this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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[โ€“] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 1 points 5 hours ago

You can't really definitively prove a theory like that I think. I'm no biologist so I'm not an expert by any means, but we can't go back in time to see why evolution did what it did. We can only guess from what we have right now.

That said, such an "ew" response to incest surely is not just coincidence. It must have arose for a reason, just like all of our emotions evolved for a reason. For example, we also experience disgust when smelling or tasting rotten milk, because drinking rotten stuff is bad for survival too, so evolution made us have that response, because it would lower the chance of us drinking spoiled milk. There's nothing "inherently disgusting" about incest or spoiled milk. We only find those things disgusting because they are bad, evolutionarily speaking.

And btw this isn't restricted to humans obviously, all animals avoid having offspring with their close family, so this is a very deep-rooted behavior.