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There's a much bigger and longer story than this. Roughly speaking, it's my understanding that the catholic church suppressed this in Europe from roughly 1000 y
by iguy 9y ago
There's a much bigger and longer story than this. Roughly speaking, it's my understanding that the catholic church suppressed this in Europe from roughly 1000 years ago, essentially as a way to counter alternative power centres.
Here's a famous article about Iraq, where this did not happen:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/cousin-marriage-conundrum/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/cousin-marri...
Here's a discussion of a recent paper:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/01/marrying-cousin-bad-democracy.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/01/mar...
- narrator 9y agoI think that someone could write a very reasonable sounding evolutionary psychology article about why the guiding hand of natural selection intervened and stopped cousin marriage due to higher rates of genetic abnormalities. However, in this case they'd be wrong in that the Catholic Church intervened directly and conciously and put a stop to cousin marriage. Finding out that a phenomenon is not due to evolutionary psychology requires careful historical research and that's hard work. Making up evolutionary psychology ideas though takes no time and can make for a great clickbait article.
- iguy 9y agoIt seems clear evolution has uniformly negative opinions of brother-sister couples. But cousins are more interesting, because the biological downside of having some ill (or just thick) grandkids must be balanced against the upside of having a tight clan, without divided allegiances, to fight off other clans.