Thread: Are we all brothers and sisters of incest?

In the bible in the book of genesis it speaks of a man and a woman created to bring life to this planet. Well from the religious perspective, Adam and Eve were the only ones created, now when you think about all the skin colors and all the languages and all the different qualities people have, i think of incest. Im not religious and dont believe in the creation story but anywho back to my point. Incest would explain all the "birth" defects. if adam slept with eve, and so did cain abel and seth, then omg. But The "defects" so to speak would be skin color, speach impediments(different languages), deformations(different facial and bodily qualities) and other things among them when you think about it now, it makes sense no matter how screwed up it sounds.

Originally Posted by Add3R

Incest would explain all the "birth" defects.

There's various causes for birth defects, things such as genetic mutation (either random or inherited), and environmental pollution (which can sometimes cause said mutations).

Humans have little genetic variation. Anthropologists and geneticist trace our ancestry back to a small group of humans living on the border of South Africa and Namibia about 70,000 years ago.

While they don't say just how small that population was, i can remember hearing (I think on NOVA) that it was around 600 individuals.

Now, that's a small group. It's bigger than two individuals living 6,000 years ago, of course, but that's just a creation myth invented by primitive people. There are many such creation myths.



Here's a link:

The results suggest that all modern humans can trace their origin to a population that lived near the border between South Africa and Namibia – although Tishkoff stresses that these people may have moved into the area from elsewhere. As expected, the study also places the exit point for humanity's great "out of Africa" migration near to the Red Sea.

Originally Posted by Darwinist

Are we all brothers and sisters of incest?

Yes. Now stop touching me on my side of the car!


There are actually a couple apologetical answers given. There are Christians who will claim (on the extremely sketchy evidence of something called the "Gap Theory" which you usually only run into in creationist writings) that the first two verses of Genesis in fact summarize two separate creations, with a full stop after the creation covered in the first verse, and then the "proper" story of Genesis beginning with the 2nd verse of the first chapter.

Just so we're all on the same page, the reasoning goes like this:
Gen 1:1
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Full stop. That single verse is sufficient (goes the argument) to imply a full creation which, as things turned out, God wasn't entirely pleased with. So God basically wipes the slate and starts afresh:
Gen 1:2
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. [etc.]

And this is the beginning of the creative process we're all familiar with. So the loophole that gets our ancestors out of incest is that when Adam and Eve and their children were expelled from Eden, they found the world already populated with people who'd been spared destruction in the Gen 1:1 first creation, and so had plenty of unrelated folks to boink with.

The second explanation (which is based on no evidence - at least no scriptural evidence) is that while Adam and Eve were the first people created (and given Eden to commemorate their place of primacy), they weren't the only people created; God created lots of other people too, and set them in the general region of Eden; so that, when Adam, Eve and their children were expelled from Eden they found all sorts of people already living in the world, and so again no one had to engage in incest to procreate.

There's even a third assertion: that "in the beginning" man's genetic structure was, quite literally, perfect; and so nothing like deleterious mutations (and beneficial mutations too, one assumes) were even possible. Following man's Fall, the human genome began to degrade but did so at an extremely slow pace, so that mutations following from incestuous pairings were vanishingly rare and didn't even begin becoming as common as they are now until the original genetic inheritance from Adam and Eve and their children had become so watered down over the generations that human pairings could no longer be considered incestuous.


Actually the skin color thing has another explanation among Christians: the curse put upon Noah's son Ham for seeing his father naked in a drunken sleep. The curse included some means by which the descendants of Ham would be knowable to all men throughout the rest of time; and making their skin a different color seems a pretty obvious way to do that. This explanation was still in common currency among American Christians well after the Civil War. In fact, it was used as a religious justification for slavery leading up to and during the Civil War, since (the reasoning went) Ham's descendants were cursed along with him they deserved to be made slaves.


Tower of Babel legend. We have different languages basically to punish of our hubris for trying to build a tower to reach heaven, to make ourselves gods there.


No biblical explanations for these, as far as I know. But Christians will go through all sorts of contortions to assure you none of it has anything to do with incest.

that is a very long and well thought out post. i congratulate you, but you have to believe in god and the bible first to believe anything that follows, and christians deform themselves all the time, monks slit their knees and kneel on rice, jesus christ, thatd hurt, why do they do it? because it helps them focus????? wtf id be screaming not focused.

Originally Posted by AgentM

There's various causes for birth defects, things such as genetic mutation (either random or inherited), and environmental pollution (which can sometimes cause said mutations).

like Japan hooray for wmds....wow america is pathetic haha atom bombs were so not necessary. but back to tpoic, yes there are several reasons.