Creeva’s World 2.0

I’ll start off with the fact that I have no inter­est inbreed­ing so this is not a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion by any means.   This is just a pon­der­ing that stemmed out of an e-mail exchange.   What is inbreed­ing and what truly defines it.

Wikipedia defines inbreed­ing as:
Inbreed­ing is breed­ing between close rel­a­tives, whether plant or ani­mal. If prac­ticed repeat­edly, it often leads to a reduc­tion in genetic diver­sity. A con­comi­tant increase in homozy­gousity of reces­sive traits can, over time, result in inbreed­ing depres­sion. This may result in inbred indi­vid­u­als exhibit­ing reduced health and fit­ness and lower lev­els of fertility.

So we’ve estab­lished that if we agree with wikipedia’s def­i­n­i­tion on inbreed­ing as a reduc­tion in genetic diver­sity, what can we say about com­mu­nal, intel­lec­tual, or soci­etal inbreed­ing?  Is there such a thing?  I think there is, whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing is for you to decide.  Let’s go over some examples.

A boy that is two years old and walks over to a new born baby girl sit­ting in a stroller in front of the neigh­bors house.  He meets her for the first time.   Over the com­ing years they run around naked in the yard together at an age where it is some­what socially accept­able.  They go to dances together.  In all ways they are best friends, brother and sis­ter liv­ing next door to each other brought together by loca­tion and shared expe­ri­ences.  At the age of 18 they marry.

Socially accept­able?  You answer that.

Another boy is 11 years old, his sin­gle father comes back from a busi­ness trip and tells his son that he met a woman and they are get­ting mar­ried in 6 months.  She hap­pens to have a 11 year old daugh­ters.  Seven years later the son and the woman’s daugh­ter marry.  They are step-siblings at the time.

Socially accept­able?  You answer that.

I can’t tell you how you thought and your feel­ings on it, but if we look at the two above sce­nar­ios and define nei­ther of those as inbreed­ing from a genetic stand point but from a rela­tion­ship stand point both may be con­sid­ered inces­tu­ous.  Granted incest laws and inbreed­ing are sep­a­rate on the moral com­pass scale, but truly you can’t have one with­out a vary­ing degree of the other.

Some incest and inbreed­ing are acci­den­tal, take the case in point of the sep­a­rated twins that got mar­ried in Eng­land last year.  While they would have inbred if they would have had chil­dren before find­ing out they were related and on the strictest sense it is incest since they were brother and sis­ter, if we throw moral­ity out the door for a sec­ond is it truly inces­tu­ous?  They had less in com­mon in life expe­ri­ence then either the first two exam­ples I gave.  They are fur­ther apart so they bring more to the table for a child to learn from in a life expe­ri­ence depart­ment.  From a intel­lec­tual or com­mu­nal stand point this wouldn’t be inbreed­ing or incest.   It would be two peo­ple that were in love that had the unlucky chance of com­mon DNA.

Part of what was dis­cussed at the time that was a news story was that peo­ple are attracted to peo­ple that are like them.  So peo­ple with sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences and inter­est are going to be more attracted to each other with the more they are like each other.   Unfor­tu­nately the more your sig­nif­i­cant other is like you the more your off­spring is going to be like you because of the moral traits and beliefs you and your mate edu­cate your off­spring with.     Hence while you may have pre­served genetic diver­sity you have squashed a muta­tion in the sense of the child being more inden­pen­dent and dif­fer­ent then your­selves.   Your child is not likely to be more suc­cess­ful then either you or your mate.  It is likely to fall in the same eco­nomic and soci­etal struc­ture as their forebearers.

Socially accept­able?  Sure is.

Morally right when you look at the big pic­tures?  You answer that.

The rea­son this comes up is all the friends and com­mu­ni­ties that peo­ple have had for years at a time.  Whether it be a church group, a video game guild, an online forum, or a local chess club the close­ness you can evolve with these peo­ple can become close enough that you can’t dif­fer­en­ti­ate between your feel­ing for fam­ily or your feel­ings for the group you belong to.  It is a fam­ily in every sense of the word except for genet­ics.    The longer the group stays together and the more they become like the other peo­ple the more intel­lec­tual and inter­est stag­na­tion can occur.   If you live your life obsessed with some­thing and so does your mate, highly likely your child will be the same way.

I can say that my wife and I shared friends but we were two very dif­fer­ent peo­ple.  We knew each other for a few months, and have grown more alike in the decade we’ve been together, but deep down from shared expe­ri­ences we are very dif­fer­ent peo­ple.   How­ever what if we would have met at 11 years old and mar­ried 7 years later?  What if we had been part of a video game group that we had let our guard down and accepted as fam­ily.  What about truly pla­tonic friends that pick up romance after 30 years of friend­ship?  At what point would there be a moral dif­fer­ence between com­mu­nal inbreed­ing  ver­sus genetic?  Is there ever?

If there is no such thing as com­mu­nal or intel­lec­tual inbreed­ing, then will iden­ti­cal twins be able to legally marry and be accepted by soci­ety once we can do genetic manip­u­la­tion?  At the point we can do true genetic mod­i­fi­ca­tion we can insure that no inbreed­ing at the genetic level will occur.  Sure it still will be con­sid­ered incest, but what would the health rea­son or soci­etal rea­son truly be to keep the peo­ple apart?  I’m sure even­tu­ally mankind will have to grap­ple and come up with the moral answer code going for­ward.  Not yet but someday.

This is not a piece to make you decide some­thing one way or another.  It is more a piece to help you decide in the global com­mu­ni­ca­tion world we live in that there will things that we need to decide on what is fam­ily.   Is fam­ily only truly a genetic trait?  Is it a lump of love and shared expe­ri­ences?  If so at which point will be the truly defin­ing line between where incest and inbreed­ing live and where soci­eties eccept­able norms lie.

Muta­tion exists through dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion, muta­tion leads to evo­lu­tion.   What needs to be done to insure evo­lu­tion at all lev­els?  You answer that.