Isn’t there some sort of biological thing where you’re more likely to be sexually attracted to your relatives if you don’t know they’re you’re relatives
Yeah, that’s weird: genetically similiar people are more attractive (as long as it isn’t too similiar)(people in stable relationships often look alike) but bigger genetical difference is better.
All I could find on this is something called “genetic sexual attraction” [1], though Wikipedia contains arguments that it’s pseudoscience [1.1]. Here’s a Reddit post asking about this.[3].
Related to this, I also came across the “Westermarck effect” [2] which appears to suggest that people who grow up together are less likely to be romantically attracted to each other [2.1].
Critics of the hypothesis have called it pseudoscience. In a Salon piece, Amanda Marcotte called the concept “half-baked pseudoscientific nonsense that people dreamed up to justify continuing unhealthy, abusive relationships”.[8] The use of “GSA” as an initialism has also been criticized, since it gives the notion that the phenomenon is an actual diagnosable “condition”.
Many have noted the lack of research on the subject. While acknowledging the “phenomenon of genetic sexual attraction”, Eric Anderson, a sociologist and sexologist, noted in a 2012 book that “[t]here is only one academic research article” on the subject, and he critiqued the paper for using “Freudian psycho-babble”.
The Westermarck effect […] is a psychological hypothesis that states that people tend not to be attracted to peers with whom they lived like siblings before the age of six.
Second degree cousins is not that close though. If every generation has three children, that’s 27 persons. I thinks that for most of human history excluding second degree cousins from the acceptable partners pool would have been impossible. Communities were not that big.
Well, yes. I meant in the sense we share on average 50% with each parent/siblings, 25% with grandparents, etc. I should have said genetics instead of DNA.
Isn’t there some sort of biological thing where you’re more likely to be sexually attracted to your relatives if you don’t know they’re you’re relatives
Yeah, that’s weird: genetically similiar people are more attractive (as long as it isn’t too similiar)(people in stable relationships often look alike) but bigger genetical difference is better.
All I could find on this is something called “genetic sexual attraction” [1], though Wikipedia contains arguments that it’s pseudoscience [1.1]. Here’s a Reddit post asking about this. [3].
Related to this, I also came across the “Westermarck effect” [2] which appears to suggest that people who grow up together are less likely to be romantically attracted to each other [2.1].
References
Second degree cousins is not that close though. If every generation has three children, that’s 27 persons. I thinks that for most of human history excluding second degree cousins from the acceptable partners pool would have been impossible. Communities were not that big.
I can’t stop laughing.
That’s how it’s phrased in many other languages, german for example.
French also
And if my maths is correct, you only share on average 12.5% of your DNA with them
your math may be wrong, because we have very similar genomes, even compared to complete strangers. hell, even between some species.
Well, yes. I meant in the sense we share on average 50% with each parent/siblings, 25% with grandparents, etc. I should have said genetics instead of DNA.
iirc 90% of dna is the same even between humans and plants. (Don’t quote me on that)
Of the variable alleles, not all DNA
Yes, one of the primary components of attraction is familiarity. Also proximity and similarity.