Possible reasons that gave rise to incest taboo?

Question

i need 4 reasons that gave rise to ioncest taboo

Answer 1

There is the religious prohibition recorded in the Bible. There are genetic issues with some of the offspring. Incest is viewed as a breakdown of trust within the family unit,and it invokes moral outrage among the general public.

Answer 2

Check wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incest_tabo...

copied and pasted:

A social response to the costs of incest

One theory is that the observance of the taboo would lower the incidence of congenital birth defects caused by inbreeding. A society that had noticed this might tend to form an incest taboo.

Anthropologists reject this explanation for two reasons. First, inbreeding does not directly lead to congenital birth defects per se; it leads to an increase in the frequency of homozygotes. A homozygote encoding a congenital birth defect will produce children with birth defects, but homozygotes that do not encode for congenital birth defects will decrease the number of carriers in a population.

One might complain that a society would have to have a fairly advanced understanding of genetics to recognise this potential "benefit" of incest, whereas the increased prevalence of birth defects is relatively easy to spot.

Second, anthropologists have pointed out that in the Trobriand case a man and the daughter of his father's sister, and a man and the daughter of his mother's sister, are equally distant genetically. In that particular case, the prohibition against relations is not based on or motivated by concerns over biological closeness.

Sociologist Ian Robertson gives three main social reasons why incest taboo exist as a cultural universals. The first is that early human beings-living primarily in small kinship groups of hunters and gatherers- needed to protect themselves by forming alliances with other groups. By forcing their children to marry into families outside their own, each group widened its social links and provided itself with allies in time of famine or other hazards. These groups faced the alternatives of marrying out or dying. Marriage in most traditional societies is a practical alliance between groups, not a love match between individuals. That is why marriages are arranged by the parents, often when their offspring are still children and sometimes even before they are born. The second reason for the incest taboo is that the family itself could not function without it, for the statuses of family members would be utterly and hopelessly confused. As Kingsley Davis points out: " The incestuous child of a father-daughter union would be a brother of his own mother, i.e. the son of his own sister; a stepson of his own grandmother; possibly a brother of his won uncle; and certainly a grandson of his own father." The third reason is that without an incest taboo, sexual rivalry among family members would disrupt the normal roles and attitudes of the various relatives. the father, for example, might experience role conflict as both the disciplinarian and the lover of his daughter; the mother might be jealous of both; and the child, of course, would be caught in the middle. Faced with constant conflict and tension, the family institution might simply disintegrate. The incest taboo has developed over time because it is vital to the survival of the family and thus of society itself. Of course, neither traditional nor modern societies consciously appreciate the reasons for the taboo. They and we simply accept it as natural and moral.

Evolutionary psychology and the Westermarck effect

Another theory suggests that the taboo expresses a psychological revulsion that people naturally experience anyway at the thought of incest.

Under this view, advanced by evolutionary psychologists, the incest taboo is primarily caused not by social condemnation, but rather by genes for incest avoidance, which would tend to prosper, by ensuring that an individual's children (possibly containing those same genes) are not unhealthy due to inbreeding. Furthermore, the benefits of s*x (as opposed to asexual reproduction) are mysterious (see evolution of s*x), but whatever they are, they would tend to be reduced by incest. Genes that prevented incest would tend to inhabit bodies that had more of these benefits, and therefore tend to become more widely spread.

Evolutionary psychologists (e.g. Steven Pinker in How the Mind Works) suggest that genetic influence is at work in the Westermarck effect, whereby people raised in close proximity (whether related or not) tend to feel little sexual attraction to each other, after maturity.

Most anthropologists reject this explanation, since incest does in fact occur. They suggest that the taboo itself may be the cause of the psychological revulsion.

Endogamy and Exogamy

Claude Lévi-Strauss has argued that the incest taboo is in effect a prohibition against endogamy, and the effect is to encourage exogamy. Through exogamy, otherwise unrelated households or lineages will form relationships through marriage, thus strengthening social solidarity. Lévi-Strauss first exposed this Alliance theory in the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949).

This theory was debated intensely by anthropologists in the 1950s. It appealed to many because it used the study of incest taboos and marriage to answer more fundamental research interests of anthropologists at the time: how can an anthropologist map out the social relationships within a given community, and how do these relationships promote or endanger social solidarity? Nevertheless, anthropologists never reached a consensus, and with the Vietnam War and the process of de-colonization in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, anthropological interests shifted away from mapping local social relationships.

Answer 3

I can give you one reason .... inbreeding , we pass on genetic problems to the next generation.

Answer 4

the social problem with having s*x with someone you share DNA>

Answer 5

1.Genetic birth defects due to inbreeding.

2.Social conflicts.

3.Because it's gross.

4.You shouldn't need any more answers after the 1st.