angelita wrote:

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OMG!!!

Chale girl, my midget lover foro friend..... i don't agree with you!!! Doooo you even know what you just said!! How can you say that we can't blame them!! IF they knew about eachother and i don't care if they didn't grow up together......... they should have NOT entered into a relationship! That's just nasty!! Oh man, it's like me and my bro......oh gawd, nevermind, that's to nasty to think about!!!!!

Oh girly,

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 Im not saying that what they are doing is right, Im just saying that under the circumstances, I can see both sides of the coin.  Obviously loving your brother/sister in that way is incredibly disgusting, and no one in their right mind would do it... but what Im saying, is that they didnt know each other.

I have a friend that grew up apart from his half sister, then they met here in Toronto when they were in their 20's.  They are both thankful that they met with the knowledge that they are related, b/c imagine if they would have met at a club or whatever? They wouldnt have known, no one wouldve been able to blame them.

Now, if you willingly enter into a sexual relationship with full knowledge that that person is your family, then thats nasty and wrong.

@ Guada - I love your Avatar

Ok, MJ did it for me.

So basically, JUST SAY NO TO INCEST!

Inbreeding leads to an increase in homozygosity, that is, the same allele at the same locus on both members of a chromosome pair. This occurs because close relatives are much more likely to share the same alleles than unrelated individuals. This is especially important for recessive alleles that happen to be deleterious, which are harmless and inactive in a heterozygous pairing, but when homozygous can cause serious developmental defects. Such offspring have a much higher chance of death before reaching the age of reproduction, leading to what biologists call inbreeding depression, a measurable decrease in fitness due to inbreeding among populations with deleterious recessives. Recessive genes which can contain various genetic problems have a tendency of showing up more often if joined by someone who has the same gene. If a son who has hemophilia has sexual intercourse with his sister who may have the same gene for hemophilia, and they have a child, the odds are 25% that the child will have hemophilia as well.

Most anthropologists have argued that there can be no biological basis for the incest taboo since, in many societies, the taboo is applied to people who are as closely related to an individual as others to whom the taboo does not apply.

Moreover, Leavitt (1990) has argued that inbreeding in small populations can have long-term positive effects: "small inbreeding populations, while initially increasing their chances for harmful homozygotic recessive pairings on a locus, will quickly eliminate such genes from their breeding pools, thus reducing their genetic loads" (Leavitt 1990, p.974)

Other specialists have argued that the proposed positive long-term effects of inbreeding are almost always unrealized because the short-term fitness depression is enough for selection to discourage inbreeding. Such a scenario has only occurred under extremely unusual circumstances, either in major population bottlenecks, or forced artificial selection by animal husbandry. In order for such a "purification" to work, the offspring of close mate pairings must only be homozygous dominant (free of bad genes) and recessive (will die before reproducing). If there are heterozygous offspring, they will be able to transmit the defective genes without themselves feeling any effects. What's more, this model does not account for multiple deleterious recessives (most people have more than one), or multi-locus gene linkages. The introduction of mutations negates the weeding out of bad genes, and evidence exists that homozygous individuals are often more at risk to pathogenic predation. Because of these complications, it is extremely difficult to overcome the initial "hump" of fitness penalties incurred by inbreeding. (see Moore 1992, Uhlmann 1992)

Therefore, it is not surprising that inbreeding is uncommon in nature, and most sexually reproducing species have mechanisms built in by natural selection to avoid mating with close kin. Pusey & Worf (1996) and Penn & Potts (1999) both have found evidence that some species possess evolved psychological aversions to inbreeding, via kin-recognition heuristics.

Given such overwhelming evidence of inbreeding depression as being an important force in sexual reproduction, evolutionary psychologists have argued that humans should possess similar psychological heuristics against incest. The Westermarck effect is one strong piece of evidence in favor of this, indicating that children who are raised together in the same family find each other sexually uninteresting, even when there is strong social pressure for them to mate. In what is now a key study of the Westermarck's hypothesis, the anthropologist Melford E. Spiro demonstrated that inbreeding aversion between siblings is predicatably linked to co-residency. In a cohort study of children raised as communal, that is to say, fictive, siblings in the Kiryat Yedidim kibbutz in the 1950s, Spiro found practically no intermarriage between his subjects as adults, despite positive pressure from parents and community. The social experience of having grown up as brothers and sisters created an incest aversion, even though genetically speaking the children were not related.

Further studies have backed up the hypothesis that some psychological mechanisms are in play that "turn off" children who grow up together. Spiro's study is corroborated by Fox (1962), who found similar results in Israeli kibbutzum. Likewise, Wolf and Huang (1980) report similar aversions in Taiwanese "child" marriages, where the future wife was brought into the family and raised together with her fiancee. Such marriages were notoriously difficult to consummate, and for unknown reasons actually led to decreased fertility in the women. Lieberman et. al (2003) found that childhood co-residency with an opposite-sex individual strongly predicts moral sentiments regarding third-party sibling incest, further supporting the Westermark hypothesis.

While the exact nature of kin-recognition psychology is still waiting to be defined, and to what degree it can be overcome by cultural forces is as yet poorly understood, an overwhelming body of research now shows that evolutionary biology and evolved human psychology plays a central role in human aversion to incest.

BLAH BLAH BLAH    Wikipedia of course!! 





ANYWAY, I remember a long time ago going to New Jersey and my mom introduced me to this boy to play with.  I thought he was super cute until my mom said, "That's your second cousin!!!" 

So I don't know how it wasn't repulsive to this brother and sister team!!!!  I didn't grow up with my second cousin and I hadn't met him until I was about 11!!!!!

X4v13r wrote:

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Marky Mark wrote:

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Why are there complications when brother and sister or close blood relatives have children? What happens genetically?

I guess I should just ask Lahtina.

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we know u really wanted to say "I guess I should just look at Lahtina"

just joking

~X

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oooohh.. you're so lucky she's in class right now! 

 

Marky Mark wrote:

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Why are there complications when brother and sister or close blood relatives have children? What happens genetically?

I guess I should just ask Lahtina.

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we know u really wanted to say "I guess I should just look at Lahtina"

just joking

~X

go_fish wrote:

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Guadalupana wrote:

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6424937.stm



That is just GROSS!!!!


It should be a crime to have children with your sibling.
But they also brought up other points.

If it's a crime for them to have children, should it not also be a crime for already disabled people to conceive as well?

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My God, aren't you creative. What would ya do, neuter them?

 

No, Guada, not here in Canada.

 

Maybe because of that little thing called "Charter of Rights"?

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I guess, but i wasn't asking the question, they were (the couple practicing incest), i merely re-typed it to see other people's point of view.

My answer to it would be, if same sex people can get married and adopt a child, then people with disabilities can have children too if they so desire.

 

Jaime Cruz wrote:

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It's ok. We won't judge you for being with your cousin

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Thanks mang, my cousin/lover/babydaddy thank you

EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW grossness to the maximus!


Although I think this is superkalafajalisticexbialadochiously nasty, I do think that it is not ENTIRELY their fault.  They did not grow up together and did not have that bond that binds a brother and sister together, they also did not know about one another until late into their lives.  I dont agree with incest, but you cant really blame this couple 100%, they didnt know.

What I can blame them for though, is having children, even after knowing of all the complications that come with children of an incestuous union. 

I know someone who married his first cousin.

They don't have kids because they're afraid of health problems.