Abstract
In the late 19th century arguments explaining incest avoidance were framed separately by Edward Tylor and Edward Westermarck. Tylor offered an environmental theory asserting that people have to marry outside of their own kin and communities or die out from the detrimental effects of isolation. Westermarck turned to Darwin’s theory to explain that harmful inbreeding had been selected against in the human genome. By the late 20th and early 21st centuries explanations of human behaviors have become increasingly encompassed by natural selection theory. The debate concerning the productiveness of evolutionary biology for explaining complex human behaviors is highly contentious and continues unabated. Although human evolutionists repeatedly say that environment is important for understanding human behavior they often do not develop this part of the equation. Behind the prestige of evolutionary biology selection models of human behavior have passed into popular science and the public psyche. Often heard today from a wide range of highly visible media sources is an assortment of topics on human behaviors which are framed by Darwinian assumptions. Contemplations about incest and inbreeding avoidance fall into this category and are presented by Darwinian social science as the best case example demonstrating evolutionary suppositions about human behavior. In the article that follows these issues are framed and examined. The argument is offered that evolutionary approaches are not always the most compelling and that convincing environmental explanations are overlooked.
Highlights
A keen interest in the incest taboo spans the history of human studies and bridges such disciplines as cultural anthropology, sociology, evolutionary biology and psychology
Westermarck proposes that this inheritable mechanism operates by generating sexual disinterest in those individuals raised together. Since no such genes have been identified, support for Westermarck’s hypothesis has typically come indirectly from four bodies of scholarly literature. This includes observations that the incest taboo is universal; that inbreeding is deleterious to offspring; that inbreeding avoidance occurs in many other species; and that evidence of such a mechanism has been demonstrated in Shepher’s (1983) kibbutzim study and Wolf’s (2005) research on Chinese minor marriage
At the core of Westermarck’s natural selection hypothesis is the long held scientific and cultural belief that inbreeding and incestuous matings have a deleterious effect on subsequent offspring
Summary
A keen interest in the incest taboo spans the history of human studies and bridges such disciplines as cultural anthropology, sociology, evolutionary biology and psychology. In the late nineteenth century, at almost the same time, Edward Tylor (1888), an English anthropologist, and Edward Westermarck (1891), a Finnish sociologist, proposed alternative and opposing hypotheses for explaining the incest taboo. These divergent premises laid the foundation in the literature for distinctive approaches in understanding incest rules. Darwin’s natural selection theory was again employed to develop an inheritance model of complex social behaviors in animals (including humans), incorporating an aversion hypothesis of incest and inbreeding. The argument is forwarded that the incest taboo is understood in relation to human environmental and sociocultural demands, not an inheritance product of natural selection
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