Many thanks to Lady Christabel for her assistance in editing this essay.
* * *
The recent news story about a pair of British twins separated at birth who met, fell in love, and married while unaware of their relationship highlights a phenomenon that has been often written about on Literotica, but it is seldom discussed in the mainstream press, ordinary society, or scientific circles. That phenomenon is physical attraction between members of the same family.
While the event above could be written off as a mere accident, remember that these twins had a whole world of partners from which to choose yet chose each other to love. Clearly, there was an attraction between them that transcended mere cohabitation, curiosity, or opportunity, the causes often cited for sexual activity between siblings. Could this same attraction be more widespread than is commonly acknowledged? If so, from where does it originate?
Psychologists have long known that a young girl's first crush is normally her father, and that the success (happiness, contentment) or failure (anger, frustration) of this relationship may affect her sexual identity and the nature of the partners she chooses for the remainder of her life. Likewise, the mother/son relationship functions similarly for boys. Further, thousands, if not millions, of people have experienced their first sexual feelings and/or activities with their siblings. Why then does this widespread phenomenon not have a respected name? Why is it treated with disdain, embarrassment, or even legal harassment?
The abhorrence of incest is so widespread that many people, even some scientists, assume that this distaste is somehow biological, that nature created this feeling in us in order to avoid the deformed babies that must inevitably result from such a heinous union. Nothing could be further from the truth. We should remember that not so very long ago such abhorrence was also aimed at homosexuals and at interracial marriages, and that these feelings started to abate when gays and interracial couples stopped allowing themselves to be treated in such a manner and began demanding social acceptance. A similar discussion of and the acceptance of familial attraction is overdue.
The deformed babies nightmare we have been taught to expect is a hoax. Incest does indeed have a strong effect on the nature of the offspring produced, but it is an amplification effect. It increases the probabilities of both the good traits and the bad traits being passed to future generations. If related parents both carry a genetically strong trait, the probability of their offspring having and passing that trait is enhanced over what it would be if only one of them carried it. Likewise, if the parents carry weak traits, then the probability of those traits is also enhanced. It is clearly not a one-sided effect. In fact, inbreeding is routinely practiced in all types of agricultural and animal husbandry fields specifically to produce better species of corn, cows, flowers, etc. Researchers expect a certain number of breeding sequences to product unsatisfactory results; these are simply discarded because so many other results produce superior specimens. The same would be true of humans.
Scientists are becoming aware that nature does indeed have a hand in incest. However, it is not the abhorrence that nature is providing, but the physical attraction. Why would nature want us to be physically attracted to our family members? The answer to that question involves an understanding of our far distant human past.
The first members of the human family of animals lived more than four million years ago. Since, for most of our history, the average length of a generation has been about twenty years, that means that 200,000 ancestors separate us from those early people. While the acquisition of hunting and fire were important events in our development, human culture, the way we live, did not start changing significantly until the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, or about 500 generations ago. That means that we lived the old way for almost 400 times as long as we have lived this new way. This is important because evolution is a slow process. The old culture still lives in us because it has not had time to change significantly.
What the presence of this old culture means is that psychologists have begun to realize you inherit more than your eye color from your parents. In addition to your physical characteristics, you also inherit psychological characteristics. You may have noticed how a certain child has inherited some aspect of its parent's personality such as their humor, temper, or disposition. Science is beginning to realize that we possess a vast number of such psychological characteristics, and that evolution affects how they are passed down to us.
Evolution affects all inherited characteristics, both physical and psychological ones, and the role it plays is to align our physical characteristics to our environment and our psychological characteristics to our physical ones. For example, one defining characteristic of humanness is the ability to walk upright. At some point millions of years ago, our ancestors were selected for this trait, and it helped them survive in their environment. However, what good would walking be if it felt bad and we hated to do it? Therefore, not only did we have to evolve to walk, but we also had to evolve to like doing it because it makes us feel good.
In a similar manner, all the feelings and emotions that humans have today exist because evolution created them in our ancestors. We can feel joy because they did; we can feel anger because they did; we like to hold hands because they did; and so on. From a psychological perspective, as well as from a physical perspective, everything that we are is due to how they lived. For millions of years, they lived in and adapted to one specific kind of culture. We live in a different culture, but our psychology is from the ancient age. It has not yet had time to adapt to our new world.
For this reason, understanding what that ancient culture was like is extremely important. Unfortunately, there is bad news in that regard – science has not been able to provide many clues about what that culture was like. Paleoanthropologists have some information about bones and teeth and stone tools, but little more than poorly supported theories about how these groups lived. The only other information is us, the descendants of those people. If we could cleanly determine which of our psychological traits were biological, or inherited, versus which were learned as part of our early social training that would be a huge improvement to our knowledge. Unfortunately, the science of Psychology has not arrived at that point yet because there is little hard evidence about how the brain works at that level of detail. Consequently, many different groups of scientists have created social models of that time, and there is little commonality among them.
Yet, it is still very important that we pursue such models using whatever data we have. The main thrust of this essay is that the most logical model of how these people lived tells us some very intriguing things about incest.
To begin with, they were vegetarians for millions of years prior to the invention of hunting; and even after that they continued to obtain most of their calories from fruit/vegetable sources. This has interesting consequences. Since in most geographies such food sources are small, scattered, and quickly exhausted, they were compelled to move frequently, and their groups would have been compelled to remain small enough (i.e. fifteen to twenty members) to avoid moving more than once per day. To have to move almost every day for 365 days per year implies that the group must have wandered a fairly large territory, perhaps fifteen to twenty miles in diameter. Within these territories, there were many other competitors for the available food, including other neighboring groups. Because of this competition and the distance between them, it is unlikely that they maintained social contact with the neighboring groups. However, it is also unlikely that they were at war with them. Confrontations were expensive in terms of food and risky in terms of lost lives. Since such small groups can ill afford to lose one of their productive adults, if another group beats yours to a food source, it is far better to simply move along to another food source. There is little to gain by fighting because the food is probably already gone. Consequently, because these groups were small and isolated, they did not commonly exchange members with other groups - once you were born into a group that group was your family for life unless tragedy intervened.
Now, let's take a closer look at the makeup of the group. Paleoanthropologists estimate from their artifacts that the average lifespan of an individual was about twenty-eight years. They also estimate that the fertility rate for adult women was about one child every four years because of a low-calorie diet, extensive exercise, and breastfeeding. Since sexual maturity for women is at approximately twelve years, the average woman would bear four or five children in a lifetime of which about half (another estimate) would die before maturity. If we throw in the fact that adult men die earlier than adult women due to their expendability and riskier lifestyle, we can estimate that our typical group of twenty individuals probably included about ten adults (four males and six females) and ten children under the age of twelve. This mixture produces a stable replacement rate, and it also provides enough hands to deal with all of the potential problems the group might face. In addition, it squares with the known biological facts of human development.
Stepping back a moment, when we take a look at our typical group, some interesting conclusions emerge. First, because of their isolated lifestyle and because they probably spoke a language that was only intelligible within their group, all of the sexual experiences of their lives were with other members of the group. Secondly, since these groups could potentially continue to survive for hundreds of years or perhaps much longer, no matter how these sexual experiences were divided (monogamous or otherwise), eventually all of the members would become closely related. Thirdly, because non-monogamous pairing provides the best gene mixing, it appears likely that the average adult had sex on a regular basis, probably daily (remember that most of the adult cavemen were really teenagers), with all of their surviving family members of the opposite sex. In short, this model leads to the conclusion that not only is incest not abnormal, it is probably the most normal kind of sex that humans have had!
Therefore, we can now revisit the questions we asked previously. From where does physical attraction between family members originate, and why would nature want it? Clearly, for early humans for millions of years, it was either incest or no sex at all and therefore the end of the family. The reasons that nature would want that are several: first, sex binds the members of the group (family) together -
helping it survive the many traumas and frustrations that threaten to tear the group apart; secondly, it keeps the members happy and motivated – helping them get over the frequent grief they must face; and finally, it provides nature with thousands of small, independent genetic experiments – genetically weak families die, genetically strong ones thrive thereby creating a new species of human.
Lest the reader surmise that this model has no historical foundation, there is also historical evidence from many places that incest was still being practiced in more recent times. Among the Egyptians and the Hawaiian Islanders, it was the perquisite of kings, though not commoners, to marry a sister. Additionally, it was common in Genesis in the Bible for biblical figures to marry sisters, nieces, and cousins. Even Abraham, Patriarch of Judaism and Christianity, was married to his sister. When it came time for his son, Isaac, to take a wife, Abraham insisted that she must also be from the family. To that end, he sent his servant out to find such a woman, and he returned with Rebecca, Isaac's cousin. Also from Genesis, Lot, the good man from Sodom whose wife was turned to salt as they were leaving, took his two teenaged daughters to hide in the mountains. Lacking a wife, he proceeded to impregnate both of his daughters. They each bore a son, one of whom later founded the kingdom of the Ammonites whose capital city was named Amon. That kingdom and city still exist. The kingdom is Jordan, and its capital is now known as Amman.
The above examples illustrate that, far from being abhorrent or biologically perverse, incest was common in our ancient past, at least among the higher classes, even into historical times. The above references are from early in the historical record, approximately 4,000 years ago, some 6,000 years after the advent of agriculture and the huge social revolution that it caused. It appears that this social revolution may have been the source of the prohibition against incest, not some biological impulse. It is possible that the repression of this form of sexuality was entirely intentional, that the chiefs and other leaders were using the control of sexuality to achieve some political end. That this might be so is entirely plausible given that such tactics are still in use today. It is no accident that the other so-called abhorrent behaviors listed previously also relate to sexual behavior. Our culture has learned over the centuries how to impose sexual restrictions quite effectively. The abhorrence we experience is simply a form of brainwashing. We have learned how to scare ourselves, particularly our children, about certain things so that neither they nor we even understand why we feel that way anymore. We simply do.
Incest is not unnatural; incest is the real us.
* * *
The recent news story about a pair of British twins separated at birth who met, fell in love, and married while unaware of their relationship highlights a phenomenon that has been often written about on Literotica, but it is seldom discussed in the mainstream press, ordinary society, or scientific circles. That phenomenon is physical attraction between members of the same family.
While the event above could be written off as a mere accident, remember that these twins had a whole world of partners from which to choose yet chose each other to love. Clearly, there was an attraction between them that transcended mere cohabitation, curiosity, or opportunity, the causes often cited for sexual activity between siblings. Could this same attraction be more widespread than is commonly acknowledged? If so, from where does it originate?
Psychologists have long known that a young girl's first crush is normally her father, and that the success (happiness, contentment) or failure (anger, frustration) of this relationship may affect her sexual identity and the nature of the partners she chooses for the remainder of her life. Likewise, the mother/son relationship functions similarly for boys. Further, thousands, if not millions, of people have experienced their first sexual feelings and/or activities with their siblings. Why then does this widespread phenomenon not have a respected name? Why is it treated with disdain, embarrassment, or even legal harassment?
The abhorrence of incest is so widespread that many people, even some scientists, assume that this distaste is somehow biological, that nature created this feeling in us in order to avoid the deformed babies that must inevitably result from such a heinous union. Nothing could be further from the truth. We should remember that not so very long ago such abhorrence was also aimed at homosexuals and at interracial marriages, and that these feelings started to abate when gays and interracial couples stopped allowing themselves to be treated in such a manner and began demanding social acceptance. A similar discussion of and the acceptance of familial attraction is overdue.
The deformed babies nightmare we have been taught to expect is a hoax. Incest does indeed have a strong effect on the nature of the offspring produced, but it is an amplification effect. It increases the probabilities of both the good traits and the bad traits being passed to future generations. If related parents both carry a genetically strong trait, the probability of their offspring having and passing that trait is enhanced over what it would be if only one of them carried it. Likewise, if the parents carry weak traits, then the probability of those traits is also enhanced. It is clearly not a one-sided effect. In fact, inbreeding is routinely practiced in all types of agricultural and animal husbandry fields specifically to produce better species of corn, cows, flowers, etc. Researchers expect a certain number of breeding sequences to product unsatisfactory results; these are simply discarded because so many other results produce superior specimens. The same would be true of humans.
Scientists are becoming aware that nature does indeed have a hand in incest. However, it is not the abhorrence that nature is providing, but the physical attraction. Why would nature want us to be physically attracted to our family members? The answer to that question involves an understanding of our far distant human past.
The first members of the human family of animals lived more than four million years ago. Since, for most of our history, the average length of a generation has been about twenty years, that means that 200,000 ancestors separate us from those early people. While the acquisition of hunting and fire were important events in our development, human culture, the way we live, did not start changing significantly until the invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, or about 500 generations ago. That means that we lived the old way for almost 400 times as long as we have lived this new way. This is important because evolution is a slow process. The old culture still lives in us because it has not had time to change significantly.
What the presence of this old culture means is that psychologists have begun to realize you inherit more than your eye color from your parents. In addition to your physical characteristics, you also inherit psychological characteristics. You may have noticed how a certain child has inherited some aspect of its parent's personality such as their humor, temper, or disposition. Science is beginning to realize that we possess a vast number of such psychological characteristics, and that evolution affects how they are passed down to us.
Evolution affects all inherited characteristics, both physical and psychological ones, and the role it plays is to align our physical characteristics to our environment and our psychological characteristics to our physical ones. For example, one defining characteristic of humanness is the ability to walk upright. At some point millions of years ago, our ancestors were selected for this trait, and it helped them survive in their environment. However, what good would walking be if it felt bad and we hated to do it? Therefore, not only did we have to evolve to walk, but we also had to evolve to like doing it because it makes us feel good.
In a similar manner, all the feelings and emotions that humans have today exist because evolution created them in our ancestors. We can feel joy because they did; we can feel anger because they did; we like to hold hands because they did; and so on. From a psychological perspective, as well as from a physical perspective, everything that we are is due to how they lived. For millions of years, they lived in and adapted to one specific kind of culture. We live in a different culture, but our psychology is from the ancient age. It has not yet had time to adapt to our new world.
For this reason, understanding what that ancient culture was like is extremely important. Unfortunately, there is bad news in that regard – science has not been able to provide many clues about what that culture was like. Paleoanthropologists have some information about bones and teeth and stone tools, but little more than poorly supported theories about how these groups lived. The only other information is us, the descendants of those people. If we could cleanly determine which of our psychological traits were biological, or inherited, versus which were learned as part of our early social training that would be a huge improvement to our knowledge. Unfortunately, the science of Psychology has not arrived at that point yet because there is little hard evidence about how the brain works at that level of detail. Consequently, many different groups of scientists have created social models of that time, and there is little commonality among them.
Yet, it is still very important that we pursue such models using whatever data we have. The main thrust of this essay is that the most logical model of how these people lived tells us some very intriguing things about incest.
To begin with, they were vegetarians for millions of years prior to the invention of hunting; and even after that they continued to obtain most of their calories from fruit/vegetable sources. This has interesting consequences. Since in most geographies such food sources are small, scattered, and quickly exhausted, they were compelled to move frequently, and their groups would have been compelled to remain small enough (i.e. fifteen to twenty members) to avoid moving more than once per day. To have to move almost every day for 365 days per year implies that the group must have wandered a fairly large territory, perhaps fifteen to twenty miles in diameter. Within these territories, there were many other competitors for the available food, including other neighboring groups. Because of this competition and the distance between them, it is unlikely that they maintained social contact with the neighboring groups. However, it is also unlikely that they were at war with them. Confrontations were expensive in terms of food and risky in terms of lost lives. Since such small groups can ill afford to lose one of their productive adults, if another group beats yours to a food source, it is far better to simply move along to another food source. There is little to gain by fighting because the food is probably already gone. Consequently, because these groups were small and isolated, they did not commonly exchange members with other groups - once you were born into a group that group was your family for life unless tragedy intervened.
Now, let's take a closer look at the makeup of the group. Paleoanthropologists estimate from their artifacts that the average lifespan of an individual was about twenty-eight years. They also estimate that the fertility rate for adult women was about one child every four years because of a low-calorie diet, extensive exercise, and breastfeeding. Since sexual maturity for women is at approximately twelve years, the average woman would bear four or five children in a lifetime of which about half (another estimate) would die before maturity. If we throw in the fact that adult men die earlier than adult women due to their expendability and riskier lifestyle, we can estimate that our typical group of twenty individuals probably included about ten adults (four males and six females) and ten children under the age of twelve. This mixture produces a stable replacement rate, and it also provides enough hands to deal with all of the potential problems the group might face. In addition, it squares with the known biological facts of human development.
Stepping back a moment, when we take a look at our typical group, some interesting conclusions emerge. First, because of their isolated lifestyle and because they probably spoke a language that was only intelligible within their group, all of the sexual experiences of their lives were with other members of the group. Secondly, since these groups could potentially continue to survive for hundreds of years or perhaps much longer, no matter how these sexual experiences were divided (monogamous or otherwise), eventually all of the members would become closely related. Thirdly, because non-monogamous pairing provides the best gene mixing, it appears likely that the average adult had sex on a regular basis, probably daily (remember that most of the adult cavemen were really teenagers), with all of their surviving family members of the opposite sex. In short, this model leads to the conclusion that not only is incest not abnormal, it is probably the most normal kind of sex that humans have had!
Therefore, we can now revisit the questions we asked previously. From where does physical attraction between family members originate, and why would nature want it? Clearly, for early humans for millions of years, it was either incest or no sex at all and therefore the end of the family. The reasons that nature would want that are several: first, sex binds the members of the group (family) together -
helping it survive the many traumas and frustrations that threaten to tear the group apart; secondly, it keeps the members happy and motivated – helping them get over the frequent grief they must face; and finally, it provides nature with thousands of small, independent genetic experiments – genetically weak families die, genetically strong ones thrive thereby creating a new species of human.
Lest the reader surmise that this model has no historical foundation, there is also historical evidence from many places that incest was still being practiced in more recent times. Among the Egyptians and the Hawaiian Islanders, it was the perquisite of kings, though not commoners, to marry a sister. Additionally, it was common in Genesis in the Bible for biblical figures to marry sisters, nieces, and cousins. Even Abraham, Patriarch of Judaism and Christianity, was married to his sister. When it came time for his son, Isaac, to take a wife, Abraham insisted that she must also be from the family. To that end, he sent his servant out to find such a woman, and he returned with Rebecca, Isaac's cousin. Also from Genesis, Lot, the good man from Sodom whose wife was turned to salt as they were leaving, took his two teenaged daughters to hide in the mountains. Lacking a wife, he proceeded to impregnate both of his daughters. They each bore a son, one of whom later founded the kingdom of the Ammonites whose capital city was named Amon. That kingdom and city still exist. The kingdom is Jordan, and its capital is now known as Amman.
The above examples illustrate that, far from being abhorrent or biologically perverse, incest was common in our ancient past, at least among the higher classes, even into historical times. The above references are from early in the historical record, approximately 4,000 years ago, some 6,000 years after the advent of agriculture and the huge social revolution that it caused. It appears that this social revolution may have been the source of the prohibition against incest, not some biological impulse. It is possible that the repression of this form of sexuality was entirely intentional, that the chiefs and other leaders were using the control of sexuality to achieve some political end. That this might be so is entirely plausible given that such tactics are still in use today. It is no accident that the other so-called abhorrent behaviors listed previously also relate to sexual behavior. Our culture has learned over the centuries how to impose sexual restrictions quite effectively. The abhorrence we experience is simply a form of brainwashing. We have learned how to scare ourselves, particularly our children, about certain things so that neither they nor we even understand why we feel that way anymore. We simply do.
Incest is not unnatural; incest is the real us.