When Daddy Loves Daughter: Exploring the Incest Taboo

Apr. 9, 2008 — -- When 61-year-old Australian John Deaves and his 39-year-old daughter Jenny announced this week that they had a child together, most people reacted with shock and disgust.

But while many would cite simple social unacceptability for their reactions, sociologists and sex experts say that aversion toward incestuous relationships goes far deeper than the violation of social norms.

In fact, research suggests that the vast majority of us are hard-wired for revulsion when it comes to the idea of sex between a father and daughter or other family members.

"When incest occurs, it is not only violating a cultural taboo, it is crossing ancient neurological wiring for avoidance," said Jonathan Turner, a distinguished professor of sociology at the University of California, Riverside.

Turner, who along with his wife, Alexandra Maryanski, wrote "Face to Face: Toward a Sociological Theory of Interpersonal Behavior," says that this "neurological wiring" may not have come about as a social construct, but rather as an evolutionary imperative that has existed for tens of thousands of years.

Evidence of such an inherent distaste for incest can be seen in studies on chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary relative. While chimps are known to be promiscuous -- arguably even more so than humans -- several studies have shown that they will also avoid having sex with other chimps with whom they can sense they are related.

And recent research has reinforced the idea that even on a subconscious level, the concept of incest is not an attractive one to most people. Such were the findings of a team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who last year published a study in the journal Nature showing that siblings possess a hard-wired instinct to avoid sexual relations with one another.

"The old thinking was that Darwinism applied to humans physically, but not socially," said study co-author John Tooby, a professor of anthropology and co-director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UCSB in a statement. "Now we see the evolution of a mechanism that finely regulates important aspects of human social behavior."

At the heart of this tendency to avoid sibling incest is a principle known as the Westermarck effect. For reasons not yet completely understood, boys and girls involved in frequent rough-and-tumble play in childhood tend to not be sexually attracted to one another later in life.