[barry-cotter]

If you’re the Alex who writes Yorkshire Ranter congratulations on an excellent and long maintained blog.

If you want to know more about the policies of the Catholic Church on marriage of relatives the Wikipedia article on cousin marriage is quite good and well referenced if you want to go from there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage

On the Church banning marrying relatives

> First and second cousin marriages were then banned at the Council of Agde in AD 506, though dispensations sometimes continued to be granted. By the 11th century, with the adoption of the so-called canon-law method of computing consanguinity, these proscriptions had been extended even to sixth cousins, including by marriage. But due to the many resulting difficulties in reckoning who was related to whom, they were relaxed back to third cousins at the Fourth Lateran Council in AD 1215. Pope Benedict XV reduced this to second cousins in 1917,[22] and finally, the current law was enacted in 1983.

The Church’s justification for banning cousin marriage has no scriptural basis. If St. Augustine's justification for banning relatives from marrying isn’t evidence in favour of what I wrote I don’t know what is.

> Whatever the reasons, written justifications for such bans had been advanced by St. Augustine by the fifth century. "It is very reasonable and just", he wrote, "that one man should not himself sustain many relationships, but that various relationships should be distributed among several, and thus serve to bind together the greatest number in the same social interests".

As to “speculative, just so, white-supremacist” Science is generally built on a base of speculation, which researchers then attempt to disprove. Hypothesis falsification and all that. Just so stories is a common insult thrown against evolutionary psychology researchers but far from universally justified. Given the high degree of fit between the model Snow proposes and the evidence it certainly isn’t justified here.

[AlexCoventry]

> Just so stories is a common insult thrown against evolutionary psychology researchers but far from universally justified.

If it's not verifiable even in principle, it's useless from a scientific perspective. And it just happens to be a theory telling white people why they're genetically disposed to morally superiority, which is highly suspicious, coming from a white guy.

> Given the high degree of fit between the model Snow proposes and the evidence it certainly isn’t justified here.

You're not taking the enormous hypothesis space into account. This is not a compelling fit, by any means.

[barry-cotter]

I’m neither a behaviour geneticist nor an evolutionary psychologist, merely an interested amateur so if I can think up ways to test these hypotheses I’m sure actual experts can do better.

We’re learning more and more about the genetic underpinnings of personality traits and getting betterat extracting ancient DNA. It’s also trivial to compute indices of relatedness between two people if you have either a full genotype or just SNPs. If the personality traits associated with WEIRD populations are highly correlated with declines in inbreeding it’s not proof of the hypothesis but it makes it more likely. We don’t have proof outside of Math anyway, Science is about more or less likely.

If you want to learn more about Evolutionary Psychology the Oxford Handbook is excellent and it’s on libgen.io. The introduction is only about 60 pages and addresses the most common and uncommon criticisms ably.

If you think that being unusually individualistic and unfamilistic is morally superior that’s a personal preference you are of course free to indulge.

[AlexCoventry]

Dude, I've written papers on population genetics. I know exactly how hard what he's trying to do is. He's full of it.

[AlexCoventry]

Thanks for the info. I'm not that Alex.