Instinctive Incest Avoidance

A Paradigm Case for Evolutionary Psychology Evaporates

Bibliographic Data

ID8975202
AuthorsJustin Leiber (Florida State University, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume36
Issue4
Pages369-388
Publication date2006-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8308 • E-ISSN: 1468-5914
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1468-5914.2006.00313.x
OpenAlexW2113512906
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited24

Westermarck proposed that humans have an incest avoidance instinct, triggered by frequent intimate contact with family members during the first several years of life. Westermarck reasons that (1) familial incest will tend to produce less fit offspring, (2) those humans without instinctive incest avoidance would hence have tended to die off and those with the avoidance instinct would have produced more viable offspring, and hence (3) familial incest would be, as indeed it is, universally and instinctively avoided (the desire simply does arise given early continuous intimate contact; the “potty principle” as some psychologists have succinctly termed it). Victorian Westermarck claimed this as a human adaptation. Evolutionary psychologists have generalized these claims to Pleistocene humans and their ancestors, to primates, and indeed to animals generally. Yet there is surprisingly little evidence for these claims of universal instinctive avoidance. Considerable inbreeding appears among large, territorial primates and may have been so with early humans and with their ancestors. While there is little reliable non‐anecdotal evidence about incestuous behavior or the lack of it among humans, what little there is does not fit well with the Westermarck thesis

Adaptation (eye · Biology · Developmental psychology · Evolutionary biology · Evolutionary psychology · Inbreeding · Inbreeding avoidance · Instinct · Population · Sociology · Cultural Differences and Values · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior · Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Psychology

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