Inbreeding Incest And The Incest Taboo The State

Of Knowledge At The Turn Of The Century Arthur P

Wolf Editor William H Durham Editor download

https://ebookbell.com/product/inbreeding-incest-and-the-incest-
taboo-the-state-of-knowledge-at-the-turn-of-the-century-arthur-p-
wolf-editor-william-h-durham-editor-51942356

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

Close Relationships Incest And Inbreeding In Classical Arabic

Literature Geert Jan Van Gelder

https://ebookbell.com/product/close-relationships-incest-and-
inbreeding-in-classical-arabic-literature-geert-jan-van-
gelder-50671150

Close Relationships Incest And Inbreeding In Classical Arabic

Literature Geert Jan Van Gelder

https://ebookbell.com/product/close-relationships-incest-and-
inbreeding-in-classical-arabic-literature-geert-jan-van-
gelder-23571640

Academic Inbreeding And Mobility In Higher Education Global

Perspectives Maria Yudkevich

https://ebookbell.com/product/academic-inbreeding-and-mobility-in-
higher-education-global-perspectives-maria-yudkevich-5381360

Consanguinity Inbreeding And Genetic Drift In Italy Mpb39 Course Book

L L Cavallisforza Antonio Moroni Gianna Zei

https://ebookbell.com/product/consanguinity-inbreeding-and-genetic-
drift-in-italy-mpb39-course-book-l-l-cavallisforza-antonio-moroni-
gianna-zei-51949210
Advances In Breeding Of Dairy Cattle Burleigh Dodds Series In
Agricultural Science 72 Illustrated Julius Van Der Werf

https://ebookbell.com/product/advances-in-breeding-of-dairy-cattle-
burleigh-dodds-series-in-agricultural-science-72-illustrated-julius-
van-der-werf-55033534

Art And Science In Breeding Creating Better Chickens Margaret Derry

https://ebookbell.com/product/art-and-science-in-breeding-creating-
better-chickens-margaret-derry-51921078
inbreeding, incest,
and the incest taboo
Inbreeding, Incest,
and the Incest Taboo
t he s tate o f k n owled g e
at t h e tu r n o f th e cen t ury

Edited by Arthur P. Wolf

and William H. Durham

stanford university press

stanford, california 2005
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system without the
prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free,
archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Inbreeding, incest, and the incest taboo :
the state of knowledge at the turn of the century /
edited by Arthur P. Wolf and William H. Durham.
p. cm.
Papers presented at a conference held at Stanford
University, Feb. 24–25, 2000.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-8047-4596-X (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 0-8047-5141-2 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Incest. 2. Consanguinity. 3. Inbreeding.
4. Taboo. I. Wolf, Arthur P. II. Durham, William H.
gn480.3.i53 2005
306.877—dc22 2004003967
Original Printing 2005

Typeset by James P. Brommer in 10/12.5 Sabon

Contents

List of Tables and Figures vii

Introduction 1
arthur p. wolf
1. Inbreeding Avoidance and Incest Taboos 24
patrick bateson
2. Genetic Aspects of Inbreeding and Incest 38
alan h. bittles
3. Inbreeding Avoidance in Primates 61
anne pusey
4. Explaining the Westermarck Effect, or,
What Did Natural Selection Select For? 76
arthur p. wolf
5. Ancient Egyptian Sibling Marriage and
the Westermarck Effect 93
walter scheidel
6. From Genes to Incest Taboos: The Crucial Step 109
neven sesardic
7. Assessing the Gaps in Westermarck’s Theory 121
william h. durham
8. Refining the Incest Taboo: With Considerable
Help from Bronislaw Malinowski 139
hill gates
9. Evolutionary Thought and the Current
Clinical Understanding of Incest 161
mark t. erickson
10. The Incest Taboo as Darwinian Natural Right 190
larry arnhart

List of Contributors 219

Index 221
Tables and Figures

Tables

2.1 Major Types of Consanguineous Relationship 39

2.2 Levels of Death and Defect Reported in Four
Studies of Incest 50
3.1 Avoidance of Sexual Activity with Relatives 64
4.1 General Fertility by Wife’s Age at First Association 80
4.2 Fertility/ Divorce Index by Wife’s Age at First
Association 81
4.3 General Fertility by Husband’s Age at First
Association When Wife’s Age at First Association
Is Zero 84
4.4 Fertility/ Divorce Index by Husband’s Age at First
Association When Wife’s Age at First Association
Is Zero 85
4.5 General Fertility by Wife’s Age at First Association
When Wife Is Adopted Before Husband’s Birth 87
4.6 Fertility/ Divorce Index by Wife’s Age at First
Association When Wife Is Adopted Before
Husband’s Birth 87
4.7 Comparison of the Consequences of Early Association
When the Wife Is an Infant (Tables 4.3 and 4.4) and
the Husband Is an Infant (Tables 4.5 and 4.6) 87
5.1 Sibling Couples Attested in Papyrus Documents
from Roman Egypt (first to third centuries ad) 95
5.2 Marital Fertility in Roman Egypt (mean number
of births per maternal age cohort) 98
5.3 Cases of Divorce by Spousal Age Gap 101
5.4 Birth Intervals of Offspring of Prolific Sibling
Couples Separated by Fewer Than Six Years of Age 102
9.1 Estimated Prevalence of Incest, 1953–1996 164
viii Tables and Figures

Figures

2.1 Map of the United States Indicating States in Which

First-Cousin Marriages Are Legal and Those in Which
They Are Civil or Criminal Offenses 42
3.1 Copulations Between Mothers and Sons and Sisters
and Brothers in the Gombe Chimpanzees 69
4.1 General Fertility by Wife’s Age at First Association 80
4.2 Fertility/ Divorce by Wife’s Age at First Association 81
4.3 General Fertility by Husband’s Age at First Association 84
4.4 Fertility/ Divorce by Husband’s Age at First Association 85
6.1 Aversion and Prohibition: Mismatch 113
6.2 Aversion and Prohibition: No Mismatch 115
6.3 The Expression Hypothesis and the Aversion
Hypothesis: An Epistemological Tension 118
inbreeding, incest,
and the incest taboo
 Introduction

Arthur P. Wolf

The chapters of this volume are the fruits of a conference held at

Stanford University, February 24–25, 2000. The conference was one of a
series held to inaugurate the university’s new Department of Anthropolog-
ical Sciences. This was a happy—and not entirely fortuitous—conjunction
of topic and occasion. The new department takes as its primary subject the
relationship between biology and culture, and no point of contact between
the two has generated more controversy than the relationship between in-
breeding and the incest taboo.
This was not the first time scholars representing the biological and social
sciences gathered at Stanford to discuss what is commonly called “the in-
cest problem.” In the spring of 1956, seven eminent researchers—David F.
Aberle, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Eckhard H. Hess, Daniel R. Miller, David M.
Schneider, and James N. Spuhler—organized a workshop at the Center for
Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences “to consider the problem of the
origins of the incest taboo.”1 Thus we have an appropriate and well-defined
baseline to assess the development of the topic in the second half of the
twentieth century. The changes are profound and will be readily apparent
to anyone who compares Aberle et al.’s arguments with those developed by
Patrick Bateson in Chapter 1 of this volume. I think these changes point to
the direction anthropology is likely to take—and ought to take—in the new
millennium.
In 1878, Mark Twain, traveling up the Rhine on a barge, came to a
small town perched on “an instantaneous hill—a hill two hundred and
fifty or three hundred feet high, and round as a bowl.” It was Dilsberg,
whose 700 inhabitants, Twain learned, were all “blood-kin to each other”
and “have been blood-kin to each other for fifteen hundred years.” The re-
sult, according to the captain of the barge, was that “for ages Dilsberg has
been a thriving and diligent idiot factory.” When, after a visit to Dilsberg,
2 wolf

Twain noted that he saw no idiots there, the captain explained that this
was “Because of late the government has taken to lugging them off to asy-
lums and otherwheres.” Twain comments: “The captain probably imag-
ined all this, as modern science denies that the intermarrying of relatives
deteriorates the stock.”2
This remained the majority opinion of “modern science” for the next
seventy-five years, as is evident in the reaction to Edward Westermarck’s
suggestion that “the psychical cause” of the incest taboo “has a biological
foundation in injurious consequences following unions of the nearest blood
relatives.”3 Although Westermarck could quote in support of his suggestion
the opinions of both Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace,4 he was widely
accused of ignoring the findings of modern science. Lord Raglan faulted
him for having assumed that inbreeding is harmful “in the face of all the
evidence”5; Bronislaw Malinowski argued against him that “biologists are
in agreement that there is no detrimental effect produced upon the species
by incestuous unions”6; and Robert Briffault claimed that “there is not in
the records of breeding from domesticated animals a single fact . . . which
indicates, much less evidences, that inbreeding, even the closest, is itself
productive of evil effects.”7
In 1934 Westermarck rebutted these criticisms in detail, but his argu-
ments were universally ignored. Writing fifteen years later, Leslie White had
no doubts whatsoever about the relationship between inbreeding and the
incest taboo. There is none. The theory that incest was prohibited because
inbreeding causes biological deterioration is “so plausible as to seem self-
evident, but it is wrong for all that. . . . Inbreeding as such does not cause
degeneration; the testimony of biologists is conclusive on this point.”8 Ac-
cording to White, inbreeding can only intensify the inheritance of traits,
good or bad. If Dilsberg was an idiot factory, it is only because the founders
were inclined toward idiocy. In societies where brother-sister marriage is
permitted in the ruling family, “we may find excellence. Cleopatra was the
offspring of brother-sister marriages continued through several generations
and she was ‘not only handsome, vigorous, intellectual, but also prolific . . .
as perfect a specimen of the human race as could be found in any age or
class of society.’”9
Claude Lévi-Strauss, writing only a year after White, reached the same
conclusion. He acknowledged E. M. East’s work on maize and his view that
“because objectionable recessive traits are as common in the human race as
they are in maize,”10 folk beliefs about the injurious effects of inbreeding
are largely justified. But he then argued that “East’s work has indirectly es-
tablished that these supposed dangers would never have appeared if man-
kind had been endogamous from the beginning.” His conclusion was that
“the temporary danger of exogamous unions, supposing such a danger to
 Introduction 3

exist, obviously stems from an exogamous or pangenetic tradition, but it

cannot be the cause of this tradition.”11 Lévi-Strauss’s preferred authority
was George Dahlberg, who concluded that “as far as heredity is concerned
these inhibitions [i.e., the incest taboos] do not seem to be justified.”12
When Aberle et al. met at Stanford in 1956, they too appear to have
taken the position that inbreeding is not necessarily deleterious. But by the
time they published the results of their deliberations in 1963, they had
changed their minds because of “new information” “which appeared after
the 1956 argument had been developed.”13 This new information was, first,
the finding that “the ratio of deleterious and lethal recessive genes to selec-
tively advantageous genes is very high indeed,” and, second, the finding that
“the percentage of individuals homozygous for lethal or deleterious reces-
sives rises sharply” as degree of relatedness increases. This led to the pub-
lished conclusion that “the biological advantages of the familial incest taboo
cannot be ignored.” “Close inbreeding of an animal like man has definite bi-
ological disadvantages, and these disadvantages are far more evident as re-
spects the mating of primary relatives than as respects other matings.”14 In
other words, Westermarck (and Twain’s captain) were right all along.
The present state of our knowledge of the consequences of inbreeding is
summarized in this volume by Alan H. Bittles in Chapter 2. For Bittles, the
question is not whether inbreeding is injurious; it is how injurious. Bittles’s
concern is that the rarity of sibling and parent-child unions combined with
their being tabooed may have led researchers and makers of social policy to
overestimate the dangers of close inbreeding. One possibility is that “a rig-
orous examination, including determination of paternity, may only be ini-
tiated if a child shows symptoms of physical and /or intellectual handicap.”
Another is that studies of familial incest do not have adequate controls for
“the potentially adverse effects of nongenetic variables, such as very young
or advanced maternal and paternal ages, and unsuccessful attempted inter-
ruption of the pregnancy.”
Bittles’s solution to these problems is to use cousin and uncle-niece unions
to estimate the dangers of sibling and parent-child unions. The advantage of
this method is that in many parts of the world—most notably Japan, South
India, and Pakistan—cousin and uncle-niece unions are both legal and com-
mon. Consequently, we now have numerous studies (many conducted by
Bittles himself) of the biological consequences of such marriages. Estimates
based on these studies put the excess death rate among the progeny of sib-
ling and parent-child unions at 16 to 20 percent, and the excess morbidity
rate for such progeny at 6 to 16 percent. This suggests a total death and ma-
jor disabilities rate of somewhere between 22 and 36 percent.
Although the “new information” that changed Aberle et al.’s minds indi-
cated that inbreeding was at least as dangerous as Bittles’s estimates imply,
4 wolf

they rejected the possibility that primitive man recognized this danger.15
This was a consequential decision, because it denied them a simple expla-
nation of the incest taboo. They could not argue that it is a consciously in-
stituted prophylactic. But how, then, did the taboo come into being? Proba-
bly because Eckhard H. Hess was a member of their workshop, Aberle et
al. seriously considered the possibility that it expresses a disposition found
in other species. Hess had shown that so long as they are reared together,
Canada geese from the same brood never mate.
Experimental work . . . indicates that this fastidious behavior is the result of sexual
imprinting. It is necessary to emphasize that the reaction persists without external
sanctions. The luckless breeder who takes a male and female from the same brood
to raise geese is doomed to disappointment: the pair will not mate even if no other
partners are available. If, however, two members of the same brood are separated
before hatching occurs and are subsequently re-introduced to each other, having
been raised in different families, they may become mates.16

Although Aberle et al. failed to make the connection, this is evidence for
what has long been known as “the Westermarck hypothesis.” Westermarck
argued that close inbreeding is injurious, but he did not argue (as Aberle et
al. mistakenly imply) that recognition of the fact led to the incest taboo. In-
stead, he argued that the deleterious consequences of inbreeding have se-
lected for an innate tendency to develop an aversion to sexual relations
with childhood associates. This tendency, not recognition of the dangers of
inbreeding, was the source of the incest taboo. As he put it in 1934 in what
turned out to be his last words on the subject,
I must confess that the attempts to prove the harmlessness of even the closest in-
breeding have not shaken my opinion that there is convincing evidence to the con-
trary. And here I find, as before, a satisfactory explanation of the want of inclina-
tion for, and consequent aversion to, sexual intercourse between persons who from
childhood have lived together in that close intimacy which characterises the mutual
relations of the nearest kindred. We may assume that in this, as in other cases, nat-
ural selection has operated, and by eliminating destructive tendencies and preserv-
ing useful variations has moulded the sexual instinct so as to meet the requirements
of species.17

Might it not be, then, that Westermarck was right about the effects of
early association as well as the dangers of inbreeding? Indeed, might it not
be that Alfred Wallace was right in thinking that Westermarck had “solved
the [incest] problem”?18 Aberle et al. do not give the possibility a moment’s
consideration. They mention what they call “the indifference theory . . .
only for the sake of completeness”: “The indifference theory has both log-
ical and empirical difficulties. It is hard to see why what is naturally repug-
nant should be tabooed, and the evidence for sexual attraction among kins-
 Introduction 5

men is quite adequate for rejecting the theory. We mention it only for the
sake of completeness.”19
The “logical difficulties” refer to Sir James Frazer’s claim that the exis-
tence of the incest taboo is alone adequate to prove that Westermarck was
wrong. In Sir James’s words,
It is not easy to see why any deep human instinct should need to be reinforced by
law. There is no law commanding men to eat or drink or forbidding them to put
their hands in the fire. Men eat and drink and keep their hands out of the fire in-
stinctively for fear of natural not legal penalties. . . . The law only forbids men to
do what their instincts incline them to do; what nature itself prohibits and punishes,
it would be superfluous for the law to prohibit and punish. Accordingly, we may al-
ways safely assume that crimes forbidden by law are crimes that many men have a
natural propensity to commit. If there was no such propensity there would be no
such crimes, and if no such crimes were committed what need to forbid them? In-
stead of assuming, therefore, from the legal prohibition of incest that there is a nat-
ural aversion to incest, we ought rather to assume that there is a natural instinct in
favour of it, and that if the law represses it, as it represses other natural instincts, it
does so because civilized men have come to the conclusion that the satisfaction of
these natural instincts is detrimental to the general interests of society.20

This argument has been repeated, mantralike, by Westermarck’s many crit-

ics. It was quoted in full by Sigmund Freud as early as 1911 and by Mau-
rice Godelier as late 1989.21 It was noted by critics as diverse in their views
as George Peter Murdock, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall Sahlins, and
Richard Lewontin. It should be entered as exhibit 1 by anyone arguing that
twentieth-century social thought was biased toward what I call functional-
ist fundamentalism.
The empirical difficulty Aberle et al. have in mind is Freud’s claim that
“psychoanalytic investigations have shown beyond the possibility of doubt
that an incestuous love choice is in fact the first and regular one.”22 This is
another anti-Westermarck mantra. It is repeated by A. L. Kroeber, Brenda
Seligman, Leslie White, Alexander Goldenweiser, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and
Marvin Harris, to name only the best-known of the many authors who
quoted Freud against Westermarck. It is an essential part of functionalist
fundamentalism because the view that human nature is selfish and unruly
(perhaps even sinful) is necessary to the view that laws exist because they
are needed.
Although Westermarck cited evidence suggesting that early association in-
hibits sexual attraction among many mammals (including horses and dogs),
Aberle et al. ignored this and the experience of generations of animal breed-
ers. It appears that they cited Hess only because it would have been impolite
to ignore the work of an eminent colleague. Their unqualified conclusion
was that “there is no evidence to suggest that asexual imprinting occurs
6 wolf

among mammals.” Asexual imprinting “does not seem to occur in man, the
apes, the monkeys, or even in more remote mammalian species.” We have
therefore to assume that “this adaptive device was simply not available—not
a part of the genetic equipment of man’s ancestors or relatives.”23
Although Aberle et al.’s conclusion regarding “more remote mammalian
species” was unjustified, they can be excused for concluding that sexual im-
printing does not seem to occur among the apes and monkeys. They wrote
before primatology was an established research field. The difference this has
made is dramatically summarized in Chapter 3, by Anne Pusey. After briefly
reviewing evidence suggesting that inbreeding is injurious for most mam-
mals (and more so in the wild than in captivity), Pusey catalogs a wealth of
evidence indicating that something like asexual imprinting is found among
our nearest relatives—rhesus macaques, baboons, gorillas, bonobos, and
chimpanzees. Field and laboratory studies of “nonhuman primates provide
abundant evidence for an inhibition of sexual behavior among closely re-
lated adults,” and “the primate data support Westermarck’s theory that fa-
miliarity during immaturity is a major reason for this avoidance.” In several
species immature mates do engage related females sexually, “but [this be-
havior] stops before the risk of conception.”
The incest taboo posed a nearly impossible task for the functionalist fun-
damentalists. Rejecting Westermarck in favor of Freud, they had to find a
supranatural source for the taboo. Their solution was to resurrect and re-
model Edward Burnett Tylor’s 1889 suggestion that “among tribes of low
culture there is but one means of keeping up permanent alliances, and that
is by means of intermarriage.”24 The essential first step in the argument was
to insist that the incest taboo is only a way of implementing exogamy.
“Nuer say that marriage to persons standing in certain relationships is for-
bidden because it is rual, incestuous,” but E. E. Evans-Pritchard argued that
“we may reverse this statement and say that sexual relations with persons
standing in these relationships are considered incestuous because it would
be a breach of the marriage prohibitions to marry them. I would hold that
the incest taboo can only be understood by reference to the marriage prohi-
bitions, and that these prohibitions must be viewed in the light of their
function in the Nuer kinship system and in their whole social structure.”25
Putting exogamy before the incest taboo led to the remarkable conclu-
sion that the incest taboo is the means by which human beings transcended
their animal nature. For Leslie White and Claude Lévi-Strauss, this made
the incest taboo the passage between nature and culture. I put their formu-
lations side by side to show how two authors who shared little else reached
the same conclusion about the origins of the taboo. The similarity is evi-
dence that they were responding to intellectual trends larger than them-
selves. First, Leslie White:
 Introduction 7

In the primate order . . . the social relationships between mates, parents and chil-
dren, and among siblings antedates articulate speech and cooperation. They are
strong as well as primary. And, just as the earliest cooperative group was built upon
these social ties, so would a subsequent extension of mutual aid have to reckon
with them. At this point we run squarely against the tendency to mate with an inti-
mate associate. Cooperation between families cannot be established if parent mar-
ries child; and brother, sister. A way must be found to overcome this centripetal ten-
dency with a centrifugal force. This way was found in the definition and
prohibition of incest. If persons were forbidden to marry their parents or siblings
they would be compelled to marry into some other family—or remain celibate,
which is contrary to the nature of primates. The leap was taken; a way was found
to unite families with one another, and social evolution as a human affair was
launched upon its career. It would be difficult to exaggerate the significance of this
step. Unless some way had been found to establish strong and enduring ties be-
tween families, social evolution could have gone no further on the human level than
among the anthropoids.26

And then Claude Lévi-Strauss:

It will never be sufficiently emphasized that, if social organization had a beginning,
this could only have consisted in the incest prohibition since, as we have just shown,
the incest prohibition is, in fact, a kind of remodeling of the biological conditions of
mating and procreation (which know no rule, as can be seen from observing animal
life) compelling them to become perpetuated only in an artificial framework of ta-
boos and obligations. It is there, and only there, that we find a passage from nature
to culture, from animal to human life, and that we are in position to understand the
very essence of their articulation.
As Tylor has shown almost a century ago, the ultimate explanation is probably
that mankind has understood very early that, in order to free itself from a wild strug-
gle for existence, it was confronted with the very simple choice of “either marrying-
out or being killed-out.” The alternative was between biological families living in
juxtaposition and endeavoring to remain closed, self-perpetuating units, over-ridden
by their fears, hatreds, and ignorances, and the systematic establishment, through
the incest prohibition, of links of intermarriage between them, thus succeeding to
build, out of the artificial bonds of affinity, a true human society, despite, and even
in contradiction with, the isolating influence of consanguinity.27

Although Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté appeared in 1950

(and was summarized in English in an article published in 1956), Aberle et
al. do not refer to Lévi-Strauss, but they do devote substantial space to
White’s version of what they call “the social and cultural systems theory”
(which I prefer to call “group alliance theory”). In their view, “it is clear
that the advantages postulated by White exist, and that, given a tendency
to choose the most easily available mate, a complete prohibition on famil-
ial sexual relations is the simplest device for forcing ties between fami-
lies.” But they were not functionalists of the fundamentalist variety. They
8 wolf

worried “that [White’s] theory seems to assert that because the shift was
advantageous, it came into being,” and they worried that to come into be-
ing, the shift would “require a movement in opposition to certain strong
trends.”28
It requires the elimination of some younger members from the family, in spite of emo-
tional attachments, and entrusting these members to groups where stable relation-
ships do not yet exist. It also requires that primitive man understand the advantages
of exchange—or else must assume that familial exogamy and the familial taboo
arose as a chance “mutation” and survived because of their adaptive character.29

But what, then, could have motivated the change?

Aberle et al.’s premises put them in an awkward position. They accepted
the evidence indicating that inbreeding is injurious, but they also accepted
Freud’s claim that human beings are naturally inclined to mate and marry
within the family. Moreover, they rejected the idea that “primitive men”
(whoever they might be) would have recognized either the disadvantages of
inbreeding or the advantages of alliances. Having gotten themselves into
this position by accepting Freud, they naturally turned to Freud to solve
their problem. After his famous reconstruction of what he called the “emo-
tional motive” for the incest taboo, Freud went on to argue that “it has a
practical basis as well.”
Sexual desires do not unite men but divide them. Though the brothers had banded to-
gether in order to overcome their father, they were all one another’s rivals in regard
to the women. Each of them would have wished, like his father, to have all the
women to himself. The new organization would have collapsed in a struggle of all
against all, for none of them was of such overmastering strength as to be able to take
on his father’s part with success. Thus the brothers had no alternative, if they were
to live together, but—not, perhaps until they had passed through many dangerous
crises—to institute the law against incest, by which they renounced the women
whom they desired and who had been their chief motive for dispatching their father.
In this way they rescued the organization which had made them strong.30

Citing Freud as the originator of what they call “the family theory” (and I
call “group harmony theory”), Aberle et al. argued that the incest taboo was
instituted to maintain order in the family. This was possible for an animal
with “language and limited culture” because domestic strife would “be ob-
servable as a pressing problem, on a day-to-day basis, and the source of the
problem in sexual competition would be equally evident.” They recognized
that the problem might be solved by regulating sex rather than by eliminat-
ing it, but argued that this solution would not survive over time because it
would not solve the genetic problem posed by the dangers of inbreeding.31
Although Aberle et al. avoided many of the mistakes made by White
and Lévi-Strauss, they ended up with a story that is no more convincing. It
 Introduction 9

is, as Hill Gates asserts in Chapter 8 of this volume, the result of anthro-
pology’s “embrace . . . of Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus complex and its odd al-
liance with contract theory.” The incest taboo is taken as promising, if not
utopia, at least a healthier, more orderly existence. But human nature, in-
cestuously inclined, stands in the way. A means must be found to overcome
it. Human beings must see that to fully realize their potential they have to
repress their selfish sexual interests. It is a particularly attractive parable
because everyone knows that the story has a happy ending. Somehow,
somewhere, for some reason or other, our ancestors saw the light and made
the necessary sacrifices. Rationality triumphed. All good men agreed that
they would forgo their sisters and exchange them for wives.
The antihero of this heroic tale is Edward Westermarck. If early associa-
tion were to be found to inhibit sexual attraction among humans beings as
well as among geese, the plot would lose its dramatic motive and much of
its appeal. Our ancestors would not have had to repress their natural incli-
nations to harvest the advantages of outbreeding and exogamy. They
would be guaranteed by their natural inclinations. It is, then, ironic that
even before Aberle et al.’s version of the story appeared in print, the Frazer/
Freud tide had turned. In 1962 Robin Fox published an essay in which he
argued that reaction to the possibility of sex among persons who have ex-
perienced close bodily contact as children “varies from ‘disgusting’ or ‘un-
thinkable’ to ‘indifferent.’” “It is the reaction of indifference that we find
most interesting, and most neglected, due to the facile rejection of Wester-
marck’s observation.”32
Fox’s bellwether essay was followed two years later by Yonina Talmon’s
study of sexual relations among children reared together in two Israeli kib-
butzim, four years later by my first report of the sexual consequences of mi-
nor marriages in Taiwan, and less than a decade later by Joseph Shepher’s
survey of a large sample of marriages in Israel. All three studies documented
“a lack of inclination for . . . sexual relations between persons who have
lived together in a long-continued relationship from a period of life when
the actions of sexual desire, in its acuter forms at least, is naturally out of
the question.”33
A Westermarck revival was under way. In the years since, it has amassed
evidence that leaves little doubt that Aberle et al. erred in concluding that
asexual imprinting does not have an analogue among humans. The only
ethnographic case that could ever be mustered in support of their conclu-
sion—brother-sister marriage in Roman Egypt—is nullified by Walter Schei-
del in Chapter 5 of this volume. After carefully reexamining the forty-six
known cases of sibling and half-sibling marriages, he concludes that “all in
all, there is nothing to show that as far as the correlation of early childhood
association and sexual inhibition is concerned, the evidence for Roman
10 wolf

Egyptian sibling marriage deviates significantly from the pattern derived from
the Chinese data on ‘minor marriages’ and other information on the dem-
ographic context of incestuous behavior and incest avoidance in humans.”
Thus, the second half of the twentieth century saw two major changes in
the assumptions researchers bring to the incest problem. The first is that
close inbreeding is injurious. Denied by White in 1949, by Lévi-Strauss in
1950, and probably by Aberle et al. in 1956, the position advocated by
Westermarck since 1890 was well on its way to general acceptance by 1963.
The second and equally important change was the discovery that among
most mammals and all the primates—including, most definitely, humans—
early association inhibits sexual attraction. Again Westermarck was proved
right. Thus the man who was mentioned in 1963 “only for the sake of
completeness” enters the twenty-first century as almost the only man worth
mentioning.
Recognition of the importance of these changes is what unites the chap-
ters in this volume, but they are not the focal subjects of the volume. There
are three problems raised by the discovery that inbreeding is injurious and
early association inhibiting. I call them the mediation problem (A), the
representation problem (B), and the localization problem (C). The media-
tion problem is, How are the deleterious consequences of inbreeding and
the inhibiting nature of early association related? Most of the contributors
to the volume are willing to assume that they are linked as cause and ef-
fect, but William Durham, volume editor and author of Chapter 7, de-
murs. He worries that “the Westermarck effect” may not be an adapta-
tion. “What is lacking,” in his view, “is conclusive evidence to show that
the aversion was specifically shaped over time by genetic selection for the
function it now performs.”
I think doubts of this kind arise because we still do not know how the
Westermarck effect is effected. In other words, we still do not know what
causes us to respond to early association with an enduring aversion. I call
the search for this cause the mediation problem because I am confident that
whatever it is, it is a product of the dangers of inbreeding. It is what this se-
lective force selected for. My hope is that when the mediation problem is
solved the solution will convince skeptics like Durham that “in this case, as
in other cases, natural selection has operated . . . so as to meet the require-
ments of the species.”
When we solve the mediation problem (A), we will know why people
avoid incest, but we will still not have an answer to the question that Bate-
son puts at “the heart of the matter”: “What relations, if any, can be found
between the avoidance of inbreeding and the incest taboo?” In other words,
we will still have to solve the representation problem (B). Generally speak-
ing, this is the problem of how the loves and hopes and fears and phobias
 Introduction 11

of individuals give rise to norms, if they do. Bernard Williams (who was
the first to use the term representation problem) puts it this way:
It is the notion of a norm that perhaps gives rise to the central representation prob-
lem. . . . The most, it seems, that a genetically acquired character could yield would
be an inhibition against behaviours of a certain kind; what relation could that have
to a socially sanctioned prohibition? Indeed, if the inhibition exists, what need
could there be for such a prohibition? If a prohibitionary norm is to be part of the
“extended phenotype” of the species, how could we conceive, starting from an in-
hibition, that this should come about?34

As I analyze it, the representation problem consists of a cluster of three

related problems concerning the relationship between individual inclina-
tions and social regulations. I call them the externalization problem (B1),
the expression problem (B2), and the moralization problem (B3). The ex-
ternalization problem concerns the fact that the incest taboo is not a mat-
ter of self-regulation. It is a matter of public condemnation. The fact that
early association inhibits sexual attraction explains why most people avoid
sexual relations with their parents and siblings, but it does not explain why
they condemn other people for having sexual relations with their parent or
their sibling.
Although it is implied by his general statement, Williams did not address
the externalization problem (B1). For him, the core of the representation
problem is what I call the expression problem (B2). And, in his view, it is an
insoluble problem. For Williams there is, as Neven Sesardic puts it in Chap-
ter 6, a “transcendental obstacle” blocking all movement from biologically
based inhibitions to socially sanctioned prohibitions. I call it “the expression
problem” because it concerns the conceptual content of the incest taboo.
The argument is that the aversion aroused by early association cannot pos-
sibly explain the taboo because they are about different things. One is about
“those [people] that one is brought up with”; the other is about “marriages
that could constitute close inbreeding.” In Williams’s own words,
Not only does extra conceptual content have to be introduced to characterize the
human prohibition, but also the introduction of that content stands in conflict with
the proposed explanation of it. There are no sanctions against marrying those that
one is brought up with (as such); the sanction is against marriages which would
constitute close inbreeding. The conceptual content of the prohibition is thus dif-
ferent from the content that occurs in the description of the inhibition. It indeed re-
lates to the suggested function of that inhibition, but that fact will not explain how
the prohibition which is explicitly against inbreeding will have arisen. It certainly
does not represent a mere “raising to consciousness” of the inhibition.

Although it is also implied by his general statement of the representation

problem (B), Williams fails to address what I call the moralization problem
12 wolf

(B3). This is surprising given his interest in morality, because the problem
arises from the fact that universally the incest taboo is represented as having
strongly felt moral content. Not only do people disapprove of incest, their
disapproval is accepted as morally motivated. A solution to what I call the
externalization problem would explain why people condemn incest, but it
would not explain why such condemnation elicits universal approbation.
Neither the mediation problem (A) nor the representation problem (B)
were seriously discussed until the end of the twentieth century. Until the
early 1970s this was because most researchers accepted White and Lévi-
Strauss’s contention that the source of the incest taboo was supranatural;
afterward, it was because the succeeding generation of cultural relativists
decided there was no incest taboo. Their reasons were succinctly stated by
Rodney Needham as early as 1971. “I conclude,” Needham wrote, “that
‘incest’ is a mistaken sociological concept and not a universal.” There were,
in Needham’s view, two reasons for this conclusion:
The first is the wide and variable range of statuses to which the prohibitions apply.
The scope of application is in each case an integral feature of the social system, and
in some sense a function of it; i.e., the complex of prohibitions in a society cannot
be comprehended except by a systematic purview of the institutions with which
they are implicated. By this account of the matter there are as many different kinds
of incest prohibitions as there are discriminable social systems.
The second consideration is that the incest prohibitions are in part moral in-
junctions; they are expressions of indigenous ethical doctrines and, whether or not
they are touched with a peculiar emotional quality, they have cultural meanings
which no attempt at explanation can reasonably neglect.35

Needham’s arguments were quickly seconded by David M. Schneider,

Peter Riviere, and Roy Wagner. In fact, arguments that were original with
Needham in 1971 were orthodoxy by the end of the decade. Thus, my pre-
ceding account of the fate of Aberle et al. is clearly “a presentist” version
of history. What I have called a Westermarck revival was only a minor
countercurrent in a tide drawn by the view that there is no incest taboo at
all, only clusters of cultural particulars. The history of the period would be
better represented by focusing on David M. Schneider than on Edward
Westermarck. Although Schneider was a member of the Aberle et al. group
(and, I was once told, drafted the report they published), he soon followed
Needham’s lead and abandoned the incest taboo as “a mistaken sociologi-
cal concept.” In a paper published in 1976 his “main point” with respect to
the problem of incest was “to stop looking for causal explanations of ori-
gin, functional explanations of maintenance and to start looking at it as a
problem in meaning in its cultural context.”36
Now that the high tide of cultural relativism is receding, we can see that
though it tried, it did not succeed in dissolving all social phenomena into
 Introduction 13

their manifest qualities. There is, contra Needham and those who followed
his lead, a universal incest taboo. But to insist on this does not deny that
“there are as many different kinds of incest prohibitions as there are dis-
criminable social systems.” Needham was right about this. He was justified
in claiming that “the range of structures to which the [incest] prohibitions
apply” is “wide and variable,” and he was justified in claiming that incest
taboos are moral injunctions that express what he calls “indigenous ethical
doctrines.”
There is, then, a third problem to be faced—in addition to the media-
tion problem (A) and the representation problem (B). This is what I call
the localization problem (C). In general terms, it is the problem of how
and why a universal tendency is implemented in diverse ways. The prob-
lem is represented in Chapter 8 of this volume by Hill Gates’s reanalysis of
Bronislaw Malinowski’s account of the incest taboo in the Trobriand Is-
lands. Why do the Trobrianders disapprove of sexual relations among all
matrilineally related boys and girls as well as among siblings? Why does
the strength of this disapproval diminish as the matrilineal connection be-
comes more remote? Why do the Trobrianders regard sibling incest as par-
ticularly horrifying? Why do they not include parental incest in the same
class of delicts as maternal incest and sibling incest? Why do some Trobri-
and clans tolerate incest on the part of what Malinowski calls their “chiefs”?
And so forth.
Although they rarely appear in the service of an attempt to link the dan-
gers of inbreeding or the effects of early association to the incest taboo of a
particular society, arguments addressed to the localization problem are
common. Indeed, most of what anthropologists have written about the in-
cest taboo belongs to this genre. The mediation problem and the represen-
tation problem, in sharp contrast, have no established place in the anthro-
pological literature. Before 1983 only Westermarck had addressed any part
of the representation problem, and before 1989 no one, not even Wester-
marck, had addressed the mediation problem. Thus the chapters in this
volume mark a sharp turn in the direction of scholarly interests. More than
half are primarily concerned with one aspect or another of either the medi-
ation problem or the representation problem.
The mediation problem (A) is addressed most directly by Mark Erick-
son, in Chapter 9, and myself, in Chapter 4 (though Anne Pusey comments
on it at the end of Chapter 3). The argument we make is a version of a hy-
pothesis first advanced by Erickson in 1989. In Chapter 9 he puts the argu-
ment in historical context by noting that while Westermarck did not pro-
pose “a psychology of incest avoidance,” Freud did. This was not an easy
task for Freud, because it involved resolving a dilemma created by his as-
sumption that “all social bonds are ultimately sexual.” If all social bonds
14 wolf

are ultimately sexual, how could it be that “sexuality is inhibited among

kin”? The answer is, of course, the deus ex machina of the Oedipal drama
—fear of castration. Discovering that his sister has no penis, every little boy
fears that he will suffer the same fate if he persists in wanting his mother.
And thus, if one can accept that fear of castration is universal, a natural
preference for incest is turned into incest avoidance.
Erickson and I avoid Freud’s dilemma—and his desperate resolution—
by arguing that a distinction must be made between sexual bonds and
asexual bonds. The bonds an infant forms with the mother and other care-
takers are fundamentally different from those formed between adult sexual
partners. Infant /caretaker bonds are inherently contrasexual. Our argu-
ment is inspired by John Bowlby’s account of what he calls “attachment
behavior.” What we add is the thought that Bowlby’s attachment and
Westermarck’s aversion are two aspects of the bonds formed in infancy and
early childhood. It could not be otherwise, because without the aversion,
childhood attachments would lead to incest, and without attachment,
childhood aversion would lead to abandonment. To evolve at all, the two
dispositions had to evolve together.
Thus part of our solution to the mediation problem (A) is to suggest that
what natural selection selected for is a universal disposition to form con-
trasexual attachments to those persons by whom and with whom one is
reared. Putting together the evidence presented in this volume with that re-
viewed in a recent handbook of attachment behavior,37 this part of our ar-
gument appears well founded. The problem is how to account for the atti-
tude of parents and other caretakers. We have to assume that they are
somehow inhibited by association with their children. But how? Bowlby
suggested that attachment behavior naturally elicits what he calls “caretak-
ing.” Thus the simplest solution to our problem would be to suggest that
caretaking, like attachment, is inherently contrasexual, but not all the evi-
dence now available is encouraging. The evidence cataloged in Chapter 9
suggests that caretaking is not necessarily contrasexual or that attachment
is not always successful in eliciting caretaking.
The representation problem (B) is addressed in this volume by Patrick
Bateson (Chapter 1), William Durham (Chapter 7), and Neven Sesardic
(Chapter 6). I will consider first that part of the problem I call the exter-
nalization problem (B1). Why do we condemn others for having sex with
their relatives? What has this to do with our not being interested in having
sex with our relatives? Westermarck’s answer was simple (at least as long
as we allow Smithian sympathy as a universal human attribute). Sexual
aversion of the kind aroused by early association is painful, but such pain
is not part of our everyday feelings toward our close relatives. Our every-
day attitude toward their sexuality is a comfortable indifference. Our aver-
 Introduction 15

sion is aroused only when “the idea of sexual relations with a near relative
occupies the mind with sufficient intensity and a desire fails to appear.”38
The reason we condemn other people for having sex with their relatives is
because it does just this to us. We condemn them because by arousing our
aversion their behavior causes us pain.
William Durham and I teach together and often debate in class the mer-
its of Westermarck’s solution to the externalization problem. I recommend
it; he rejects it. Ironically, as he sees it, the three studies that have done the
most to confirm Westermarck’s account of why we avoid incest all discon-
firm his account of why we condemn incest. In Taiwan, Israel, and Leba-
non, children who are not siblings were commonly reared together as inti-
mately as if they were siblings. In all three cases the result was, as
Westermarck predicted, an aversion to sexual relations as adults. But in no
one of these cases did the aversion aroused by early association produce a
tendency to condemn sexual relations between the co-reared children. The
children reared together in Israeli kibbutzim were encouraged to marry,
and the children reared together in Taiwan and Lebanon were condemned
if they refused to marry.
Durham offers in place of Westermarck’s solution to the externalization
problem a solution of his own. This is a more sophisticated version of the
view that Aberle et al. rejected when, accepting the dangers of inbreeding,
they denied that primitive man could have recognized these dangers. Dur-
ham argues that in so doing they overlooked the evidence preserved in the
origin myths of many societies. This evidence says that the deleterious con-
sequences of inbreeding were widely recognized in prehistoric times. The
incest taboo is not, as Westermarck would have it, an unintended conse-
quence of our emotional constitution; it is a consciously implemented solu-
tion to a recognized problem. Durham does not deny Westermarck’s claims
with regard to the consequences of early association. He even agrees that
this is the primary reason humans avoid incest. What he denies is that the
“social fact” we call the incest taboo is largely a product of the aversion
aroused by early association. Thus, for Durham, what Williams calls the
representation problem is not a problem at all. The incest taboo is not a
representation. It is a creation.
Durham’s position is best seen in contrast to the positions taken by Bate-
son (Chapter 1) and Gates (Chapter 8). Although Durham is reluctant to
attribute the inhibiting effects of early association to the dangers of in-
breeding, he is happy to attribute the incest taboo to these dangers. Bate-
son and Gates, in contrast, seem willing to assume that the dangers of in-
breeding account for the inhibiting effects of early association, but they are
not willing to assume that these dangers account for the incest taboo. “In
summary,” Bateson writes, “I suggest that it is unlikely that inbreeding
16 wolf

avoidance and incest taboos evolved by similar mechanisms or even have a

common utility in modern life.”
In Chapter 6, Neven Sesardic challenges Durham’s rejection of Wester-
marck’s solution to the externalization problem by suggesting that Durham
is taking unfair advantage of an “epistemological tension” in Westermarck’s
account of the incest taboo. Westermarck argues that early association
arouses a sexual aversion that gives rise to the incest taboo. His critics argue
that the aversion he identifies is a result of the incest taboo, not its source.
Thus, to make his case, Westermarck must show that even in the absence of
an incest taboo, early association arouses an aversion. Consequently, every
case Westermarck can muster in support of his aversion hypothesis will in-
evitably challenge his solution to the externalization problem. “It is,” as
Sesardic puts it, “a zero-sum game; what the theory gains by collecting evi-
dence in favor of the [first hypothesis] it automatically loses on the other
front because the same empirical data chip away at the [second hypothe-
sis].” Durham responds (in Chapter 7) by arguing that what is significant
about these cases is not simply that they involve socially acceptable unions
between childhood associates. It is that in all three cases they are the mar-
riages most parents prefer.
Chapter 6 also takes up Bernard Williams’s treatment of what I have
called the expression problem (B2). Williams argued that Westermarck was
attempting the impossible in trying to derive the incest taboo from the
aversion aroused by early association. This is impossible because the con-
tent of the aversion and the content of the taboo are not the same. The
aversion is about sexual relations with the people with whom one is reared,
while the taboo is about marriages between people who are classified as
close relatives.
Sesardic argues, in defense of Westermarck, that Williams’s argument
only “looks persuasive because it trades on a crucial ambiguity.” The fact
that childhood association arouses an aversion to sexual relations does not
necessarily mean that the people affected experience the aversion as being
directed to their childhood associates qua associates. We must distinguish
the cause of the aversion and the subjective experience of the aversion.
When we do so, Williams’s objection evaporates. It is not only possible, but
also highly likely because it would be culturally encouraged, that siblings
who are reared together experience the aversion aroused by their early as-
sociation in terms of kinship rather than in terms of association. Thus, it is
also highly likely that there is rarely a mismatch between the experience of
childhood association and the content of the incest taboo.
There is, in my view, a relationship between Sesardic’s critique of Dur-
ham and his critique of Williams. He could have employed against Durham
the same argument he employs against Williams. Both confuse the cause of
 Introduction 17

sexual aversion and the experience of that aversion. In all three of the soci-
eties Durham cites to refute Westermarck, the great majority of the people
with whom one associates as a child are parents and siblings. Thus it is
likely that the aversions aroused by childhood association are typically ex-
perienced in kinship terms. There is, then, no reason to expect that mar-
riages involving childhood associates who are not siblings will elicit disap-
proval. They lack what it takes to turn a comfortable indifference into a
painful aversion.
Most authors recognize that the incest taboo has what George Peter
Murdock called “a peculiar emotional intensity,”39 but many do not recog-
nize that it also has a peculiar moral intensity. The result is that what I call
the moralization problem has been neglected. In fact, the only thorough
treatment of the problem is in Westermarck’s Origin and Development of
Moral Ideas. His solution to the problem is deceptively simple. It is prem-
ised on the view that “the moral concepts, which form the predicates of
moral judgements, are ultimately based on moral emotions, that they are es-
sentially generalizations of tendencies in certain phenomena to call forth in-
dignation or approval.” What distinguishes the moral emotions from other
emotions is “their disinterestedness, apparent impartiality, and flavour of
generality.”40 Thus, what makes disapproval of incest moral is the fact that
the disapproval is general and does not appear to serve any selfish interest.
In sum, it is moral because it is generally approved disapproval.
In Chapter 10, Larry Arnhart points out that even those social and bio-
logical scientists who defend Westermarck’s explanation of incest avoid-
ance reject his solution to the moralization problem. With the notable ex-
ception of E. O. Wilson, they cannot accept the possibility that moral
concepts “are ultimately based on moral emotions.” Even the evolutionary
psychologists who take Westermarck’s aversion hypothesis as paradigmatic
reject his evolutionary approach to ethics as violating a fundamental fact /
value dichotomy. For David Buss and Steven Pinker, as for Callicles and
Kant, is is is and ought is another thing.
Arnhart contrasts “the ‘transcendentalist’ claim that ethics is rooted in
absolute standards that exist outside of the human mind” with “the ‘em-
piricist’ claim that ethics is rooted in natural human inclinations.” The con-
trast is neatly illustrated by the difference between Francis Hutcheson and
Bernard Mandeville on the subject of the incest taboo. Hutcheson, in the
empiricist tradition, argued that the incest taboo shows that we are all pos-
sessed of an innate moral sense. “Had we no moral Sense natural to us, we
should only look upon Incest as hurtful to ourselves, and shun it, and never
hate other incestuous Persons, more than we do a broken Merchant.”41
Mandeville, in the transcendentalist tradition, emphatically denied the ex-
istence of an innate moral sense. He agreed that “incestuous alliances are
18 wolf

abominable; but it is certain that, whatever Horror we conceive at the

thought of them, there is nothing in Nature repugnant against them, but
what is built upon Mode and Custom.”42
Arnhart’s contrasts help us to understand why Westermarck’s solution to
the moralization problem was neglected. The reason is that just as Wester-
marck was a thoroughgoing Darwinian, so also was he—ipso facto, I would
say—a thoroughgoing empiricist. Recognizing the moral content of the in-
cest taboo, he refused to separate it from the taboo’s psychological roots
and its biological origins. Instead, he attributed the moral content of the
taboo to the same sources as the aversion responsible for incest avoidance.
This violated the fact /value dichotomy by turning an ought into an is. The
argument would have appealed to Francis Hutcheson. It did not appeal to
the transcendentalists who dominated twentieth-century social thought.
It is necessary to partition the incest problem and name the parts lest we
lose sight of its complexity and be tempted by partial solutions. We must
always remember, however, that solutions to one part of the problem may
have implications for our understanding of other parts. This is illustrated
over and over again in this volume. The implications of Bittles’s concern
that the immediate effects of inbreeding have been exaggerated are not lim-
ited to the problem of how incest avoidance originated. They are also rele-
vant to the problem of why incest avoidance was mandated. The less visi-
ble the effects of inbreeding among a couple’s children, the more likely it is
that Westermarck was right in seeking the origins of the incest taboo
among the passions. The more visible the effects of inbreeding among a
couple’s children, the more likely it is that Durham is right in arguing that
rationality played a critical role.
One of the questions I take up in my own chapter is whether men are as
sensitive to the inhibiting effects of early association as women are. Have-
lock Ellis suggested that they are not. I offer evidence indicating that he
was wrong. Which of us is right will affect not only the solution to the me-
diation problem but, even more critically, the solution to the representation
problem. It is one thing to derive a prohibition that applies to both sexes
from an aversion felt by both, quite another to derive a prohibition that ap-
plies to both sexes from one felt by only one sex, particularly if the inhib-
ited sex is also the socially subordinate sex.
Hill Gates concludes Chapter 8 by noting that “under conditions not
fully mapped out, but surely recurrently, our innate alertness to the emo-
tional complexity of incest was seized upon and turned to precise cultural
ends, until something better came along.” She is pointing to the possibility
of relationships between the mediation problem and the localization prob-
lem. Mark Erickson and I argue that it is not coincidental that we sexually
avoid those persons to whom we are most strongly attached as children.
 Introduction 19

Avoidance and attachment have evolved together, and together from the
emotional core of the parent-child relationship. Thus, from our point of
view, it is easy to see why secular and religious leaders who set themselves
up as “father and mother of the people” extend the scope of the incest ta-
boo and enact severe sanctions against incest. Sanctioning incest fits emo-
tionally—and thereby helps justify politically—a paternalistic stance.
Their published report suggests that, meeting in 1956, Aberle et al. did
not concern themselves with the practical or policy aspects of the incest
problem. In my view, this was not because there was not yet an “incest epi-
demic,” or that, if there was, it had not yet been diagnosed. It was because
in 1956 incest was considered, at worst, a legal or ethical problem. In the
eyes of scientists (social and biological alike), it did not have a medical or
psychopathological aspect. Incest was a social matter without serious im-
plications for either physical or mental health. It could be safely left in the
hands of anthropologists with no interest in either biology or psychology.
The chapters in this volume show how Westermarck’s return has changed
all this. Bittles’s interest in calculating as precisely as possible the level of de-
fects among children of consanguineous unions is not entirely academic. It is
motivated by practical concerns and has clear policy implications. Although
the frequency of cousin and uncle-niece marriages has declined worldwide,
it is still high in parts of Asia and Africa and in many immigrant communi-
ties in Europe. And there would be reason for concern even if the frequency
of consanguineous marriages was lower than it actually is. An important
part of Bittles’s argument is that as infant mortality and deaths owing to in-
fectious diseases decline, genetic disorders will constitute an ever larger pro-
portion of the medical problems people experience. An inevitable result will
be that the problems produced by consanguineous unions will be ever more
obvious and ever more likely to stigmatize those people whose customs en-
courage such unions. He is particularly concerned about the effects of these
changes in Europe, where these people are immigrant minorities.
Although their importance was long obscured by the mistaken views of
Twain’s “modern science,” questions about the medical consequences of in-
cest have a long history. They were, as Bittles observes, the subject of in-
tense debate in the 1850s and 1860s, leading to Sir John Lubbock’s attempt
to have questions about cousin marriages included in the 1871 census.
What is new from a practical perspective is concern about the psycho-
pathological consequences of incest. Mark Erickson begins Chapter 9 by
noting that “a distinct recollection of my psychiatric training in the 1980s
is that of a group of patients, mostly female, who presented such a bewil-
dering array of symptoms as to defy diagnosis.” In 1980 it had not yet been
discovered that they were victims of incest.
Although we are a long way from understanding why incest predisposes
20 wolf

people to psychopathologies, it now appears certain that it does. Erickson

mentions, among the many problems of incest victims, major depression, al-
cohol and drug dependence, self-mutilation and suicide, and a wide range of
stress-related illnesses. The evidence of marriages worldwide rule out the
possibility that the cause of such a panoply of disorders is the experience of
sex with an older man. What is critical is that the older man is a father or
older brother. But why does this matter? What makes sex with a father or
an older brother so disturbing? The answer may be implicit in the solution
Erickson and I offer to the mediation problem. It is the symbiotic relation-
ship of incest avoidance and attachment behavior. The evolutionary purpose
of attachment is to elicit caretaking. This is its innate promise. Consequently,
sexual advances by a father or brother are disturbing because they deny the
promise of caretaking. They threaten abandonment. Victims of paternal in-
cest commonly complain that their father “betrayed them” or “violated their
trust.” What they are saying, we suggest, is that a person who had promised
care behaved in a way that denied having ever made such a promise.
Whether or not the specifics of this hypothesis prove correct, it is a step
in the right direction because it assumes that incest is unnatural. Incest is,
as Erickson puts it, “a kinship pathology.” So long as social scientists ac-
cepted the mid-twentieth-century view that human beings were naturally
incestuous, the problems Erickson lists could not be reasonably attributed
to incest. Incest was, in the twentieth-century view, a purely social delict. It
could arouse, at worst, feelings of guilt or shame, and then only if the delict
were discovered. It did not have the emotional stuff needed to fuel a major
pathology.
Erickson concludes Chapter 9 by putting his subject in historical per-
spective: “During most of the twentieth century, social scientists believed
incest was common in nature. Among humans, incest was thought to be
rare because of cultural taboos.” Ironically, Erickson suggests, “this view
has been turned on its head. Incest is now known to be rare in nature, and
we must seriously ask if human incest has become more, not less common,
because of cultural influences.” Thus, in Erickson’s view, the twentieth cen-
tury has seen a complete revolution in the relationship between culture, in-
cest, and human welfare. Culture has gone from what saves us from our in-
cestuous inclinations to what exposes us to the dangers of incest. What
early in the century was seen as a need to repress our innate inclinations is
now seen as a need to recover them.
What will we see in the twenty-first century? In Chapter 10 Larry Arn-
hart suggests that “we will see great advances in the biological understand-
ing of human nature. He continues:
This will force us to think about whether biological science can explain that most
distinctive trait of our humanity—our moral sense of right and wrong. Some peo-
 Introduction 21

ple will argue that our moral experience transcends our biological nature. Others
will argue that we should be able to explain our morality as an expression of our
biological nature. How we decide that debate might be decisively influenced by
whether we accept or reject Edward Westermarck’s Darwinian theory of the incest
taboo as a natural expression of human moral emotions.”

I agree with Arnhart’s assumption that the incest problem will be as hotly
debated in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth century, and I
agree with his prediction that the focal point of the debate will shift from
the question of why we avoid incest to the question of why we condemn in-
cest. I would like to add only the prediction that with this shift, the debate
will become even more intense. I say this because in my view the underlying
question that sustains interest in the incest problem is the degree to which
we have managed to transcend our animal origins. Almost completely, ar-
gued the mid-twentieth-century transcendentalists, claiming the incest taboo
as evidence that we are capable of overcoming, even remaking our animal
nature. Then came the Westermarck revival showing that we avoid incest
for natural, not cultural reasons. Now all that remains of the transcenden-
talists’ case is the fact that we do not just “look upon Incest as hurtful to
ourselves, and shun it.” We “hate other incestuous Persons.” This is the
is/ought barrier, the transcendentalists’ last line of defense. They will contest
any attempt to breach it and do so as ardent champions of human dignity.

no t e s
1. David F. Aberle, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Eckhard H. Hess, Daniel R. Miller,
David M. Schneider, and James N. Sphuhler, “The incest taboo and the mating
patterns of animals,” American Anthropologist, vol. 65 (1963), p. 253.
2. Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (1880), (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996), p. 173.
3. Edward Westermarck, “Recent theories of exogamy,” in Three Essays on
Sex and Marriage (London: Macmillan, 1934), p. 147.
4. See Arthur P. Wolf, Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association: A Chinese
Brief for Edward Westermarck (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995),
pp. 2–8.
5. Lord Raglan, Jocasta’s Crime (London, 1933), p. 16.
6. Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society (London,
1927), p. 243.
7. Robert Briffault, The Mothers (London, 1927), vol. 1, p. 215.
8. Leslie White, “The definition and prohibition of incest,” American Anthro-
pologist, vol. 50, part I (1948), p. 417.
9. Ibid.
10. E. M. East, Inbreeding and Human Affairs (New York, 1938), p. 156.
22 wolf

11. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston:

Beacon Press, 1969), trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Strummer, and
Rodney Needham, pp. 14–15.
12. G. Dahlberg, “On rare defects in human populations with particular
regard to inbreeding and isolate effects,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of
Edinburgh, vol. 58 (1937–38), p. 224.
13. Aberle et al., “Incest taboo,” p. 256.
14. Ibid., pp. 256–57.
15. Ibid., p. 257.
16. Ibid., p. 259.
17. Westermarck, “Recent theories of exogamy,” pp. 158–59.
18. Alfred Wallace, K. Rob, and V. Wikman, “Letters from Edward B. Tylor
and Alfred Russell Wallace to Edward Westermarck,” Acta Academia Aboensis
Humanioria, vol. 13, no. 8 (1940), p. 18.
19. Ibid., p. 258.
20. J. G. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy (London, 1910), vol. 4, pp. 97–98.
21. See Maurice Godelier, “Incest taboo and the evolution of society,” in
Evolution and Its Influence, ed. Alan Grafen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
p. 69.
22. Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1920), trans.
Joan Riviere (New York: Pocket Books, 1953), pp. 220–21.
23. Ibid., p. 261.
24. Edward B. Tylor, “On a method of investigating the development of
institutions; applied to laws of marriage and descent,” Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 18 (1889), p. 267.
25. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer (London:
Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 43–44.
26. White, “Definition and prohibition,” p. 425.
27. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The family,” in Man, Culture, and Society, ed.
Harry L. Shapiro (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 278.
28. Aberle et al., “Incest taboo,” p. 258.
29. Ibid.
30. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1950), p. 144.
31. Aberle et al., “Incest taboo,” p. 262.
32. Robin Fox, “Sibling incest,” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 13 (1962),
p. 147.
33. Edward Westermarck, A Short History of Human Marriage (London,
1926), p. 86.
34. Bernard Williams, “Evolution and ethics,” in Evolution from Molecules to
Men, ed. D. S. Bendall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 560.
35. Rodney Needham, “Remarks on the analysis of kinship and marriage,”
in Rethinking Kinship and Marriage (London: Tavistock, 1971), pp. 25–26.
36. David M. Schneider, “The meaning of incest,” Journal of the Polynesian
Society, vol. 85 (1976), p. 168.
 Introduction 23

37. Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver, eds., Handbook of Attachment Behav-
ior (New York: Guildford Press, 1999).
38. Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, vol. 2, p. 197 or 214.
39. George Peter Murdock, Social Structure (New York: Macmillan, 1949),
p. 288.
40. Edward Westermarck, The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas
(London: Macmillan, 1906–8), vol. 2, pp. 738–39.
41. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty
and Virtue (London: J. Darby for Will and John Smith, 1725), p. 192.
42. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1924), vol. 1, p. 331.
1 Inbreeding Avoidance and Incest Taboos

Patrick Bateson

I have never much liked the way some of my colleagues in the bio-
logical sciences have applied terms such as rape or marriage to animals. I
appreciate that this is sometimes done to lighten the normally dull language
of scientific discourse. However, these terms have established usage in hu-
man institutions with all their associated rights and responsibilities of indi-
viduals and culturally transmitted rules on what people can and cannot do.
Problems of communication between disciplines are compounded when,
having found some descriptive similarities between animals and humans
and having investigated the animal cases, biologists or their popularizers
use the animal findings to “explain” human behavior. Such arguments rely
on a succession of puns, which are usually unconscious, but which are es-
pecially unfunny to those social scientists who feel threatened by an appar-
ent takeover bid of the biologists.
I believe that incest should be restricted to human social behavior where
culturally transmitted proscriptions limit sexual contact and marriage with
close kin (and others who might be deemed to be close kin). Inbreeding
avoidance should be used for behavior that makes matings with close kin
less probable in both humans and nonhuman animals. This separation then
leaves open the question of whether these behaviors have evolved for simi-
lar reasons and whether the two phenomena have similar current functions.
This chapter briefly reviews the evidence that people unconsciously
choose mates who are a bit different from those individuals who are famil-
iar from early life but not too different. In a biological context this is often
referred to as optimal outbreeding.1 Why did it evolve? The question in-

Generous financial support from the Australian Research Council and the benefits
of ongoing collaboration with many colleagues in Australia, India, Pakistan, the
United Kingdom, and the United States is gratefully acknowledged.
 Inbreeding Avoidance and Incest Taboos 25

vites examination of the concept of adaptation and the role of Darwinian

evolution in generating such adaptations. Since evolution is thought to in-
volve changes in genes, it is necessary to be clear about the role of genes in
an individual’s development. When development is considered, a quite dif-
ferent set of issues is raised. These need to be considered in relation to the
formation of mating preferences. Finally, it is necessary to come to the
heart of the matter: what relations, if any, can be found between the avoid-
ance of inbreeding and incest taboos?

Optimal Outbreeding

The biological costs of inbreeding are evident enough in other ani-

2
mals. They are particularly obvious in birds. If a male bird is mated with
his sister, and their offspring are mated together, and so on for several gen-
erations, the line of descendants usually dies out fairly quickly. This hap-
pens because some damaging genes are more likely to be expressed in in-
bred animals. Some potentially harmful genes are recessive and therefore
harmless when they are paired with a dissimilar gene, but they become
damaging in their effects when combined with an identical gene. They are
more likely to be paired with an identical recessive gene as a result of in-
breeding. The presence of such genes is a consequence of the mobility of
the birds and the low probability that they will mate with a bird of the op-
posite sex that is genetically similar to them. Over time, the recessive genes
have accumulated in the genome because they are normally suppressed by
their dominant partner gene.
The genetic costs of inbreeding arising from the expression of damaging
recessive genes are the ones that people usually worry about. However, re-
cessive genes are less important in mammals than they are in birds because
mammals generally move around less and may live in quite highly inbred
groups. The most important biological cost of excessive inbreeding is that
it negates the benefits of the genetic variation generated by sexual repro-
duction. If an animal inbreeds too much, it might as well make many cop-
ies of itself without the effort and trouble of courtship and mating.
On the other side, excessive outbreeding also has costs.3 For a start, ex-
cessive outbreeding disrupts the relation between parts of the body that
need to be well adapted to each other. The point is illustrated by human
teeth and jaws. The size and shape of teeth are strongly inherited charac-
teristics. So too are jaw size and shape, as may be seen in the famous paint-
ings of the Hapsburg family, scattered around the museums of the world.
The Dürer painting of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I reveals the
large Hapsburg jaw, which remained as pronounced in his great-great-
26 bateson

great-grandson, Philip IV of Spain, shown in the painting by Velasquez.

The potential problem arising from too much outbreeding is that the in-
heritance of teeth and jaw sizes are not correlated. A woman with small
jaws and small teeth who had a child by a man with big jaws and big teeth
lays down trouble for her grandchildren, some of whom may inherit small
jaws and big teeth. In a world without dentists, ill-fitting teeth were proba-
bly a serious cause of mortality. This example of mismatching, which is one
of many that may arise in the complex integration of the body, simply illus-
trates the more general cost of outbreeding too much.
Some of the evolutionary pressures on mate choice arose from too much
inbreeding, on the one hand, and from too much outbreeding on the other.
A preference for an individual somewhat like close kin will minimize the
opposing ill effects of breeding with individuals who are genetically too dif-
ferent. A sexual preference for individuals who are a bit different from
close kin strikes a balance between the biological costs of inbreeding and
those of outbreeding.4
The suggestion is that individuals had greatest reproductive success if
they mated with a partner who was somewhat similar to themselves, but
not too similar. The hypothesis has gathered considerable empirical sup-
port from studies of animals.5 Japanese quail, for example, prefer mates
that are first or second cousins, when given a choice in laboratory experi-
ments.6 If they have been reared with unrelated individuals, the quail pre-
fer mates that are a bit different from these familiar individuals. In hu-
mans a great mass of data shows that freely chosen human spouses are
more like each other than would be expected on a chance basis. Similari-
ties are not only social and psychological but also found in measures of
body dimensions such as length of earlobe.7
Humans choose partners somewhat like themselves.8 At the same time,
people prefer sexual partners who look slightly different from individuals
with whom they have grown up. Faces are perceived as more attractive if
some of the facial features are exaggerated by caricaturing the image so
that it differs from the average.9 Most people are attracted to faces that are
distinctive and depart from the average. When the faces of individuals who
were perceived as being attractive were averaged, this composite was pre-
ferred over the average of all faces.
Natural experiments have been performed unwittingly on human be-
ings. Famously, Israeli kibbutzniks grow up together like siblings and rarely
marry each other.10 The most comprehensive evidence has come from Ar-
thur Wolf’s (1994) study of the marriage statistics from Taiwan in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, when Taiwan was under Japanese
control.11 The Japanese kept detailed records for the births, marriages, and
 Inbreeding Avoidance and Incest Taboos 27

deaths of everyone on the island. As in many other parts of China, mar-

riages were arranged and occurred mainly and most interestingly in two
forms. The major type of marriage was the conventional one in which the
partners first met each other when adolescent. In the minor type of mar-
riage, the wife-to-be was adopted as a young girl into the family of her fu-
ture husband. In minor-type marriages, therefore, the partners grew up to-
gether like siblings. In this sense they were like the quail in the laboratory
experiment, having been reared with an individual of the opposite sex to
whom they were not genetically related. Later in life their sexual interest in
their partner was assessed in terms of divorce, marital fidelity, and the
number of children produced. By all these measures, the minor marriages
were conspicuously less successful than the major marriages. Typically, the
young couples who had grown up together from an early age, like brother
and sister, were not much interested in each other sexually when the time
came for their marriage to be consummated.
While a great deal is still unknown about sexual preferences in both an-
imals and humans, the similarities are quite striking. The processes in-
volved in preference of humans for slight novelty have been subject to Dar-
winian evolution. However, acceptance of this point has to be tempered by
an awareness that mate choice is influenced by many qualities that are be-
yond the scope of this chapter.12

Adaptation and Darwinism

Unconscious preferences for slight novelty are seen by biologists as

being adaptive in the sense that they serve to enhance the reproductive suc-
cess of the individual who acts on those preferences. Darwinism has gener-
ated much distrust in the social sciences because it seemed to spawn such
strange and, indeed, wicked social theories. The reason why biologists like
me are still greatly enamored of the Grand Old Man is because he provided
what is probably the only coherent and systematic explanation for adapta-
tion—the match between the characteristics of organisms and the worlds in
which they live.
Complicated things found in biology have the appearance of having
been designed for a purpose. In the early nineteenth century a famous the-
ologian, William Paley, put it this way: “It is the suitableness of these parts
to one another; first, in the succession and order in which they act; and,
secondly, with a view to the effect finally produced.”13 Paley took this as
proof of the existence of God. Darwin provided us with an explanation of
how it came about. When individual differences are inherited, those indi-
28 bateson

viduals that are better adapted than others are more likely to survive and
reproduce and then have offspring that share their adaptations.
The perception that behavior is designed springs from the relations be-
tween the behavior, the circumstances in which it is expressed, and the re-
sulting consequences. The closeness of the perceived match between the tool
and the job for which it is required is relative. In human design, the best that
one person can do will be exceeded by somebody with superior technology.
If you were on a picnic with a bottle of wine but no corkscrew, one of your
companions might use a strong stick to push the cork into the bottle. If you
had never seen this done before, you might be impressed by the selection of
a rigid tool small enough to get inside the neck of the bottle. The tool would
be an adaptation of a kind. Tools that are better adapted to the job of re-
moving corks from wine bottles are available, of course, and an astonishing
array of devices have been invented. One ingenious solution involved a
pump and a hollow needle with a hole near the pointed end; the needle was
pushed through the cork and air was pumped into the bottle, forcing the
cork out. Sometimes, however, the bottle exploded and this tool quickly be-
came extinct. As with human tools, what is perceived as good biological de-
sign may be superseded by an even better design, or the same solution may
be achieved in different ways.
Among those who spin stories about biological design, a favorite figure
of fun is an American artist, Gerald Thayer.14 He argued that the purpose
of the plumage of all birds is to make detection by enemies difficult. Some
of the undoubtedly beautiful illustrations were convincing examples of the
principles of camouflage. However, among other celebrated examples, such
as pink flamingos concealed in front of the pink evening sky, was a paint-
ing of a peacock with its resplendent tail stretched flat and matching the
surrounding leaves and grass. The function of the tail was to make the bird
difficult to see! Ludicrous attributions of function to biological structures
and behavior have been likened to Rudyard Kipling’s Just-So stories of
how, for example, the leopard got his spots.15 However, the teasing is not
wholly justified. Stories about current function are not about how the leop-
ard got his spots, but what the spots do for the leopard now. That question
is testable by observation and experiment.
Not every speculation about the current use of a behavior pattern is
equally acceptable. Both logic and factual knowledge can be used to decide
between competing claims. Superficially attractive ideas are quickly dis-
carded when the animal is studied in its natural environment. The peacock
raises his enormous tail in the presence of females, and he molts the cum-
bersome feathers as soon as the spring breeding season ends. If Thayer had
been correct about the tail feathers being used as camouflage, the peacock
should never raise them conspicuously and he should keep them year round.
 Inbreeding Avoidance and Incest Taboos 29

Genes and Development

A Darwinian account tells us nothing about how those sexual pref-

erences develop in the individual. It is true that for the Darwinian evolu-
tionary mechanism to work, something must be inherited. But even if a sin-
gle gene provides the basis for the distinctive beneficial character of the
individual, a single gene is not sufficient for the development of the charac-
ter. This is where we get to the heart of a very lively debate in biology.
Scientists collaborating on the Human Genome Project have elucidated
nearly all the DNA sequences of all the genes on all twenty-three pairs of
chromosomes found in every human cell. It is a staggering achievement.
But the excitement about what is being done should be greatly moderated.
“The Book of Life,” as one leading scientist called it, will not provide the
complete story about human nature.
The human genome is like a cook’s larder list.16 Working out all the dishes
that cooks might make from the ingredients available to them is another
matter. If you want to understand what happens in the lifelong process
from conception to death, you must study the process. The starting points
of development include the genes. But they also include factors external to
the genome, and of course, the social and physical conditions in which the
individual grows up are crucial.
The language of a gene “for” a particular characteristic is exceedingly
muddling to the nonscientist—and, if the truth be told, to many scientists
as well. What the scientists mean (or should mean) is that a genetic differ-
ence between two groups is associated with a difference in a characteristic.
They know perfectly well that other things are important and that, even in
constant environmental conditions, the outcome depends on a combination
of many genes. Particular combinations of genes have particular effects,
and a gene that fits into one combination may not fit into another. Unfor-
tunately, the language of a gene “for” a characteristic has a way of seduc-
ing the scientists themselves into believing their own sound bites. The lan-
guage rests on a profound misunderstanding.
While genes obviously matter, even a cursory glance at humanity reveals
the enormous importance of each person’s experience, upbringing, and cul-
ture. Nobody could seriously doubt the remarkable human capacity for
learning from personal experience and from others. It is obvious that expe-
rience, education, and culture make a big difference, whatever an individ-
ual’s genetic inheritance. Individuals are not like the dry Japanese paper
flowers that are simply put into water to open out.
The notion that genes are simply blueprints for an individual human is
hopelessly misleading. In a blueprint, the mapping works both ways: start-
ing from a finished house, the room can be found on the blueprint, just as
30 bateson

the room’s position is determined by the blueprint during the building

process. This straightforward mapping is not true for genes and individual
human behavior patterns, in either direction.
Genes do not make behavior patterns or physical attributes. Genes make
proteins. Each human has about 30,000 genes, each of which is an inher-
ited molecular strand (or set of strands) that may be translated into a pro-
tein molecule (or part of one). The proteins are crucial collectively to the
functioning of each cell in the body. Some proteins are enzymes, controlling
biochemical reactions, while others form the physical structures of the cell.
These protein products of genes work not in isolation but in a cellular en-
vironment created by the conditions of the local environment and by the
expression of other genes. Each gene product interacts with many other
gene products.
Any characteristic of an individual, such as a behavior pattern or psy-
chological attribute, is affected by many different genes, each of which con-
tributes to the variation between individuals. In an analogous way, many
different design features of a motor car contribute to a particular charac-
teristic such as its maximum speed. A particular component such as the
system for delivering fuel to the cylinders may affect many different aspects
of the car’s performance, such as its top speed, acceleration, and fuel con-
sumption. A broken wire can cause a car to break down, but this does not
mean that the wire by itself is responsible for making the car move.
The image of a genetic blueprint also fails because it is too static, too sug-
gestive that adult organisms are merely expanded versions of the fertilized
egg. In reality, developing organisms are dynamic systems that play an active
role in their own development. To some extent each individual chooses and
shapes its own physical and social environment. This can have interesting
consequences. People who differ in ways that relate to differences in their
genes may also pick certain physical and social environments in which to
live. This process has been given the name “niche-picking.”17 It means that
individuals with different characteristics, some of which reflect differences
in their genes, end up by their own actions experiencing the world in dif-
ferent ways.
Environmental and inherited factors often work together to produce
much larger overall effects than when either factor is present on its own.
The often uncanny similarities between identical twins provide striking ev-
idence for the importance of genes in shaping physical and behavioral char-
acteristics. But one surprising finding to emerge from studies of identical
twins is that twins reared apart are sometimes more like each other than
those reared together.18 To put it another way, rearing two genetically iden-
tical individuals in the same environment can make them less similar. This
fact pleases neither the extreme environmental determinist nor the extreme
genetic determinist.
 Inbreeding Avoidance and Incest Taboos 31

The environmental determinist supposes that twins reared apart must

have different experiences and should therefore be more dissimilar in their
behavior than twins who grew up together in the same environment. The
genetic determinist does not expect to find any behavioral differences be-
tween genetically identical twins reared together; if they have had the same
genes and the same environment, then how can they be different? Of course,
one twin provides a social environment for the other and siblings often
hate to do what the other one is doing.
A single developmental ingredient, such as a gene or a particular form of
experience, might produce an effect on behavior, but this knowledge gives
only a feeble insight into developmental processes. The best that can be
said of the nature/nurture split is that it provides a framework for uncov-
ering a few of the genetic and environmental ingredients that generate dif-
ferences between people. At worst, it satisfies a demand for simplicity in
ways that are fundamentally misleading.
The processes involved in behavioral and psychological development
have certain metaphorical similarities to cooking, to which I have already
alluded. Both the raw ingredients and the manner in which they are com-
bined are important. Timing also matters. In the cooking analogy, the raw
ingredients represent the many genetic and environmental influences, while
cooking represents the biological and psychological processes of develop-
ment. Nobody expects to find all the separate ingredients represented as dis-
crete, identifiable components in a soufflé. Similarly, nobody should expect
to find a simple correspondence between a particular gene (or a particular
experience) and particular aspects of an individual’s behavior or personality.

The Development of Mating Preferences

Returning to mating preferences, how do they develop? A preference

for faces that are a bit different, but not too different, from a familiar stan-
dard is relevant to mate choice in other species. Animals of many species
tend to avoid mating with individuals who are very close kin, such as sib-
lings, but they do sometimes prefer to mate with more distant relatives. The
developmental process involved was first made famous by Konrad Lorenz
and called “sexual imprinting.”19 This is coupled with some habituation to
the very familiar, which offsets the preference to the slightly novel.20
The few Israeli kibbutzniks who chose to marry within their peer group
were usually those who had entered the kibbutz after the age of six and
therefore had not grown up with their future spouses.21 In Taiwan, girls
who were adopted into families before the age of three and then married
their adopted “brother” had a lower fertility than girls adopted later.22 Nei-
ther of these findings means that the learning process that affects adult sex-
32 bateson

ual preferences is completed early in life. If children grow up together and,

as a result, see a lot of each other, they revise the ways in which they rec-
ognize each other; this goes on until they are sexually mature. By the time
they are three, children are highly conscious of their own sex and are much
less likely to play with somebody of the opposite sex, particularly a child
who is not well known to them.23 It seems plausible then that a girl who is
adopted when over three will be viewed as a stranger by the boy and treated
differently from a girl who is adopted when younger.
Two developmental explanations have been proposed for the age-
dependent effect. The first suggests that all the information that will be
used is gathered within a period when the brain is most easily affected by
such experience.24 This is a classical critical period hypothesis used at one
time for behavioral imprinting in birds but now largely discarded. It sup-
poses that the adult can remember the faces of its siblings and generalize
from their childlike characteristics to their adult form. As far as I know,
this possibility has never been tested. I don’t find it especially plausible, but
in its defense, it should be remembered that algorithms have been devised
for aging pictures of children so that those who have been kidnapped early
in life might be recognized many years later. If computers can do it, then
perhaps humans can too.
I prefer a rather different hypothesis, which is that while the process of
learning starts most readily at a relatively early stage in development, the
representations of familiar faces are updated by continuing close contact.25
A lot hinges on the type of relationship the couple have when they are
young. If they play together and, as a result, see a lot of each other, the in-
difference is likely to be greater. By the time they are three, children are
highly conscious of their gender and are much less likely to play with a
member of the opposite sex, particularly a strange member.26 It seems plau-
sible that a girl adopted when over three will be seen as a stranger by the
boy and treated very differently from girls who are adopted when younger.
The idea that familiarity of a certain kind does reduce sexual attractive-
ness may be applied rewardingly to explain one striking feature of divorce
statistics. For instance, in British women who married before the age of
twenty, the proportion of marriages that ended in divorce has been ap-
proximately double that of the marriages of women who married between
twenty and twenty-four.27 The difference is found at any time between four
and twenty-five years after marriage. Many factors, such as differences be-
tween social classes in attitudes toward marriage, could explain or con-
tribute to explaining the difference. However, early marriages may involve
a great deal of intimacy but relatively little sexual satisfaction. Indeed, peo-
ple often report that their early sex lives were relatively unrewarding. If the
effects of habituation are not powerfully offset by rewarding sexual expe-
 Inbreeding Avoidance and Incest Taboos 33

rience, the partner may lose his or her attractiveness and become the equiv-
alent of a sibling.

Evolution and Function of Mating Preferences

The presumption made by biologists is that inbreeding avoidance

evolved because those individuals that did it were more likely to have greater
reproductive success than those who did not. Since mate choice is affected by
early experience in a great many birds and mammals, with a preference for
types that are familiar from early life, it would not be a big step to superim-
pose on such a mechanism a reduced preference for those individuals that
are very familiar. Two well-known learning processes, behavioral imprinting
and long-term habituation, are able to generate a preference for individuals
who are a bit different but not too different from those individuals who are
familiar from early life.28 If, as the evidence strongly suggests, inbreeding and
excessive outbreeding carry biological costs in the form of reduced repro-
ductive success, then the activation of both processes in the development of
sexual preferences would have been favored. It does not matter for the evo-
lutionary argument whether behavioral imprinting came before, after, or at
the same time as the habituation of sexual preferences. Just how the early ex-
perience is mediated through the rest of childhood to affect adult sexual
preferences remains unresolved. But uncertainty about the developmental ar-
gument does not detract from the evolutionary hypothesis that it was more
beneficial to base sexual inhibitions on early experience rather than later ex-
perience. Those individuals who set the standards determining with whom
they should not mate when they were likely to be surrounded by family were
fittest. They were more likely to obtain biological advantage than those who
started the process later.
What about incest taboos? Differences between cultures in the close rela-
tives (or presumed close relatives) that are prohibited as targets of sexual in-
terest are not genetically inherited. Many authors have suggested that indi-
viduals may derive reproductive success from the taboos.29 However, those
individuals who impose the prohibitions do not derive immediate personal
benefits from their behavior. Others derive those direct fitness benefits. Social
benefits may be derived because the group does not have to pay the costs of
caring for individuals who in various ways are less fit. But note here that an
attempt to mount a purely eugenic argument would be confused because the
maladaptive genes expressed when inbreeding is common are not removed
from the population by preventing inbreeding. Indeed, inbreeding is the best
way of getting rid of those genes in the long run. The social benefits of incest
taboos may therefore be seen as equivalent to those modern laws that re-
quire the wearing of seat belts in cars.
34 bateson

Whether people are aware of the effects of inbreeding is another issue.

William Durham has presented persuasive evidence that in many cultures
people are aware.30 He also documents cases where they are not, and we
are left with the possibility that either they were aware in the past or incest
taboos were driven by other pressures. Awareness of the ill effects of in-
breeding would be best translated into the conviction that the aware indi-
vidual should not have children with his or her sibling. Nothing more is
required of Darwinian evolution. The awareness does not immediately trans-
late into a conviction that others should be stopped from having children
with their siblings. Or if it does, it is driven by a different utility that in-
volves group selection.
Differences of outcome raise problems for an argument developed by
E. O. Wilson. He wrote,
By translating the Westermarck effect into incest taboos, humans appear to pass
from pure instinct to pure rational choice. . . . I suggest that rational choice is the
casting about among alternative mental scenarios to hit upon the ones which, in a
given context, satisfy the strongest epigenetic rules. It is these rules and this hierar-
chy of their relative strengths by which human beings have successfully survived
and reproduced for hundreds of millennia. The incest avoidance case may illustrate
the manner in which the coevolution of genes and culture has woven not just part
but all of the rich fabric of human social behavior.31

Implicit in this argument is that the incest taboo is serving the same func-
tion for the individual as inbreeding avoidance. The same point arises in a
formal genes-culture coevolutionary model developed by Aoki and Feld-
man.32 Further, the model assumes random mating by those who don’t
have the postulated “avoid sibling” behavior pattern. Since such random
mating does not occur, the assumption renders the model questionable.
In summary, then, I suggest that it is unlikely that inbreeding avoidance
and incest taboos evolved by similar mechanisms or even have a common
utility in modern life. I fully accept the argument in favor of having both
belt and braces (see Chapter 6). Redundant mechanisms are well known in
biology, those used in navigation by birds being a famous example. Even
so, incest taboos need not necessarily serve the same function as the inhibi-
tions derived from early experience. If that much is accepted, what other
mechanism for the cultural evolution of incest taboos should be enter-
tained? Like Wolf, I think that a strong case can be made for the hypothesis
advanced by Edward Westermarck.33
Westermarck suggested that humans have an inclination to prevent
other people from behaving in ways they would not themselves behave. On
this view, left-handers were in the past forced to adopt the habits of right-
handers because the right-handers found left-handers disturbing. In the
same way, those who were known to have had sexual intercourse with
 Inbreeding Avoidance and Incest Taboos 35

close kin were discriminated against. People who had grown up with kin of
the opposite sex were generally not attracted to those individuals and dis-
approved when they discovered others who were. It had nothing to do with
society not wanting to look after the half-witted children of inbreeding,
since in many cases they had no idea that inbreeding was the cause. Rather,
the disapproval was about suppressing abnormal behavior, which is poten-
tially disruptive in small societies.
Such conformity looks harsh to modern eyes, even though we have
plenty of examples of it in contemporary life. However, when so much de-
pended on unity of action in the environment in which humans evolved,
wayward behavior could have destructive consequences for everybody. It is
not difficult to see why conformity should have become a powerful trait in
human social behavior. Once in place, the desire for conformity, on the one
hand, and the reluctance to inbreed, on the other, would have combined to
generate social disapproval of inbreeding. The emergence of incest taboos
would take on different forms, depending on which sorts of people, nonkin
as well as kin, were likely to be familiar from early life.
If these ideas are correct, human incest taboos did not arise historically
from deliberate intention to avoid the biological costs of inbreeding. Rather,
in the course of biological evolution, two separate mechanisms appeared.
One was a developmental process concerned with striking an optimal bal-
ance between inbreeding and outbreeding when choosing a mate. The other
was concerned with social conformity. When these two propensities were
put together, the result was social disapproval of those who chose partners
from within their close family. When social disapproval was combined with
language, verbal rules appeared that could be transmitted from generation
to generation, first by word of mouth and later in written form.

Conclusion

I believe that the divide between the biological sciences and the so-
cial sciences has narrowed to the point where real dialogue occurs. At-
tempts at a takeover by sociobiologists and, more recently, evolutionary
psychologists set this process back, all the more so because they persuaded
some social scientists to change their faith and preach with the zeal of the
recently converted.
Nevertheless, I believe that we are getting closer. The biologists have
come to understand that their own thinking is affected by where they have
come from, and the social scientists have started to understand how evi-
dence changes the way they think. Darwinism is no longer the threat it
once seemed. It offers explanations that are quite different in character
from those provided by studies of how an individual develops. The days
36 bateson

of both genetic and environmental determinism are numbered. The center

of intellectual activity is now focused on process and how the individual
develops.

notes
1. P. Bateson, “Optimal outbreeding,” in Mate Choice, ed. P. Bateson (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 257–77.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. P. Bateson, “Preferences for cousins in Japanese quail,” Nature, vol. 295
(1982), pp. 236–37.
7. William Durham, Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991).
8. Bateson, “Optimal outbreeding.”
9. D. I. Perrett, K. A. May, and S. Yoshikawa, “Facial shape and judgments of
female attractiveness,” Nature, vol. 368 (1994), pp. 239–42.
10. J. Shepher, “Mate selection among second generation kibbutz adolescents
and adults: Incest avoidance and negative imprinting,” Archives of Sexual Behav-
ior, vol. 1 (1971), pp. 293–307.
11. Arthur P. Wolf, Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association: A Chinese
Brief for Edward Westermarck (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995).
12. P. Bateson and P. Martin, Design for a Life: How Behavior and Personality
Develop (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
13. W. Paley, Natural Theology (London, Faulder, 1802).
14. Gerald H. Thayer, Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (New
York: MacMillan, 1909).
15. J. S. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, “The spandrels of San Marco and the
Panglossian program: A critique of the adaptationist program,” Proceedings of
the Royal Society of London, B, vol. 250 (1979), pp. 281–88.
16. Bateson and Martin, Design for a Life.
17. Ibid.
18. J. Shields, Monozygotic Twins Brought Up Apart and Brought Up
Together (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).
19. Konrad Lorenz, “Der Kumpan in der Umwelt des Vogels,” Journal für
Ornithologie, vol. 83 (1935), pp. 137–213, 289–413.
20. Bateson, “Optimal outbreeding.”
21. Shepher, “Mate selection.”
22. Wolf, Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association.
23. Eleanor E. Maccoby, “Gender and gender relationships,” American
Psychologist, vol. 24 (1990), pp. 523–520.
24. Wolf, Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association.
 Inbreeding Avoidance and Incest Taboos 37

25. P. Bateson, “Rules for changing the rules,” in Evolution from Molecules
to Men, ed. D. S. Bendall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
pp. 483–507.
26. Maccoby, “Gender and gender relationships.”
27. Bateson, “Rules for changing the rules.”
28. Bateson, “Optimal outbreeding.”
29. Durham, Coevolution.
30. Ibid.
31. E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf,
1998).
32. K. Aoki and M. W. Feldman, “A gene-culture coevolutionary model for
brother-sister mating,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA,
vol. 94, no. 13 (1997), pp. 46–50.
33. Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage (London:
Macmillan, 1891).
2 Genetic Aspects of Inbreeding and Incest

Alan H. Bittles

When referring to humans, the term inbreeding is used to describe

unions between couples known to share at least one common ancestor.
While now rare in Western societies, marriages between close biological
kin are preferential in many parts of the world, including north and sub-
Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and much of the Indian
subcontinent.1 Although the rates and types of inbred union may vary ac-
cording to religious and societal norms, marriages between first cousins are
especially common; for example, in Pakistan they currently account for ap-
proximately 50 percent of all marital unions.2
An incestuous relationship is a union between biological relatives that is
genetically closer than permissible under prevailing civil legislation. Most
commonly, incest is defined as sexual intercourse between persons defined
as first-degree relatives, that is, father-daughter, mother-son, or brother-
sister. However, in some countries, such as Scotland, the definition includes
half-sib and uncle-niece unions, where the partners have 25 percent of
shared genes.3
In all forms of consanguineous union the partners share genes inherited
from one or more common ancestors; for example, in first-cousin mar-
riages the spouses are predicted to have 12.5 percent of their genes in com-
mon. This means that on average their progeny will be homozygous at 6.25
percent of gene loci; that is, they will have inherited identical gene copies
from each parent at these sites in their genome. As shown in Table 2.1, this
is conventionally expressed as the coefficient of inbreeding (F), which for
first-cousin offspring is 0.0625, whereas in matings between first-degree
relatives the couple has 50 percent of their genes in common, with an
equivalent F value in their progeny of 0.25. Irrespective of the level of in-
breeding, if the same mutant gene is inherited from both parents, the indi-
vidual will express the disorder, prenatally, at birth, or later in life, depend-
 Genetic Aspects of Inbreeding and Incest 39

table 2.1
Major Types of Consanguineous Relationship
Fraction Coefficient of
Genetic of Genes Inbreeding (F)
Family Relationship Relationship in Common in Progeny

Incestuous First degree 1/2 0.25

Uncle-niece Second degree 1/4 0.125
Double first cousin 1/4 0.125
First cousin Third degree 1/8 0.0625
First cousin once removed Fourth degree 1/16 0.0313
Double second cousin 1/16 0.0313
Second cousin Fifth degree 1/32 0.0156

ing on the nature and site of the mutation, thus contributing to the phe-
nomenon of inbreeding depression.

Attitudes Toward Consanguineous Marriage

Within Different Religions

Many examples of consanguineous unions are cited in the biblical

texts, with Abraham and Sarah identified as half-brother and sister (Genesis
20: 12), and Amran and Jochebed, the parents of Aaron and Moses, related
as nephew and aunt (Exodus 6: 20). At a later date the permitted degrees of
marital relationships between biological kin were extensively defined, with
marriages up to and including uncle-niece (but not aunt-nephew) permitted
(Leviticus 18: 7–18).
In attempting to assess the rationale underpinning these regulations, it is
important to acknowledge that many early societies possessed a quite so-
phisticated knowledge of potentially fatal inherited disorders. For example,
the X-linked recessive mode of inheritance of hemophilia A appears to be
recognized in the Talmud and other Jewish religious texts dating back to
the second to fifth centuries ad. Dispensation for the normally obligatory
male circumcision on the eighth day of life could be granted under two sets
of circumstances:
1. If a woman had given birth to two or three sons who had died
following circumcision, any future male children she might bear would
be excused circumcision even if the pregnancy was with a different
husband.
2. Where the sons of three sisters had died following circumcision,
all male children born to other female siblings would also be excused
circumcision.4
40 bittles

According to the Venerable Bede, an early ruling on consanguinity within

Christianity was given by Pope Gregory I to St. Augustine, the first arch-
bishop of Canterbury, in approximately ad 597.5 Citing Leviticus 18: 6, the
Pope advised that marriages between consanguineous spouses did not result
in children and that sacred law forbade a man to “uncover the nakedness of
his kindred.” For members of the Latin Church, the effect of this ruling was
to prohibit marriage with a biological relative, usually up to and including
third cousins, although because of different methods of calculating the de-
grees of biological relationship there was some confusion as to exactly
which degrees of consanguineous union were permitted or prohibited. This
problem was solved in the canon issued by Pope Alexander II in ad 1076,
which resulted in a shift in the formal method of consanguinity classifica-
tion from the Roman to the Germanic system. For example, third-cousin
marriages, which according to the Roman system were of the eighth degree,
became fourth degree under the Germanic classification.6
The formal proscription of consanguineous unions was confirmed in
1215 by the Fourth Lateran Council and generally remained in force within
the Latin church until 1917, when it was limited to unions between couples
related as first cousins or closer. Dispensation could, however, be granted at
Diocesan level for related couples who wished to marry within the prohib-
ited degrees of consanguinity, albeit with payment of an appropriate bene-
faction to the church.7
Similar strict rules governing consanguineous marriage continue to be
applied by the Christian Orthodox Church. Among the Reformed Protes-
tant denominations, the existing biblical guidelines (Leviticus 18: 7–18)
were generally adopted, although the closest form of approved union usu-
ally has been between first cousins. Somewhat paradoxically, the highest
rates of consanguineous unions historically recorded in Europe appear to
have been in the southern Roman Catholic countries, where consanguinity
was subject to church sanction, rather than the Protestant countries of
northern and northwestern Europe.8
Among other major world religions—Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, and
in smaller religious communities such as the Zoroastrians/ Parsis—attitudes
toward close kin marriage are generally favorable or neutral.9 Cross-cousin
marriages also are permitted in the Chinese Taoist /Confucian tradition,10
and in rural Han communities in the period 1949–67, 0.7 percent to 1.2 per-
cent of marriages were between first cousins.11 While a generally tolerant ap-
proach was adopted toward marriage between biological relatives at the
inception of the People’s Republic of China,12 under the terms of the 1981
Marriage Act unions between first cousins became illegal. In the face of this
prohibition, it must be assumed that their prevalence has since declined, at
least in the majority Han population.
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
 PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the

free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this
work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase
“Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of
the Full Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or
online at www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand,
agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual
property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree
to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease
using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for
obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™
electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms
of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only

be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by
people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.
There are a few things that you can do with most Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying with the
full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There
are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™
electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and
help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the
collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the
individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the
United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright
law in the United States and you are located in the United
States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying,
distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works
based on the work as long as all references to Project
Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will
support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free
access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for
keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the
work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement
by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full
Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without charge
with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside
the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to
the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying,
displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works
based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The
Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright
status of any work in any country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project

Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must
appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project
Gutenberg™ work (any work on which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed,
viewed, copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United

States and most other parts of the world at no cost and
with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it,
give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project
Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United
States, you will have to check the laws of the country
where you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is

derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of
the copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to
anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges.
If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of
paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use
of the work and the Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth
in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is

posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and
distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through
1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder.
Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™
License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright
holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project

Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files
 containing a part of this work or any other work associated with
Project Gutenberg™.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute

this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1
with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the
Project Gutenberg™ License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if
you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project
Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or
other format used in the official version posted on the official
Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must,
at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy,
a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy
upon request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or
other form. Any alternate format must include the full Project
Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™
works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or

providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works provided that:

• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive
from the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
 payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”

• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who

notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt
that s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project
Gutenberg™ License. You must require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg™ works.

• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in
the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90
days of receipt of the work.

• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project

Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different
terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain
permission in writing from the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project Gutenberg™
trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3
below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend

considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on,
transcribe and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright
law in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these
efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium
on which they may be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as,
but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data,
transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual property
infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be
read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except

for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in
paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation, the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
and any other party distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic
work under this agreement, disclaim all liability to you for
damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE
THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT
EXCEPT THOSE PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE
THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY
DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE
TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL,
PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE
NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you

discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you
paid for it by sending a written explanation to the person you
received the work from. If you received the work on a physical
medium, you must return the medium with your written
explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the
defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu
of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.
If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund
in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set

forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’,
WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this
agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this
agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the
maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable
state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of
this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the

Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the
Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any
volunteers associated with the production, promotion and
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless
from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that
arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you
do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project
Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or
deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect
you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission

of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new
computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of
volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

assistance they need are critical to reaching Project
Gutenberg™’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™
collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In
2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was
created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project
Gutenberg™ and future generations. To learn more about the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your
efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the
Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project

Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-
profit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the
laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status
by the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or
federal tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions
to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax
deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and
your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500

West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact
links and up to date contact information can be found at the
Foundation’s website and official page at
www.gutenberg.org/contact
 Section 4. Information about Donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without
widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission
of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works
that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form
accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated
equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly
important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws

regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of
the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform
and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many
fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not
solicit donations in locations where we have not received written
confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine
the status of compliance for any particular state visit
www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states

where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know
of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from
donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot

make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations
received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp
our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current

donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a
number of other ways including checks, online payments and
credit card donations. To donate, please visit:
www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About

Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could
be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose
network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several

printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by
copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus,
we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any
particular paper edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear
about new eBooks.
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com