Should incest be decriminalised?

[Tattooed Goddess]

Dandelion, are you saying Incest should be legal. Brothers and sisters should be pairing up and having children, so on and so forth? Are you saying not only should it be legal that there are not enough obvious physical consenquences or psychological ones?

Are you one of those "Anything goes" kind of people?

 

[AM_092]

If you included specifics in the poll, we might actually have different answers!

 

[Guy-jin]

In the context of a discussion about incest we are really only talking about the inbred children, not the population as a whole. In the context of an individual, there can only be two possible versions of a gene, not the very many in a wider population. I presume that law or no law, incest would remain rare. It doesnt really matter whether in one set of children amongst the entire population we bias the resulting genome one way or another. The only medical objection raised to the cross is whether they are more likely to inherit something which will immediately affect their own health. But I would also suggest that if one pairing is chosen of people with particularly close genetics, the remainder of the population still contains all the other partners these two might have chosen. No genetic variability has been lost in the overall population. Indeed, a close cross may lead to the next generation containing an unusual pairing of recessives, thus increasing the variability in that generation.

No.

If you want examples of good inbreeding look at most animals we breed. Those with two many deleterious mutations are not represented in the population: theyre dead. You will find far fewer bad genes amongst farm animals than pets: Farm animals purpose is basically to be eaten, so the cull rate compared to the breeding rate is much greater. The problem with pets is that there is a financial benefit to their owners to keep breeding them despite genetic defects. The owners are actually selecting bad traits to breed, because they have a financial investment in the particular animals they own.

I refer you to the example of inbreeding I outlined, which you did not comment on. 1/4 offspring has a fatal pairing of recessives, and dies. 2/4 has a mix. 1/4 has homozygous good genes. The result is whereas the initial population was entirely 1 bad gene paired with 1 good, the next generation has 2/3 with 1 bad gene and 1/3 with 2 good genes. In other words, making a cross between parents with 1 bad and 1 good gene actually improves the position in the surviving offspring. The overall situation improves in the offspring if you cross recessive bad genes.

I'm not going to make a big post responding to every point in particular.

Inbreeding is deleterious generally. Any advantages passed on are far outweighed by the increased mortality.

Unless you live in a malaria infested area, in which case you live whereas your unaffected compatriots die.

But that is because the population as a whole is more healthy if the sickle cell trait persists in the population. If the stimulus disappears, ie we cure malaria some other way, then the result of continuing crosses will be that the sickle cell trait dies out from the population. The result of breeding is always to produce more of the most successful offspring in each generation...by the mechanism that the disadvantaged ones fail to breed. In the case of sickle cell anaemia, we very probably are interrupting the natural mechanism which would get rid of the trait from the population, because we treat and keep healthy those with the disease, in an analogous way to which we have used medicine to get rid of the malaria. This is not an example of genetic selection in action, but of medical intervention in action. If we chose to treat malaria but not sickle cell, then sickle cell would eventually cure itself by becoming increasingly rare. That may not be considered ethical now, but it is the way the genetics works.

You don't need to regurgitate what I already explained to you back to me. I know what heterozygote advantage is, and I already told you the example of it in the sickle cell trait and malaria. People aren't selected to have sickle cell anemia. They're selected to be heterozygous for the sickle cell trait. That seems to be your confusion.

of course, I have forgotten most of my statistics. The two statements are correct, it centres at 50% and only identical twins will share all dna. However, I reckon 1/30000 siblings will share 10% or less of their DNA, 1/800 share less than 20%, 1/20 share less than 33%. Thats is, assuming 23 chromosome pairs of unique chromosomes. Should the chromosomes in the pairs already be identical, then naturally the individuals would be more alike, but to the same degree it would make no difference to the outcome whether this was a mating of siblings or of the random population. If the random population all have identical chromosomes then it makes no difference if we breed incestuously or not.

Some fumbling with a statistics book suggests otherwise? 1/20 less than 33% seems worth mentioning to me.

Chromosomes aren't passed on in identical pairs. They undergo crossing over to shuffle the genetic material in them before passing on to the offspring. That's why rates far away from 50% are so exceedingly rare. They don't follow that simple statistical model.

I have no way to judge that. Do you? What proportion of the population has a double gene for immunity to cholesterol? Tobacco smoke? a thinness gene? A doubled beneficial gene would likely result in extended lifespan. Has anyone done any research on this, how could it be measured? What proportion of the population is indeed genetically immune to tobacco smoke? Or HIV? By comparison it is very easy to measure the number who die from sickle cell, or a specific heart deformity, because we can specifically identify the disease which they did suffer from. It is quite hard to identify people who successfully fought off a disease and never come to medical attention.

It's not on the negative side to prove something, it's on the positive side. You're insisting there are common genetic causes for infertility. I asked you for proof of it because, as someone who would know about them, I have not heard of them. You don't have any. Therefore, your stance holds no water.

Maybe I am not quite so uninformed as you think?

I'm struggling not to be overly condescending with you, but you're not making it easy. You need to recognize that you're arguing with me on my turf. Unless you start saying something that's scientifically, genetically accurate, there's unlikely to be an accord here.

Actually, new variations can only come into existence by random changes. How else? Did a mad scientist perform experiments on the subjects and change them? Then these random variation spread through the population, depending on whether they were beneficial or neutral, or died out if they were entirely harmfull. The vast majority of slective development of a breed, as for example breeds of dogs, is done by making use of gentic variation already existing in the wild population. Thus we can push dogs from 6 in high to 4 ft high, but not 6 ft high, which is beyond the range achievable from the existing variation within the populaion. To get more we must either become the mad scientist, or wait for random changes to come along.

Where did I say "new variation"? I was responding to your point about evolution, not discussing new variants. My response, verbatim:

Actually, no. The vast majority of evolution is caused by variations that are already present in the genome being selected for or against, not by random mutation.

We all die from a genetic disease. faulty hearts, faulty livers, cancerous cells, faulty immune system, something fails and few survive more than 100 years. Show me the genotype for living 200 years and I want to inbreed it at once. The numbers I have heard discussed suggest you way over estimate the effect.

What in Darwin's name are you even talking about? How is that at all relevant to the quote you are supposedly responding to?

STDs causing infertility? Isn't that a gentically inherited immune system incapable of dealing with the disease before it causes damage? I dont know anything much about the nature of reproductive difficulties, but an environmental response to lead, so youre poisoned, would be fixed by a genetic mutation to allow the body to deal with lead. A hypersensitivity to steroids in the diet would be fixed by a genetic ability to prevent their absorption in the gut. If the body in any way cannot reproduce because of an environmental factor, then some genetic adaptation would help. People are bad at reproducing underwater - we drown-, despite life evolving in the sea. Somehow we went wrong genetically and can no longer breed in an excessively wet environment.

Again, not sure what you're even talking about. Completely irrelevant response.

Look, I'm trying to help people understand why incest is genetically a bad thing. I'm a professional geneticist. I know what I'm talking about. I don't think you are a geneticist, and if you are, I think you need to brush up on your genetics.

 

[dandelion]

Dandelion, are you saying Incest should be legal. Brothers and sisters should be pairing up and having children, so on and so forth? Are you saying not only should it be legal that there are not enough obvious physical consenquences or psychological ones?

Are you one of those "Anything goes" kind of people?

By now ive forgotten the original question getting interested in genetics which I havnt thought about for ages.

One of the arguments made for making it illegal was to protect any offspring from genetic risks. It happened that before I posted anything here I was recently listening to a debate about cousin marriage, which happens amongst the british indian community, but it a tradition in some cultures. The discussion included about genetic risks, and on the one hand one side said the risk doubled, but the other side said it was pretty small anyway. Given the people concerned were already inbred, it didnt necessarily make the risks very much worse if it was siblings marrying, or strangers from the same ethnic group. The recent posts about genetics also extend the debate to the issue of whether inbred traits are necessarily bad (might be good), either for the individual or society.

To say that something ought to be legal is not to say that it is to be encouraged, or even likely to happen if legal sanction is removed. I dont know of many cases, but occasionally a case hits the news of a brother and sister living together as partners perfectly happily, who then get thrown in jail because someone found out. I regard this as completely insane, so there should not be a law making it illegal. Similarly, bigamy. How does it help either of the spouses if the shared husband is suddenly hauled off to jail, but this is a bit off topic.

There are plenty of laws banning coercive relationships (ie rape, paedophilia). I see no reason to ban consensual ones.

I think on the whole i am an 'anything goes' person. As far as I am concerned laws are there to protect my rights, and arbitrate when my rights and your rights conflict. They should not be to protect anyone from themselves. So let people smoke whatever they want, live with whoever they want, how they want. If I want to take my sister as lover, that should be up to us. In my case thats unlikely since Im gay, but I dont have a brother for the purposes of example. It is also unlikely because in society it just doesnt happen. There arent hordes of people held back from marrying their siblings just because of the law. Removing the law would not stop anyone telling their children that people dont do that sort of thing, nor make those children suddenly want to.

 

[SR_Les Intercourse]

incest is wrong, why would someone want to do have sex with your relatives. there is no point in it, there is so much more outside of the family. so i dont see the need to do this.

no offense to people that are born from incest but if it is looked at in a scientific point of view, incest minimizes genetic recombination by half which is useless and does not follow the laws of nature because there is no moving forward occuring there, the reason for sex is to mix and match genes so there can be a larger diversity of them

 

[dandelion]

I'm not going to make a big post responding to every point in particular. Inbreeding is deleterious generally. Any advantages passed on are far outweighed by the increased mortality.

Stop and think about that. How exactly did we evolve? By inbreeding? I think we did. It works. It generates a greater range of gene expression and hence speeds up selection.

I already told you the example of it in the sickle cell trait and malaria. People aren't selected to have sickle cell anemia. They're selected to be heterozygous for the sickle cell trait. That seems to be your confusion.

i thought I introduced it into the discussion as an example of an apparently bad genetic trait which in fact is beneficial.

It's not on the negative side to prove something, it's on the positive side.

I merely observed that it is a mistake to base scientific conclusion on what is reported in the news. 'Man dies from rare genetic disease' may draw attention and clock up 1 score against inbreeding, but so what? 'man fails to catch HIV despite unknowingly being exposed and no one knowing he had the rare homozygous pair which protected him' just never appears in print. How could it? No one would know. It is impossible to draw any scientific conclusion if you do not properly analyse a situation. You cannot conclude anything about the relative frequency of bad traits from inbreeding unless you can quantify the accompanying frequency of good traits.

You're insisting there are common genetic causes for infertility. I asked you for proof of it because, as someone who would know about them, I have not heard of them. You don't have any. Therefore, your stance holds no water.

Are you denying that the bodies immune system and general ability to fight off invading organisms has anything to do with genetic inheritance? ?? You are attempting to take a very narow view of what counts as an inherited genetic deficiency, which is not sustainable. I infer you are prefessionally a medic of some sort, so come on, apply some medical common sense.

I'm struggling not to be overly condescending with you, but you're not making it easy. You need to recognize that you're arguing with me on my turf.

Then maybe you should answer more seriously, because thus far a guy having read half of Dawkins' books 10 years ago is making you look not so good. My advice would be to stop being condesending and answer in depth, but avoid technical terms which will only serve to confuse the layman.

Unless you start saying something that's scientifically, genetically accurate, there's unlikely to be an accord here.

Indeed. Including over what is scientifically accurate.

Where did I say "new variation"? I was responding to your point about evolution, not discussing new variants. My response, verbatim:

Actually, no. The vast majority of evolution is caused by variations that are already present in the genome being selected for or against, not by random mutation.

Again, you seem to be taking a very narrow definition of the meaning of 'evolution'. Evolution is a process. The first step of that process is for a new genetic variant to appear randomly. Then this spreads through the population. If it is a bad trait, it may die out. or, it may become widespread because it confers an immediate benefit. Evolution in action. Then again, it may simply exist as a variation because it is not immediately good or bad. Given a new stimulus, it may now suddenly come into its own because it confers a benefit in the new situation. You are looking at only part of the picture. Species tend to change in spurts, but the evolutionary process proceeds steadily.

But this is deliberate inbreeding generation after generation, not the odd sibling marriage which is all that is remotely likely if people are left to choose.

It could happen after one generation. Very possible. The offspring of a sibling-sibling mating has 25% homozygosity. In other words, it has lost 25% of its protection against deleterious inherited alleles. Russian roulette. Have four children and one of them is very likely to die or have a genetic disease. In fact, there's a good chance you'll end up with a number of miscarriages before you even have a child in that joining.

We all die from a genetic disease. faulty hearts, faulty livers, cancerous cells, faulty immune system, something fails and few survive more than 100 years. Show me the genotype for living 200 years and I want to inbreed it at once. The numbers I have heard discussed suggest you way over estimate the effect.

What in Darwin's name are you even talking about? How is that at all relevant to the quote you are supposedly responding to?

Hope I traced the conversation correctly. You were arguing that inbreeding causes immediate bad effects, I was arguing that all life is genetically organised and we all suffer from bad genetic effects. If we manage to survive most of the specific ones, we still die before a maximum age of around 100. In fact, living to 100 may well mean we had a particularly good genetic deal and avoided most of the obvious bad ones, but we still had a bad genetic inheritance which caused us to die at 100. So dont claim inbreeding makes for uniquely bad traits, we all have plenty already. If a random variation suddenly occurs which when doubled up makes us live 200 years, i want to inbreed for that trait as soon as possible, because it is very desireable. If we forbid inbreeding we will never see the effect and never benefit by the extra 100 years life.

Look, I'm trying to help people understand why incest is genetically a bad thing. I'm a professional geneticist. I know what I'm talking about. I don't think you are a geneticist, and if you are, I think you need to brush up on your genetics.

Well I think you are wrong. Evolution has led to improvements in the species, any species. That is what it does, how it works. We know it works because we are here arguing about it. Inbreeding (incest) helps spread new traits faster, allows them to be expressed. If this is prevented, then evolution is also being curtailed and prevented. You are arguing to prevent one element of evolution continuing. I imagine that most random genetic variations are in fact bad, because the current set are all ones which basically work and to make a random change may very well screw something up. But in the context of incest we are talking about pairing up genes which are relatively common in the population (or the parents would anyway be unlikely to possess them) and so are already proven to be of some benefit (or they would have been bred out). I see no reasoon to think such a doubling up is any more likely to be disadvantageous than advantageous.

 

[dandelion]

incest is wrong, why would someone want to do have sex with your relatives. there is no point in it, there is so much more outside of the family. so i dont see the need to do this.

Well you dont have to. No one is proposing a law saying you must marry your sister. The question is whether there is any benefit from having a law saying you are forbiden to marry your sister. If no one wants to do so, why do we need a law forbidding it? In the unlikely case a brother and sister did want to do this, why exactly should we send them to prison if they do? What good does that do?

incest minimizes genetic recombination by half which is useless and does not follow the laws of nature because there is no moving forward occuring there, the reason for sex is to mix and match genes so there can be a larger diversity of them

Do you think people have sex and children because they want to mix their genes? Do you? You think people should be forbidden to have sex because they have genes in common? (hint: that would mean almost everyone was forbidden to have sex with almost everyone else). I think hardly anyone thinks about genetics when they decide to have children. If a few people who are closely related do so, what difference does it make to everyone else?

 

[D_Harry_Crax]

Still no reasons to ban sex between consenting adults of the same sex.....

 

[D_Abraham Slinkin]

I cannot believe anyone voted yes. that's just sick

 

[601900]

It should NOT be decriminalized,it's disgusting !

 

[dandelion]

So its not outrageous that a couple of consenting adults should be sent to jail just for having sex?

 

[Notthe7]

Without being rude, why on earth is this a question?

 

[cocktaste]

The Royal Family is all inbreeding. lulz!

The only issue with incest is the possibility of genetic mutations if one gets pregnant. Whether you find it disgusting or not, there is a real risk. You are allowed to marry your cousin in the US, though. Figure that one out.

 

[933295]

i think the only circumstances where incest wouldn't be constituent with abuse is if it were equal ages/equal maturity/equally sexually experienced. so probably a slim number of cases meet that definition.

so in the case of the twins in my fantasy 3 way, it shouldn't be a crime.

It's a crime to say what you said on this website. No incest comments ever.

 

[dreamer20]

What he has said was not a crime, but simply an opinion tonygem. You're also reacting to a thread & thread comment, made more than nine years ago - long before the TOS of June 4, 2015 was created BTW.

 

[MickeyLee]

This is a good snapshot of just how fucking awesome LPSG.

Mad love to Mr. @Guy-jin for dropping that sweet scientific knowledge into this thread

Much love to @Hillaire, @bbucko, @Hick_boy, and @Hazelzgodthe five and dime ain't the same since you been gone.

 

[chicagosam]

What he has said was not a crime, but simply an opinion tonygem. You're also reacting to a thread & thread comment, made more than nine years ago - long before the TOS of June 4, 2015 was created BTW.

No incestuous content
Terms of Service and Rules

 

[MickeyLee]

@tonygem dude, what were you searching and how deep did you dive to find this thread?