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Comment by chimi | Hacker News Reader

I always try to explain these things with evolutionary biology. I look to the non-human animal kingdom to see if the pattern of behavior exists in other species too. This one does.

In many species, members of clans and tribes go off to discover mating opportunities. I believe much of it has to do with limiting inbreeding.

I remember a scene in Game of Thrones where the guy didn't want to be eaten by the dead things, so he said he was going to take his boats to an island, kill all the men, and take their wives. Such things happen often in war. It might be a reason war exists.

In the case of the German daughters, if the males work the land, know the land, defend the land from invaders, then it would make sense the daughters leave to be protected by such men in another land.

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Game of Thrones is not a historical source, it’s a work of fiction created with modern biases.

You say you look to evolutionary biology, but it’s far more common for females to form family groups that kick the males out once they’re of age. Social animals like horses, bison, lions, even eusocial insects like bees and termites- they all send their males out to other groups.

Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, send females to other groups.

Nature can be a bit more complex.

Take baboons. Male indeed leave the troop while females tend to stay, but there is an exception. Low ranking females also tend to leave and join new troops. It is not that great to be at the bottom of the social hierarchy and female hierarchy in a baboon troop is based on linage so there is very little social mobility. Joining a new troop is not easy and often produce the same results as new females are rarely welcomed by the other females but it has a slightly better chance for social mobility compared to staying in the old one.

I would be surprised if you don't see the same pattern in many other social animals where the majority of the females are blood relatives.

Bees are a bit complex since in order to create new hives they swarm. In that situation they create a new queen and the old queen leaves with a subset of the bees and form a new hive while the new queen stays and start to lay eggs in the old hive.

This hypothesis seems less like evolutionary biology and more like evolutionary psychology.

Which might seem pedantic, but I think most evolutionary biologists would consider it to be a pretty important distinction.

It does make sense. In hindsight. But why would the tribes send away all their daughters in the first place? I don't think that inbreeding was a concept back then. So what compelled a rich and powerful father to send away all his daughters. That seems rather odd to me.

So, political marriages?

Assuming Male Primogeniture; A rich and powerful father arranging the marriages of his daughters to other powerful and wealthy families is how business relationships and alliances were formed, and how one could potentially move their own family up the social order.

It's pretty much how royalty and landed gentry used to work in Europe.

Sure. But wouldn't you expect these marriages to also be arranged within the domain to at least some degree?

> I don't think that inbreeding was a concept back then.

There are evolutionary guards against inbreeding. Its why brothers + sisters can grow up and live together, but for the most part don't feel like dating or marrying each other.

Its beyond culture: its written in our genetic code itself. Presumably, the primitive-man tribes who did do in-breeding were probably wiped out in the stone-age due to the (now well known) problems.

True, there are exceptions. But in the general case, the guards against in-breeding are part of the human's genetic code. Sorta anyway: IIRC the specific genetic programming is against "marrying people who you grew up with".

There are also relatively-modern tribe rules which provide some protection. For example Australian tribes use a split into subsections where you're allowed to marry only 4 out of 8 (or some other configuration) which provides a minimum of some number of generations before people with common ancestors can marry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship#...

But there are no evolutionary guards against cousin/cousin inbreeding whose effects show only after some generations. I don't think that this policy was a deliberate attempt to save the gene pool.

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