Paternity

It worked in part because biology:

A man who can afford to support two households can produce children who know who both their parents are and who are raised with a decent standard of living. A woman with two lovers prior to modern paternity tests might have no idea which children each man fathered.

I have a homozygous recessive genetic disorder. This means I'm incapable of not passing on a defective gene to any biological child of mine.

All of my children will either be carriers or have my condition. If the father is not a carrier, all offspring will be carriers. If the father is a carrier, odds are fifty-fifty as to the outcome.

If for some bizarre reason I had children with another person with my condition, one hundred percent of the children would also have the condition.

One of my two sons has my condition. So I not only know firsthand how miserable the condition is, I know how burdensome it is to raise such a child.

This fact has strongly influenced my assessment of human sexual morality and historical social practices. It makes me see valid concerns where other people seem to only see misogyny and sexism.

In Egypt, pharaohs routinely married siblings until a dynasty was identifiable by their gruesome genetic defects. One college history professor of mine talked about overbites so bad the upper back teeth met with the lower front teeth.

We're talking about a disfiguring condition that significantly interferes with eating and thus is potentially life threatening if the slightest issue adds to your difficulty in consuming food.

While it may not be obvious or a big problem to have the occasional instance of a child that is a product of inbreeding, frequent and consistent inbreeding leads to individuals that get a "Darwin Award" as the Internet likes to call it.

In a word, being stupid about your sexual partners in this particular fashion in a widespread and consistent fashion leads to genocide.

Cultures that are blithely uncaring about this detail are gradually crippled by it and eventually die out. Ethnic Jews and Amish both have high rates of extremely serious genetic disorders that can kill the offspring before they reach adulthood.

This is a factor in the human cultural emphasis on paternity -- on knowing who the father is -- and skewing sexual morality to preserve and promote that knowledge as much as possible.

I know of exactly one primate species that has developed a culture which makes it not stupidly genocidal to allow females to be consistently promiscuous: Bonobos.

Bonobos have been described as pansexual and from what I gather pretty much all members of a troup mate willy nilly -- with one exception: Females don't mate with their sons.

They know who their sons are because they give birth to them but in practical terms no one really knows for sure who anyone's father is. This detail is handled by sending adolescent females to other troups so females cannot accidentally mate and reproduce with their own father or a half brother with the same father.

The biological evidence suggests humans have skewed towards monogamy for a long time and towards men frequently having two lovers with whom they reproduce if they reproduce at all.

Somewhat similar to the bonobo practice of sending females elsewhere, humans tend to find "exotic" peoples wildly attractive. Very plain Caucasian men who can't get a girlfriend back home can go someplace like Japan and be swarmed with adoring attention.

In other words, we are genetically encoded to find people clearly not genetically related to us "hot." 

The Lewis and Clark expedition included a Black man. Native women threw themselves at him, wanting a Black baby.

Women who are extremely promiscuous routinely end up doing atrocious things to cover their activities and try to make life work. I've seen true crime type TV shows about such women murdering newborns and burying them in the backyard, arranging secret abortions repeatedly, secret adoptions and so forth.

It's undesirable for quality of life of all individuals impacted by such behavior and at the societal level. It's hard on her physically, mentally, emotionally and financially and it leaves a trail of destruction in her path with children not knowing their paternity -- which negatively impacts medical care -- not trusting anyone etc. because these children may know about the dead baby in the backyard.

This is not equally true with the historical practice of allowing a man to have both a wife and a mistress IF he adequately provides for both women and all resulting offspring.

I think a lot of social expectations concerning age difference in relationships are likely rooted in not wanting to accidentally reproduce with an immediate blood relative you may not know is related to you. If you don't know who your father is and you don't date anyone old enough to be your father, you aren't going to be accidentally inbreeding.

My father used to tell an extremely ugly and unfortunately racist joke where a girl comes home in love and wanting to get married and her daddy tells her "You can't marry him. I'm his father." After three such incidents, her mother pulls her aside and says "You marry any of those boys you want. He's not your father."

The medical drama House was tentatively called "Everybody lies" initially because a lot of the medical mystery in the show is rooted in the lies people tell, often related to issues of sexual immorality. In one episode, the Black girl nextdoor that the White boy's "racist" father forbade him from marrying turns out to be his half sister and their medical issues are inherited from their father, not a communicable disease that one gave to the other.

Both fictional stories, like TV shows, and humor are socially acceptable means to spread critical information about what not to do for activities that you don't really want to discuss in earnest. We point and laugh at what idiots other people are to try to make sure that doesn't happen for realzy realz in our own immediate families without having to point blank say "Don't go sleeping with your sibling!"

Not sure how I feel about having said that having been molested and raped by my brother because it certainly wasn't anything I WANTED to happen or agreed to.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time in therapy and the two therapists I worked with the most were both men of the cloth. Like Hannibal Lecter, the criminally insane psychologist in the last cell of the basement, I seem willing to think the unthinkable and speak the unspeakable and polite society seems to see me as rude, crude and socially unacceptable.

Because I have a bad habit of commenting on things people want swept under the rug if they are at all guilty of those activities which are frequently taboos because they come with too high a cost for society to be sustainable and are thus often fetishized by people who want some big emotional rush and imagine it's somehow not going to be ruinous for THEM.

At least not just this ONCE, you know. 

No, you shouldn't comment on anything that might make anyone in the room wonder why Little Johnny doesn't look like me, bitch!

Though that specific issue is related to a completely different issue and not a result of inbreeding.

Multiple US states have it encoded in the law that if the wife has a baby, her husband is financially responsible for that child and we don't care who the biological father is. Men sometimes decry those laws which date to a different era, an era when women were rarely financially independent and often couldn't have a job without her husband's permission or a bank account in her own name.

I have concluded it was likely rooted in knowing that some men engaged in threesomes with the wife and a male friend or similar activities and deciding "Bud, when society lets you treat your wife like chattel property and you do shit like that, no, you aren't allowed to claim infidelity on her part and wash your hands of the consequences of your actions because that's probably not what happened and we aren't having this conversation with you. You will pay for any children your wife has and we are done discussing your perverted crap, mmmkay?"

Women are much less like chattel property these days and men these days are much more likely to have been cuckolded if she's pregnant by another man. Historically, women didn't have that kind of freedom and people seem to not understand the context in which those laws were written and now men have a snit about how unfair it is to them, not realizing what it likely says about historical sexual practices behind closed doors.

So male bad habits were something patriarchal culture and law accounted for and said, in essence, "You take responsibility for the consequences of your actions and do right by the women and children involved and you're allowed to get your sexual needs met and have your privacy and we mostly don't want to discuss it."

Women's lib has a big problem because no one really wants to grapple with how freedom for women changes things we kind of had handled when women weren't granted rights like a human being.

No one seems prepared to admit those laws imply our "conservative" ancestors whored their wives out to their weirdo predilections and then as long as you supported the wife and resulting children and kept it quiet, no one really cared.

Women aren't supposed to enjoy sex or want sex for their own pleasure and aren't supposed to have sex for money and women's lib seems to mostly concern itself with the right to earn a paycheck like a man.

And we seem BAFFLED globally that this is proving wholly insufficient to birth a new world order that actually works for men, women and children.