Comments on The Ultimate Bond

Sorry, but seeing as how this recent German incest case concerns siblings who did not meet until well into adulthood, it's hard to see how the Hegel rumination applies here. Unless one really does think the brother-sister bond is "a supernatural aura" which magically comes with being biologically related rather than an effect of mutual experiences among folks who grew up together. Get out of here with this human law vs divine law business: what is the divine law on incest again? Pro or con? Let's all be sure to ask God when next we meet Him.

Ick. Ick. Ick.

hmmm...i'm pretty open-minded and open to people living their own lives in freedom and peace, but i'm not sure i can support direct blood brother and sister from having kids. I thought that does nasty things to the dna that can have serious mental and physical outcomes for the baby. yes, all kids are precious, but should we try to conciously try to bring developmentally disabled kids into the world? that helps no one...plus doing it with your brother/sister is just kind of.....*shudder*

Apparently, it's actually not that uncommon to be attracted to a sibling that one was separated from early on. There's a psychological phenomenon called the Westermarck effect that is said to be the source of personal aversion to sex with your siblings, and it has to do with living in close contact to them for a prolonged period in your youth. But if you don't have that period of negative imprinting - well, your sister might very well look hot to you.

So long as they're not planning on having kids, I see no problem with this. They're consenting adults, there's love (twue wuv!) so god speed to them.

Admittedly, I'm kind of squicked by the notion but, eh, none of my business otherwise.

contrary to popular belief, any kids born to this couple are unlikely to be a problem. genetic problems start to occur as a result of multi-generational incest, like you see in remote regions and royal families. one generation of incest is a non-issue unless BOTH of these two lovebirds by some very slim chance happen to carry a genetic anamoly inherited from thier parents.

Please tell me the huge bloody red thing sticking out of the back of his head with a mouse on it is not a "genetic anomaly".

Why has only he been to jail?

6) The currently popular evolutionary explanations for the incest taboo see the main benefit as providing some defense against parasitism by distancing the childs genetics enough from the parents that the parasites transmitted to the child (millions and millions of them) don't have a head start.

First of all: gross.

Second of all: "Giest" is not a word. It's "Geist" and the closest translation is "spirit" - though Hegel used it not in a supernatural sense, but in the sense of "mind".

It seems that whenever we think of other people expressing physical intimacy we tend to think it is "icky" unless it involves airbrushed pornstars in our own favorite flavor.

As Jessie Helms said about a gay pride parade: "these are disgusting people."

The central conflict in Wagner's Ring is the love between a brother and sister who are unaware of their blood relation to each other. The gods are conflicted over what to do, some of the gods are convinced that they will lose their own legitimacy if they bless this union.

The parallels between the laws govering incest and the laws governing gay unions cannot be ignored.

If you separate the child molestation aspect sex within a biological family from the matter of incest between consenting adults, then I see no reason why the state should proclaim some unions to be sacred and others to be profane.

The state should limit itself to the adjudication of contracts between consenting adults, and leave the matter of blessing or damning what other people do in bed to the churches.

Chris B, they've already had four kids. If you read the article, it states that the children of siblings have a 50% chance of birth defects, and it's absolutely true in the case of this couple. Two of their four children have serious birth defects.

If they were willing to submit to sterilization procedures, it would still be icky as all hell, but I'd have less of a problem with it.

10) *spirit* works better for me too - after all one can refer to the *spirit of an age* or *team spirit* as well as to the more mind-like concept, so it also covers whatever CM's trying to get at with his *gist* nonsense. Maybe Charles meant *grist* - the phenomenology of that which is to be ground up for the profit or advantage of another.

Serves me right for commenting before reading. In that case, yeah, seriously messed up situation. Retroactive sterilization should be called upon.

This is called "Genetic sexual attraction," or GSA. I just watched a special on Dateline or one of those "investigative" shows about it. It's frickin' sick...BUT, whenever I hear about these types of stories, or stories about people who have gender identity issues, etc, it just makes me feel sooooooooooo lucky that the problems I have do not mirror anything like this!

first of all: the closest translation of "Geist" - as in "Phänomenologie des Geistes" would be "mind". it literally means "spirit" (hence the most common translation "Phenomenology of the spirit") but the word doesn't imply anything divine or supernatural - in general use the word means the opposite of body: mind. according to leo, the best translation in english is "nous" - a word i have never heard of.

secondly - this couple had four children already, all of them healthy in every respect. three were taken from them and placed in foster care.

maybe because i don't actually have a sister - i don't think anything is wrong with those two. and i certainly don't see why they should be put in prison because of a general feeling of "ick" - there certainly are many many people whose children face worse genetic risks, and no one is keeping them from procreating. unless you want to regulate it for everyone, you can't really randomly impose it on them. many people out there have the same vague feeling of discomfort and sense of it being unnatural with homosexuals - and we just tell them to get over it already. why doesn't this apply here?

geez, i suppose i spent too much time writing and not enough time reading. a tv report here actually called all four children "healthy" in passing. i still don't see why they should be punished because they have handicapped children - just because they could have known in advance, much like many other risk groups?

The article didn't say that two of their four children had genetic defects. It said that one had epilepsy (sometimes but not usually genetic) and was premature; the other has "special needs" but doesn't say what they are. Most retardation, for instance, is not genetic. He's had a vasectomy, so future problems are moot.

What it DID say is that she's only 22, which is awfully young to have four kids, and they've been living together for SIX YEARS, which puts her at 16. They met and fell in love when she was fifteen.

Also, he's an "unemployed locksmith" and ex-con, which means he's permanently unemployable.

Hey, what about people of different races marrying and producing offspring? Something must be done.

For about the last 25 years infertile couples and lesbians have been getting inseminated at hospitals from a very small DNA pool (including my own fine product).

It seems entirely possible that half-brothers and half-sisters are meeting on the streets and in the bars even now.

Not to mention all the kids in small towns who don't know who their dads are.

Get over it. Inbreeding happens all the time, and always has.

Charles, it's now well understood by academics that Hegel only said this to convince his sister to return a prized fountain pen she had borrowed from him.

Hegel was clearly transformed by the pen incident, as he later wrote "A brother's affection for his sister is best expressed through frequent and vigorous KaupfKnucklen". (The closest word we have in English to "KaupfKnucklen" is "nugie".)

@6
I heard a similar explanation on some NOVA show recently. It was shocking but the scientists seemed pretty legit. I forgot the details though, thanks.

RainMonkey, are you in love with your sibling? Equating homosexuality with incest is just weird and puzzling. Sure, perhaps the genetic mutations that inbreeding causes will eventually bring about the next evolutionary (or devolutionary) step, but people have enough problems right now without having to worry about them with severe disabilities.

On a genetic studies level, biological siblings, even if they don't know they are related (e.g. adopted), tend to think of sex with their siblings as "icky".

So don't say it's all "societal morals".

I'll just go out on a limb here and speculate: many of the surviving legal conventions regarding who can have sex with whom are based on power relationships as much as anything else. So, for example, statutory rape assumes that minors can't provide informed consent to adults because the power relationship between them will always skew things.

Now, obviously that opens the door for all kinds of fucked up judgments about power (race and skin privilege, anyone? muscle density and size differences between men and women?). But the fact is that each society has to make those judgments. Adults having sex with children or teens? No, the power differential is always there and meaningful. Anglos having sex with people of color? Fine; the power differential is not a given and consenting adults can make informed decisions.

Families are full of appallingly asymmetrical relationships. So I imagine the German incest laws are in place (that is to say they survive, regardless of why they were created) to address those concerns.

Whatever the particulars of this case, I think the principle stands.

23 - "On a genetic studies level, biological siblings, even if they don't know they are related (e.g. adopted), tend to think of sex with their siblings as "icky"."

Not true. Example:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,956454,00.html

"The unexpectedly high number of reported cases of men and women struggling with sudden and terrifying emotions after a reunion has surprised and perplexed most post-adoption agencies. So far, because of the taboos surrounding GSA and its variable and complex nature, the frequency of these cases is almost impossible to quantify, although some agencies estimate that elements of GSA occur in 50% of reunions."

There is, in fact, evidence that sexual repulsion to others comes from prolonged exposure to them at an early age. The Israeli kibbutz system was an example of this - children who were raised together from birth showed little sexual interest in each other later on, even when they weren't blood related.

Anyone else think sis looks like Cynthia Nixon?

Sorry, trying to get my mind off incest

#22, I think the point was that artificial insemination procedures draw from a small genetic pool, and often many, many women are fertilized with sperm from one man (there was a NYT article not long ago talking about individuals as hot biological commodities), thus increasing the number of kids put out there who might meet up, find each other hot, and not know they're in fact, by blood, half-siblings.

Wait. What happens if one of those kids unknowingly meets up with their DAD and finds the old man hot? Oh GOD!

To fnarf's point (@ 18): I have less of a problem with brothers and sisters coupling up and having kids than I do with any two people who can't afford having kids deciding to have four of them anyway.

On that level, if a new call to rally around bro-sis rights is in the offing, these two make a poor test case. Their problems run deeper than just being siblings.

Pretentious Hegel references asside, what's the problem? Unless you're comfortable with the state doing genetic screening on all potential parents to prevent them if they're both carriers of any known recessive disorder, this is pure, hypocritical prudery. This couple made some questionable choices, to risk having kids, but I'm unconvinced as to that being anyone else's business.

If it was an Adam and Eve situation or you were the last survivors on the planet in some sci- fi scenario would you still bang your sister to continue the human race or would that be against the law of the universe.
It would be wierd, but I bet most of us would summon up the courage to make a pass if we got horny. And if you were snowbound and freezing would you get naked with your sis to keep your bodies warm, and ick ick ick! I'm going to go shoot myself now.

Oh and want an even sadder worstcase scenario- see that korean movie 'OLDMAN'.

Is it wrong that I'm more annoyed with a 22 year old having four kids than with the idea of siblings fucking?

So that dude is the new James Bond? Damn, I thought Daniel Craig was the ultimate Bond.

#30 - I've never understood this "last humans on earth" scenario. Why the fuck do I care if humans continue? I'll be dead, and with no one else around, life is boring.

"If you read the article, it states that the children of siblings have a 50% chance of birth defects"

The author of the article is completely full of it with that assertion. The reality is that siblings have a single digit chance of birth defects. Less than two percent if I recall correctly. It's a widely held, but completely inaccurate, belief that there are huge rates of defects in the children of blood relatives. Recent research, including some done at the UW, has shown that couplings of even first cousins don't produce a statistically significant increase in the rate of defects. Siblings do produce a higher than normal rate, but only just.

When you have small genetic pools then when something strange gets into the pool it just keeps showing up. Like hemophelia in the european monarchies, or the six finger thing in the mennonites or whoever.

The evolutionary benefit of sexual, as opposed to asexual, reproduction is greater genetic variability. So it makes evolutionary sense that children would imprint a sexual aversion to their familiar playmates, and also that people would tend to be squicked by incest.

I have no dog in this fight, but I do take a libertarian view of marrage, and don't think anyone should be able to tell other adults that they are too icky to be allowed to go behind a closed door together.

Your apparent obsession to relate everything to Hegel or Heidegger is embarrassing, and is often the opportunity for a joke.

OK, I am creeped out by this couple, but the 50% risk thing is patent bullshit. In a couple where both are known to carry a dangerous recessive (for Tay Sachs, for example, or cystic fibrosis), any given child has only a 25% chance of inheriting the scary bad disease, whatever it is. And there are plenty of families where there's no scary recessive genetic trait lurking in the shadows.