• OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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    3 days ago

    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

    • olosta@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      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.

    • Kalcifer
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      3 days ago

      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
      1. “Genetic sexual attraction”. Wikipedia. Published: 2024-10-14T18:46Z. Accessed: 2024-12-09T07:29Z. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_sexual_attraction.
        1. §“Criticism”

          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”.

      2. “Westermarck effect”. Wikipedia. Published: 2024-09-26T14:09Z. Accessed: 2024-12-09T07:33Z. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect.
        1. 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.

      3. "How does nature prevent us from feeling sexually attracted to relatives who are objectively sexually attractive? ". Author: “Morgentau7” (u/Morgentau7). “r/TooAfraidToAsk”. Reddit. Published: 2024-09-25T17:50:08.227Z. Accessed: 2024-12-09T07:34Z. https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/comments/1fpaold/how_does_nature_prevent_us_from_feeling_sexually/.
    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      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.