DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest | Hacker News Reader

DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest

theatlantic.com

26 pointspseudolus21 comments

Like, I'm sure it happens (we don't tend to have taboos on things unless people are at least occasionally doing them, because the point of the taboo is to make them stop), but the article's principal evidence is a single, unpublished study which estimated it at one in 7000.

I mean, clearly the prevalence is greater than 0, but the evidence for it in this article is not impressive. Even many published studies don't hold up to closer scrutiny, and this one isn't even published.

Also infidelity. Way more common than anyone had assumed and that was back when people were religious.

> back when people were religious

The way I heard it, the etymology of "nepotism" is that nephews were involved because of course priests don't have sons.

A biology professor at Stanford claims it’s in the 10% range in modern times

>The truth about misassigned paternity

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-jun-20-la-oe-zu...

https://archive.ph/WB2jg

The number is highly political

https://archive.ph/YEzVY

Edited to substitute archive link for shortened link.

Dude that's a shortened link to the same article.

    HTTP/2 301
    location: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/03/dna-tests-incest/677791/

Thanks. I've corrected the error.

dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39756964

Not surprising. Natural selection doesn't care about morality. We're all descended from rapists and murderers.

That's rather inflammatory, but taking your comment at face value, I highly recommend "The Evolution of Cooperation" for a very detailed and nuanced exploration of this idea.

Thanks, I'll check it out. Also, see "The Better Angels of our Nature"

If you take the bible on face value, you can easily see that every single one of us has incest in our family history.

Do you have any evidence for that? Many animals practice rather peaceful dating. Many species of bird do regular dating and mating for life. Humans display both aspects but I don't think we have any concrete evidence about our grand-grand fathers.

> Many animals practice rather peaceful dating.

Not OP but occasionally I come across videos of 'animals behaving really badly' so I did a (very specific and extreme) quick search below. I think we all know about male lions killing cubs that don't belong to them, dolphin's dark side, etc...

https://start.duckduckgo.com/?q=murderers+and+rapists+among+...

> I don't think we have any concrete evidence about our grand-grand fathers.

I remember getting into a discussion with someone about religion. This person hated religion. I'm not religious. He blamed religion for all the atrocities in the world. I wasn't defending religion but I like to look at both sides and said...

Maybe it's because of religion that we haven't already destroyed ourselves. At least with Christian (New Testament) religion (the only one I'm passably familiar with), there are a set of (divine) rules to live by[0]:

No killing, no adultery, stop stealing, stop lying, no false testimony, stop envying/coveting what is not yours... etc.

** Please, I don't want to get into a religious argument. **

But, what if... religion was _invented_ by man because man himself was so murdery and rapey as OP (afpx) stated. That the only way to control him/her was by inventing a power greater than man himself. Indoctrinate man at some core level so that these tendencies could be managed somehow.

Because even with an all-seeing God, even with a divine set of rules, even with the promise of an after-life... believers broke those "divine" rules (as they do today) - often in the name of religion itself.

All of this is supposition for discussion (not argument), please:-)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments?useskin=vecto...

This isn't an uncommon thought in the slightest. I hear this used as an argument frequently. Maybe some of you need a booklet with things that you can and cannot do but many of us do not and it isn't because of a religion.

Not all, but much of western society, definitely :)

> Natural selection doesn't care about morality.

Natural selection doesn't care about morality, but it does care about incest, since products of incest—especially after a few generations—tend to be markedly less fit.

That's not actually true

It's not? In what way?

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