Who gave these rules?

Post Reply New Topic

Yeah, I don't think so. Stuff like that seems very obvious in our time, but that's because most of us have had the leisure to spend a huge part of our formative years in an institution almost totally devoted to our education. School is a major investment for our society, albeit once that pays good dividends. But, I really doubt that they could afford it back then. To busy trying not to die.

They also didn't have the, shoot don't know how to say this, thought constructs? Anyways, stuff like the arabic number system, standardized measuring units, and the scientific method. Those technologies are easy to forget, since they're ways of thinking about stuff, and don't require anything but your brain to work. But they are huge human accomplishments, and not the kind of thing some whiz kid could come up with on his own.

When you don't have some of these science memes, progress is pretty much a process of trial and error. Particularly when there is no way to stop selection bias and the placebo effect from popping up and messing up any observations.

He didn't "explain genes"; he hypothesised their existence based on behaviour/results ( of cross-breeding plants etc) perfectly visible to the naked eye. And I expect a clever mind looking at the results of certain breeding procedures, and their consequences, in goats, whose importance to many people would have helped concentrate some people's minds on the subject, could have come up with the idea that breeding too close or in certain directions would produce weaker strains.

Without having to know anything about genes, germs, or microscopes.

Because 'god' said it was bad. People have done far stranger things for superstitious reasons - rabbit's feet, ritual sacrafice, rain dances. None of those appear to have any measurable effect, but people still do them. You got to think in evolutionary terms - people randomly think up stuff and apply it. The ideas, or 'memes', that are successful either spread to other minds or cause the group who believes them to become more successful. Just like genetic evolution, no real guiding force is needed for this process to happen.

Not really, ideas of descent do not seem that uncommon. I mean, I think Plato's republic suggests an early form of eugenics. He did not know about genetic codes, but still knew enough to recognize that breeding was important. Not only that, but I think anthropologists claim that anti-inbreeding rules are relatively common. We also have had experience breeding animals from an early stage in our history given dogs and other domestic animals.

Incest taboos are either universal or very nearly universal.

Is that right, in all societies?

In which case is that because it's very easy to work out by observation of other animals once animal husbandry begins? ...

... and/or because it is some instinctive revulsion? If it is because of instinctive revulsion then I suppose that may be something that was selected for, ( weaker incest-produced strains died off more easily), however in that case it would suggest that the mosaical laws were the response to a slackening of this instinctive revulsion for some reason.

I wonder whether such a slackening was because humans were changing the environment/circumstances such that weaknesses from incest were less of a disadvantage, or because sedentary life, or patriachal rule, ( after early matriachal ones were overthrown), with children being identified according to their father, etc, altered the balance of contact between children and adults, and between men and "nearby" women in tribal groups ?

Or because humans were increasingly out of touch with their instinctive/genetically induced behaviours , perhaps because of highly unnatural diets including carbohydrates not much consumed until the grain/cereal mutations which led in the neolithic era, or use of drugs, or dairy products.

Either way the consequences and pattern of "inbreeding producing weakness" would have been very obvious, and provoked alarm in leaders for the strength of their "stock" ( the tribe), hence the laws.

Just read that following the institution of patriachal descendance incest taboos may have been an important part of maintaining family structure and the class division between children and adults.

And also just realised that Iamnotaparakeet may really have been asking whether those rules came from god or moses, whereas I thought he had just missed out an option in the poll for some clever/observant person, or genes plus society. sorry.

And I find the question impossible to answer because I am not sure Moses ever existed, or if he did, was even half of the things he is described in the OT as being and doing.

It seems that there is no historical evidence that Moses actually existed and that if he was actually the one who wrote the Torah other than tradition.

Incest is not that bad

You don't actually need to know anything about science to develop an incest taboo, just as you don't need to know general relativity or Newtonian physics to figure jumping off a cliff is a bad idea. Any society in which incest was the norm would be so full of genetic problems that it would undermine its chances of survival. Selection would therefore ensure that an incest taboo of some sort would arise (it might be allowed for a small minority, like the pharaohs, or under certain circumstances, but never the norm) even if nobody knew why it was a good idea. Some animals also have some form of incest taboo - and I doubt very much they know about genetics.

That's right. There are some societies where the taboo even extends against marriage with someone who has a similar name. In others, it doesn't so much extend past the nuclear family, but there's always some form of it (the exceptions are usually for a certain small group of people within the society, e.g. some that are considered to have a "royal" bloodline that must be kept pure).

The Israeli kibbutzim are one of the classical pieces of evidence that there's an innate component to the incest taboo, but that it extends primarily to people you grew up around. The kibbutzim were communes where several families lived together, and despite the absence of a taboo on intra-kibbutz dating, kids who were raised together never paired up.

It's not unlikely that the explicit incest taboos in every society have some relation to this innate revulsion.


The innate revulsion doesn't seem to extend to people you weren't raised with from an early age.

Many Middle-eastern people are prone to cousin-marrying in part because it keeps money and property in the extended family, and in part because of parental arrangements combined with tradition, and general suspicion of people on the outside of their group. This has led to large clans of extended relatives who are inbred to an extent, but usually have enough genetic diversity to avoid any major problems (not always, there are cases like Bedouin clans having a high proportion of congenitally deaf people, for example).

Nobody gave them, they were tribal social rules that developed slowly and then became attached to South-Canaanite/Proto-Hebrew mythology. the Hebrews' moral code is just another tribalistic social code like all such codes they have no single origin or source.

Another thing I think is interesting is that siblings who were not raised together may have a higher than normal chance of getting together. Genes that predispose someone to finding a certain trait attractive are likely to be clustered together to some extent with genes that express that trait.

I don't know whether the chances are actually substantially higher. It would be difficult, but not impossible to determine empirically, but any otherwise good method would likely be unethical. Maybe one way would be a survey of half-siblings who met through sperm donor registries. But the explicit societal taboo would probably be a significant confounding factor. Hmmm...

Well, I guess the real question to start with is: Is there evidence that the Egyptians knew of these things?
I'm guessing no, since no one has brought any up in this debate.

Last edited by Ragtime on 16 May 2008, 3:18 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I'll give that a third.

Who cares where this stupid, bronze age, uneducated, nomadic mythology comes from.

Personally, I think that looking down upon our ancient ancestors with haughy elitism is a fool's choice.

Their best minds were just as brilliant as our best minds are today,
even though they lacked the technology of the present age.

They were not "stupid", or "uneducated".