what is it like to have a half sibling
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Mr. James Russell of Cashiers, North Carolina, recently justified meat-eating in the pages of Asheville Citizen-Times by arguing that humans are biologically classified as carnivores. His reasoning was simple. The consumption of creature flesh is morally right because it is natural.
Unfortunately, Mr. Russell got his facts wrong. Zoologists place humans in the order Primate (family unit Hominidea), not in the order Carnivora. Furthermore, like rats, humans are omnivores, non carnivores. Simply more than troubling is Mr. Russell's belief that humans should look to nature for moral guidance. He justifies meat-eating in humans on the grounds that other animals consume one another. I doubtable, however, that he does non approve of gang rape, infidelity, cannibalism, and the consumption of feces, all of which are practiced in nature by our four-legged brethren. While moral codes be in other species, humans have the capacity—and, indeed, the responsibleness—to operate on a higher ethical plane.
The (Nearly) Universal Taboo
On matters of morality, I generally concur with Katherine Hepburn who quipped to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Nature is what we are put in this globe to rise higher up." There is, however, an exception to my contention that humans should not turn to nature for moral guidance. It is the dominion that says: "Don't have sexual practice with first-degree relatives." Showtime-degree relatives are the individuals you share 50 per centum of your genes with—your parents, children, and siblings. Indeed, non-human animals accept evolved a host of strategies to forbid incest (here). Even plants possess anti-incest mechanisms (here).
As University of Miami psychologists Debra Lieberman and Adam Smith pointed out in a contempo commodity in the periodical Current Directions in Psychological Scientific discipline, humans have social and psychological mechanisms to deter incest. With very few exceptions, marriages between brothers and sisters and betwixt parents and their children are verboten in every human civilization. The primary psychological anti-incest machinery is the yuck response. Even the idea of sex activity with mom or dad or bro or sis is upsetting to most people. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has found that nigh everyone is repelled by the prospect of brother-sister sex, even in hypothetical situations in which there is no take a chance of pregnancy (here).
The Biological Cost of Incest
This raises an interesting question: Just what'southward so bad almost incest? Sure, having sex activity with your dad or your sister seems gross. But why? Some anthropologists have argued that incest taboos are learned social conventions. This explanation, nevertheless, doesn't make sense to me as information technology does not explain the widespread existence of anti-incest mechanisms in creatures ranging from cockroaches to chimpanzees (here). Second, the incest taboo is about as close to a universal law as homo moral rules get.
Why should mechanisms for avoiding incest be and so widespread both in nature and across homo societies? The answer is simple. The problem with having sex activity with shut relatives is that at that place is an astonishingly high gamble that your offspring will exist born with a serious birth defect. Take the results:
Percent of children with severe birth defects.
Source: A report of Czechoslovakian children whose fathers were first-degree relatives. Fewer than half of the children who were the product of incestuous unions were completely salubrious. 40-2 percent of them were born with astringent birth defects or suffered early expiry and another 11 pct mildly impaired mentally. This study is particularly instructive as it included a unique control group—the offspring of the same mothers but whose fathers were not the mothers' relatives. When the same women were impregnated by a non-relative, just seven percentage of their children were born with a birth defect (Figure 1).
A group of genetic counselors reviewed the research on the biological consequences of sex between relatives (consanguineous relationships) (hither). They establish a surprisingly small increase (about iv percentage) in birth defects among the children of married cousins. Incest between first-caste relatives, however, was a different story. The researchers examined 4 studies (including the Czech research) on the effects of first-degree incest on the wellness of the offspring. Forty percent of the children were born with either autosomal recessive disorders, congenital physical malformations, or severe intellectual deficits. And another 14 percent of them had balmy mental disabilities. In brusk, the odds that a newborn kid who is the product of blood brother-sister or begetter-daughter incest will suffer an early death, a severe nascence defect, or some mental deficiently approaches 50 percent.
Foolish Consistencies and Picayune Minds
The profound negative effects of incest on unborn children raise the issues of moral consistency and of abortion politics. I understand the pro-life argument. If you believe that human life begins at the moment sperm meets egg, it is perfectly logical to oppose ballgame. Merely at what signal do reasonable people atmosphere logical consistency with compassion and common sense?
During the 2012 Republican Political party convention in Tampa, the Platform Commission struggled with an aspect of the argument against legal ballgame. Just about everyone on the committee agreed that abortion should be banned. But committee members were carve up over whether official political party doctrine should include exceptions to the abortion ban if a fetus was the issue of rape or incest. In the end, ideological purity prevailed. The official Republican platform states, "Nosotros affirm the inherent dignity and sanctity of all human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed." No exceptions, period. Fifty-fifty in cases of first-degree relative incest.
I grudgingly acknowledge that the lack of any exception in the official Republican position on abortion is logically consistent with the party'south statement on the "sanctity of all human being life." But shouldn't logic sometimes be tempered with compassion? Emerson famously wrote, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of trivial minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
Forcing a adult female burdened with the psychological scars of incest to behave a child who has a roughly fifty:50 risk of having mental disabilities or a astringent birth defect is perhaps the ultimate example of a foolish consistency that appeals to little statesmen.
Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animals-and-us/201210/the-problem-incest
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