cousins than with mom/dad or brother/sister so much so that some cousins are more genetically diverse than a total stranger in the same racial/regional area that you may meet.

It's fascinating how we knee-jerk react to thing rather than think about them and what consequences they have and how. However Humility's lovely post about facts saying that the extreme dislike or disgust vs not minding it at all is determined by the mothers genetic composition then it explains why for many it seems to be a split issue.

I still maintain that I don't care what anyone does as long as they aren't hurting anyone. This would also apply to other genetic risks like mental and physical health disorders that have medium to high risk of being passed to offspring. Since incest doesn't even have that high of a chance and as Tarmaque pointed out that the incest becomes an issue down the line when it continues rather than one instance of it I would say people are far more irresponsible if they have current genetically predicated issues mental and physical and still decide to have kids instead of adopt.

When you know your child will suffer from something you will have a very high chance if not absolutely will pass down, you are the gross one to me. But culture and morals are complete arbitrary nonsense and it's more okay for someone who has dwarfism, depression, eczema and a history of cancer in the family to have a kid, yet two related persons not having kids, but still being lovers, that's the real crime.

@Sinvanor

There are actually two reasons for incest to be unpopular/illegal. One of which has been mentioned and if humilities facts are accurate your probably right that there's no genetic harm if a couple in an incestuous relationship have no children.

However there's a moral reason for distrusting some types of incest as well. Relationships in a family are often unequal and it can be that one member, especially if they feel powerless may see they have no choice as to such a relationship. Especially if its a parent and child. This would occur even if the child is over the formal age of consent, especially if their been programmed from a young age. Sex with someone classified as a child is deemed illegal in most societies but if the target is a bit older but has been groomed for a prolonged period so they feel unable to disagree with the demands made on them is it any less immoral?

You often see a related issue in patriarchal societies as children, even when in their late teens or 20's often feel compelled to comply with demands of their parents - not always just their father - on how they behave, who they mix with and even who they marry.

Going a round about way of saying it but basically there are some forms of incest that should be at least frowned upon even if no children results and its not technically illegal on grounds of the age of one 'partner'.

@stevep59 But then, only the parents/children relationship should be taboo... I don't know about England but it isn't so in France, even having an affair with your cousin, while not illegal, is pretty badly perceived. I'm not even talking about a brother/sister relationship which is just unconceivable to most people and even sugesting it would bring horror to their faces (yup I did that).
Moreover, I feel this argument is just a bad excuse to justify a nonsensical tradition : problematic relationships happen all the time. Husbands hurting or raping their wives and never getting punished for it, there is absolutely no need for incest to be involved for that to happen.

Also, you can't forbid everybody to do something just because 1% of the time it will result in a bad situation. At least that is not how we decide for most of the things we may or may not do. I feel most anti-incest arguments are just like homophobic arguments were 60 years ago : choosing an extreme example of an incestuous relationship gone wrong and saying that is why it's wrong to do so.

@stevep59 Ah, that's actually a really good point, in which case I would think that brother, sister relations might have less issues with power dynamics.
Age would always be a consideration as well.

I still vouch for it being legal and regulated, because if people are going to do it anyway, I'd rather have people educated and safer than otherwise. So things like power dynamics, especially parent to child, and age differences between siblings and cousins would all be considered in regards to an incestuous relationship.
However, none of those concerns are specifically incest related alone. We have moral "laws" for power dynamics and age differences already when it comes to relationships.
A good example being work place love or relations with your boss because of an inherent power dynamic.

Totally don't disagree with you though that those are definite concerns, just that they aren't unique to incest.

@Sinvanor

You raise some good points there. I would say there might still be concerns with a brother-sister relationship, especially in still largely patriarchal societies but definitely less likely to be abusive than parent/child ones.

@Sinvanor

You do realize that you are basically making an argument for eugenics, right?

Also, Dwarfism isn't necessarily a disadvantage, especially in the military.

@CorruptUser It begs noting, that any time you talk about genetics and limiting who can and can't marry-even when opposing incest-your arguing for eugenics. However, generally the downside of eugenics is two fold: One not giving the individual a choice and the fact it almost always unfairly leans on the lower class of society with the upper class being immune or ignored.

Generally just discussing limiting anyones choice based on their genetics is straight eugenics, it's more a question of how much is acceptable.

@CorruptUser The great irony about Eugenics is that for it to work, you would have to apply the principles of animal husbandry to humans. Human husbandry. And to avoid the kind of genetic problems associated with inbreeding, every woman would need two husbands. One closely related, one unrelated, (Two produce offspring of varying degrees of diversity within a single generation) and you would need to follow the close incest, distant incest then no incest pattern of generational breeding. And then select against any children with unwanted genes showing.

And yet supporters of Eugenics are utterly oblivious to this or just don't care.

@Humility

That's because Eugenics was never about "let's breed a better humanity", but rather "I want more stuff/sex/status, therefore I'm superior, therefore I should breed more, this group of people is a group I don't like, therefore they are inferior, therefore they should be exterminated".

Yes, that is illogical, but it's hardly unique among Eugenicists. If anything, "I want something, therefore it's my right to have it, anyone in my way is denying my rights and therefore evil" is the most human form of philosophy there is.

@CorruptUser Dwarfism comes with a massive host of medical complications, almost all of which tend to lower the life quality and expectancy of the persons who have it.

You aren't incorrect, but it's also about it being agreed upon that passing on bad genes knowingly is seen as an immoral thing to do. Which people don't generally even consider when having kids.
It's why I'm not going to have kids. My family has a history of trying mental illnesses and I just got pretty crap genes. I don't want anyone to live with that, even if I'm happy to be alive, I would prevent a theoretical person from having my shoddy DNA.

@Sinvanor
The problem with making incest legal is the similiar to the problem with legalizing drugs: people don't do it becuase it isn't allowed. If it's allowed, people will start doing it and it will become a problem (though slower than everybody being on drugs would become a problem).

@Sisu A lot of times drugs is more a problem of insufficient support and overly harsh punishments. There are effective limits to how harsh a punishment can be and still have a positive influence on society. Generally execution does bypass that as when your dead you dont do the bad thing anymore one way or another. But anything less there is a limit to what is effective deterant for a crime and overly harsh punishment can have a lesser effect than lesser punishments or active support. The US war on drugs went for a no tolerance policy and arguably things have steadily gotten worse due to the harsh punishments and lack of support, not saying outright legalize cocaine but generally there are limitations that are very extensively studied by experts who should be acknowledged.

@Soulbourne I mean just look at how the War on Drugs (targeting mostly poor and minority population) was enforced with harsh punishments, as opposed to the Opioid Crisis (which focused on people who were generally well off enough to afford insurance) where the users were treated as poor victims and given counseling and therapy.

@Sisu That's patently not true if you've looked into studies regarding countries that did make drugs legal. In many cases, the rates of drug use, especially heavy and previously illegal dropped by a large margin, and in the cases of users, they were safer because the drugs were regulated to be of better and safer (as safe as cocaine and others can be considering their risks) which lead to less ER visits from bad quality.
It also lead to less spread of diseases by providing clean needles and recovery areas in bad events. This leads to not only a morally better avenue, but also a financial one. Less people going to the ER who can't afford it going to specialized places that deal with persons who still do hard drugs, get clean needles, etc.

Same with making incest legal as well. Any incest relationships that enter marriage or have kids would be regulated. Likely the couple would not be allowed to have kids, or would have extensive checks for probability of complication. Likely in the future we'll just have gene editing and it wouldn't matter anyway.

@Sinvanor Ah but controlling marriage is so much easier than controlling who has kids with whom. Laws differ on how close a relationship is allowed for marriage. But things like sharing a house or inheriting each other? Entirely different thing.

@Sinvanor What do we do with the from incest born children?

Sterilization?

@Svenskefan
I think it depends on if they have issues that could be passed to their children and/or if incest proclivity is somehow genetic, IE that they are likely to be incestuous too.

There are already plenty of people with out incest whom by these measures shouldn't be having kids. Lots mental and physical diseases that someone's life a lot more challenging, if not needlessly so.

"Didn't you USE to have...", please, not "Didn't you useD to have...".

@Eldkatten Er, no, "Didn't you used to have" is right

@weelydangle Not really:

"Usage

1 The construction used to is standard, but difficulties arise with the formation of negatives and questions. Traditionally, used to behaves as a modal verb, so that questions and negatives are formed without the auxiliary verb do, as in it used not to be like that and used she to come here? In modern English, this question form is now regarded as very formal or awkwardly old-fashioned, and the use with do is broadly accepted as standard, as in did she use to come here? Negative constructions with do, on the other hand (as in it didn't use to be like that), although common, are informal and are not generally accepted. 2 There is sometimes confusion over whether to use the form used to or use to, which has arisen largely because the pronunciation is the same in both cases . Except in negatives and questions, the correct form is used to: we used to go to the movies all the time (not we use to go to the movies). However, in negatives and questions using the auxiliary verb do, the correct form is use to, because the form of the verb required is the infinitive: I didn’t use to like mushrooms (not I didn't used to like mushrooms)."
as quoted from the New Oxford American Dictionary here:
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8816/whats-the-negation-of-i-used-to-be-surely-not-i-didnt-used-to-be

@weelydangle As schnablo explained in many words (thanks for that), it is not. A question is usually formed with a form of "do" in the right tense and the infinitive form of the verb:
you see that -> do you see that? -> don't you see that?
you saw that -> did you see that? -> didn't you see that?
It gets complicated with "would" and "should" (which take the place of "do" in the question) and the past tense:
Should you really have said that? Shouldn't we have helped them?
Would I have thought of that? Wouldn't they have heard it?
The infinitive here is "have", but it might lead to the misconception that the question is formed with the past tense of the verb (in fact it is the past participle, and I deliberately chose verbs for which the simple past tense has the same form as the past participle: say-said-have said, help-helped-have helped, think-thought-have thought, hear-heard-have heard, as opposed to see-saw-have seen, do-did-have done or go-went-have gone).

Sorry, but I allways flinch when I read things like "Did he went there?" The past tense is already marked by "did", so it doesn't need another marker.
Somewhere I read something about how that misconception and the wrong construction arises, but I forgot. It seems to be quite common in translations of Manga from Japanese to English, and I allways wondered whether it's something about japanese people thinking in english as a foreign language, but I've heard it is not very uncommon among native speakers, too. Some day in the future, if more and more English speakers use it this way - [question marker] + [personal pronoun] + [past tense of the verb] - it might have become correct, but today it's not.
No offence meant.

@Eldkatten holy shit. i'm not reading that

@Eldkatten I often wonder about that too. I think it's because Japanese people sometimes get confused over the presence of two verbs. "Do" is an auxiliary verb, but it's also a verb in its own right. The same question in Japanese "Did he go there?" would translate as, "Asoko ni ikimashita ka?" (or "Asoko ni ikimashita?" - with a strong rising inflection at the end, otherwise it becomes a statement - "Asoko ni itta no?" "Asoko ni itta?"...there are more, but it basically depends on who you're talking to as to which level of politeness you use.)

Anyway, the point is that there is only one verb in that question: "ikimashita/itta" which is the past tense of "iku" - to go. Since that's definitely in the past tense in Japanese, I think many Japanese believe that it needs to be in the past tense in English too. It also gets a little more confusing as Japanese has auxiliary verbs, but they're used more as conjugations. Specifically, conjugations that go at the end of the verb, and can be mixed and matched (eg: "taberu" means "to eat" but "tabesaseraremasendeshita" ＝ taberu + causative (saseru) + passive (rareru) + polite negative (masen) + polite past tense (deshita)＝fun tongue twister for Japanese language students that means "was not forced to eat.") :P

@JudasFm Thanks a lot for the explanation! And I nearly had missed it.

Can't keep in your pants, keep it in the family.

To be ENTIRELY FAIR THO what nation DIDN'T have major incest problems until like the 21st century?
Edit: Why the downvote? I was just pointing out that incest was (rather disturbingly) common until quite recently. Franklin Delanore Roosevelt, president of the United States during WW2, married a distant cousin of his.

@Yeehaw0 Not really. In eastern Europe or Turkey for example that was not an issue. People more or less figured out that when closely related people make a baby, it ends up a mess. They didn't knew the exact reason why like we do today, but they figured out how to at least avoid it.
Usually when they ran out people to marry, young people from close range villages would travel to find a spouse they are not related to, or even fully move out and form new villages. Also shifting populations due to better land offers(that's basically how the US was formed, and that is just one example), big merchant groups that would settle for long in a different country, nomadic groups running from war(this is why ex Yogoslavia is such a hot ethic mess of a map), rape during wars or kidnaping if you want to get into the dark side of it would all pretty much assure new blood often enough to avoid. Even the kings and nobleman would avoid to marry family because the "blue blood" idea was not as popular here.
Sure, there were still isolated people or ultra nationalistic ones that refuse the notion of marring anyone they would consider "outsiders". However they were not enough to be a huge incest problem. Not everyone was the damn Austrian aristocracy were their family tree was more of a stump.
I think it really depends of what corner of the world you are thinking of, hence why the down votes. The comment was a bit too general.

@Lostdaydreams
But to be fair, they were the exception, not the rule.

@Lostdaydreams
Also I can find records of more or less socially acceptable incest from Polynesia to Peru to Zimbabwe. Really, Eastern Europe and Turkey were the exception.

@Yeehaw0 I don't think marrying a distant cousin is really 'incest'. A first cousin could be a bit problematic, a sibling/parent is surely incest, but a distant cousin is, well, distant. And it should be noted that the likelihood to have genetic problems even with the most harmful form of incest (parent/child) is still relatively low.

The only problem is if there are many generations marrying cousins one after the other, then you will start to see serious problems. It's the piling up that amplifies the problem

@Yoramus
But FDR was raised treating her as his cousin, they met as children! Even though they weren't closely related, that's still a pretty screwed up mentality.