Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Yes, and the ones in which it was expected tended to a pay a price, as witness some of the European royal families. In the case of the Egyptians and the Europeans, inbreeding was almost impossible to avoid. If you were a royal, you pretty much had to marry another royal, and chances were good they were a relative... The available pool of suitable partners was too small.
As for reasons other than recessives, the best one I know of is simple. In any society at any time, it was effectively impossible to be self-sufficient. In order to survive and prosper, you needed the assistance of others. What would motivate others to assist? One of the strongest motivations is blood kinship - they're your relatives.
Consider the institution of arranged marriages still practiced in some cultures. They aren't love matches, they are political and economic alliances between families, arranged by the families for the benefit of the families. It's a perfect example of the above.
"Keeping it in the family" reduces your available ties with others, and in the long term is anti-survival.
Now, you can argue that the advanced technology available to Lazarus Long and company lessened the strength of that argument, too, but RAH doesn't seem to have ever considered it as a factor.
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Dennis
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Of course the extra-familial ties have both bad sides as well as good sides. It works well only when everyone involved supports the larger family rather than being a constant drain.
Also I would agree that it is anti-survival from a family sense but not necessarily from an individual sense. Yes I know that the family working together is stronger than the individual alone. But an individual who is accustomed to working alone is a stronger individual than one who has always been supported by the family. Perhaps I'm just atavistic in my outlook.