Could Cousin Marriages Fix Falling Fertility Rates?

Malcolm reveals statistics showing couples who are third or fourth cousins have more kids and grandkids than other couples. He and Simone discuss the evolutionary rationale for "cross-cousin" marriage in small tribes, as well as the downsides of first-cousin inbreeding.

They cover research on actual genetic risks, which are lower than commonly assumed. The Catholic Church banning cousin marriages out to 17th cousins is highlighted as a way they disrupted inheritances. Inter-ethnic marriage benefits are also touched on.

The conversation gets into Western culture's taboo and fetishization around incest, effects like the Westermarck Effect, and how repulsion/attraction can sometimes get reversed. They debate whether future advancement could eliminate risks that block sibling marriages.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Some hot,

Malcolm Collins: hot stats. Some hot stats. Simone, one of the things that people always tease us for when

Simone Collins: they're looking at pictures.

Oh, I had a good intro for this. Can I do an intro? You can do the intro.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: So Malcolm, you know how like, basically since we, we started working together and doing things together, people assumed that we were brother and sister. And so at parties, when I, you know, was introducing myself and you to people and you were on the other side of the room and they, they, You know, you weren't in the conversation and I was trying to point out where you were.

I would, I just gave up and started saying, Oh, you know, he's the guy who looks like he's my brother. And I went immediately knew who you were.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah, and pictures online of us, whenever we go viral for this or that thing that we've done recently, one of the most common insults is, well, they look like they're a brother and sister.

Yeah. And It's funny because I think what they're actually seeing, because one of the things that we often point out is our sort of cultural slash ethnic group [00:01:00] used to be a very common ethnic group in this country and is now just a very, very rare one which is sort of the larger Calvinist cultural group and it's just not that common anymore and it what they're really noticing is just like, it's your first time meeting somebody who's like an Asian and they're weird and they're

Simone Collins: Asian.

Yeah, you look like you're related.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you look like you're related. Like, but if you go to like the town I'm from, because my family came from like a small offshoot of that group, but that had tons and tons of kids. So like every one of my family has over like three or four kids. And historically we go a few generations back.

What was it? 14 kids per generation?

Simone Collins: It's a lot. Yeah. They had a

Malcolm Collins: lot of kids, but yeah, if you go like rural area around Dallas, like everyone looks like me, you'll be like,

Simone Collins: even, even in Dallas, people look like they could be related to you. It's, it's a little bit creepy. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Just generic Texan. What makes somebody Texan?

But, but What I wanted to go into here on this [00:02:00] particular topic was a very interesting statistic I saw recently. Which brings up an interesting question, which is as pro natalist advocates, should we be promoting people marrying their cousins? Oh

Simone Collins: boy. Yeah. I mean, a very, some very, very high birthrate cultures do have

Malcolm Collins: a lot of, Simone, if you, I'm just going to give a quote here.

Okay. Okay. So this is a, a study that was done recently. It was couples who are third or fourth cousins tend to have more kids and more grandkids than other couples. The research. The researchers suggest marrying third and fourth cousins is so optimal for protection of have the, quote, best of both worlds, end quote.

While first cousin couples could have inbreeding problems, couples who are far removed from each other could have genetic incompatibilities. Mm. And if [00:03:00] you look the, the, the, the study, if people want to read the study on this it was called kissing cousins have more kids. It was published in 2008.

They went for it. Oh, no, wait, that was the name of the study. That was the name of the article on the study, I guess. Oh,

Simone Collins: oh man. I, I really love it when academics just like fully go for it with funny titles and that I'm disappointed.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And it makes. So there's, there's probably a few things at play here, right?

Okay. Okay. One thing I think they're, they are right. Which is you are going to have genetically healthier children, likely if you marry a third or fourth cousin than if you marry somebody completely unrelated to you. I mean,

Simone Collins: like, do you, is there, did you read in this any like clarity on like how much the, the.

Risk is reduced. Like if you're a third cousin, are you very, very unlikely to have genetic

Malcolm Collins: problems? So you may not know this, but the most common marriage type in the world. So this is, if you're talking not in terms of number, like for [00:04:00] example, if I say something like what is it? I think it's like 85 percent of all human cultures are polygynous, i.

e. it's one man, many wives is the norm for people who are wealthy within those cultures. I don't mean one. You know, that percent of people in the world, because the most successful cultures are obviously the monogamous ones. Now, when I say this, what I'm talking about is on a per culture basis. So most cultures, like if you're talking about the vast amount of cultural diversity, it's small cultural groups that like live in a rainforest somewhere.

Because, you know, like, The United States is largely like one or two cultural groups, right, where if you're talking about like one region of woods or something, you might have like a huge diversity of cultural groups. Well, if you divide cultures this way the vast majority of cultures prefer, no, not the vast majority, I think it's like two thirds prefer cross cousin marriages.

By count. By count. Yeah, by, well, percent, count, whatever you want to put it. Do they

Simone Collins: have, like, [00:05:00] by cousin, do they mean more removed cousins? Like, third, like, I'm just really concerned about Cross cousin

Malcolm Collins: means first cousin. First cousin marriages. So let's explain why they do this. See, that's This is So do you know why you would choose a cross cousin marriage?

A genetic reason why you would do this. If you're living in a small group of humans, this is for the audience too. Oh yes,

Simone Collins: yes. So the genetic reason for doing this in really small communities is it's the best way to make sure that you're not marrying someone even more closely related. Exactly. Like at least you're not, you know, marrying.

Malcolm Collins: They marry cross cousins because it reduces the rate of inbreeding rather than increases the rate of inbreeding, which is very counterintuitive to people. That is because you're cross cousin. So a cross cousin is the cousin of the opposite sex sibling to your parent. So let me, that takes a little explanation.

Simone Collins: Yeah, maybe give us some

Malcolm Collins: scenarios too. So a cross cousin would be my [00:06:00] mom's brother's kids or my dad's sister's kids. And the question is Why would you do that? Why would you be marrying those people? Because when you're in a small tribe, where sometimes cheating happens, because apparently it must happen a lot in these small tribes with the, and I imagine pretty frequently with the, the, like, most dominant male sleeping with lots of the females in these tribes.

And we know that cheating happened historically due to things, like, if you want to get an idea of, like, How impactful cheating has been on the evolution of humans. When a woman is ovulating, like when she is fertile, she will be more likely to be attracted to extra masculine looking men. And there's a number of other changes in her behavior, which would only happen, you would only see this differentiation, what a woman finds attractive depending on her level of fertility.

If Women were choosing like beta bucks for, or who they were marrying. And then you know, the, the chatty von Chattington for who they were sleeping [00:07:00] with when they were about to have a kid, because that was an evolutionarily successful strategy. So we, that is just like imprinted into the human genome that this was happening.

Actually there was a great study. Hold on. I'm going to research this really quickly.

So just, you know, what I'm Googling, I'm Googling what percent of kids are not their fathers.

Simone Collins: Oh, do not. Yeah. Okay. They're not related to their fathers are not related. What percent of kids are not related to their mother's husband?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I I'm seeing numbers that range from 10 percent to 30%.

Simone Collins: Right. And a lot of this came out when people started doing genetic testing.

Malcolm Collins: Right. And they were like, Oh, it's actually really common for women to cheat on their kids. So you're in this small tribe, right? You don't know if the person's parents cheated. So you can't just say like, Oh, I won't, you know, so how do you ensure that you don't end up marrying a half sibling? The best way to ensure that you are not marrying a half, a half sibling is cross cousin marriages.

Right. The person [00:08:00] in a tribe, a person is the least likely to sleep with is their opposite sex sibling. The question is, wait, why are people unlikely to sleep with? Isn't that like a fetish? Like, like brother, sister stuff and like pornography and stuff. It's very interesting. So there's something called the Western Merk Effect.

The Western Merk Effect is an effect where if you grow up. With somebody else, like, and it, it doesn't need to be, it could be an adopted sibling, anything like that. If you grow up with them between a specific age period in your development, you build an instinctual sexual disgust towards them.

And this, this I think also might happen with parents and their kids, which is why normally, as I was mentioning in another thing, normally parents, even if like, My daughter was objectively hot. I wouldn't be able to be aroused by her and I would find effectual thoughts of her disgusting.

Simone Collins: On that front, my theory as to why there are still some men who are attracted to their daughters, it's because they're mostly absentee parents.

Malcolm Collins: That would make sense [00:09:00] with Trump. Anyway, okay. So, next so, so sorry. Western Mark effect. Western market. Oh,

Simone Collins: and this is so yeah, with regard to people usually not being attracted to their siblings scenarios in which people grew up in the absence of their siblings. And this happens of course, especially with half siblings.

There are actually some pretty serious issues of attraction. There are support groups, for example for people who Accidentally meet siblings who are adopted out to different families. And especially in the IVF community where like, sometimes there are very prolific sperm donors because this is not as well regulated as it should be.

So like, you know, one man might have a lot of kids and then these kids can meet each other and be like, Oh, you're hot.

Malcolm Collins: And then discover that people find people who are genetically similar to them, more attractive than other people. And, and, and this is the Western work effect can cause problems.

So there were some cultural groups where it caused a big problem where they had a practice of Arranged marriages and buying people who their kids were going to marry, but at a very young age, like at like five, basically they would get their [00:10:00] kid's wife. Yes. So it's like, okay, you have a five year old boy and you're, you're, you're trying to find a wife for them.

And a lot of cultures, people will like pay bride prices.

Simone Collins: Okay. Yes. So it's an arranged marriage with a bride

Malcolm Collins: price. It's an arranged marriage with a buy price, but I don't know, I call it buying, whatever. So they would take the daughter at like five and then raise them with the person who was going to become their husband.

Oh, oh. And they would get this instinctual disgust. Be like super grossed out. Low fertility rates in these cultures. Oh, that's funny. Which is really interesting. But anyway, so, so, to the, the brother sister porn stuff, I think that the people who primarily consume this, and we should have looked into this when we were doing our research, I don't know if we, we checked this are people who don't have brothers and sisters or when they're thinking about it, they're not thinking about their actual brother and sister.

They're just the concept of a brother or sister.

Simone Collins: No. So I, I, I discovered how like. Common. It was when, when I went through one of my deep dives of the Argonne wild [00:11:00] audio subreddit. And I was like, well, what are like, what are men listening to? Like what are the top rated posts for like women, voice actors describing scenarios to male audiences and.

Though incest really wasn't popular among like male voice actor to female audience posts in that subreddit incest was super popular among the female voice actor to male audience subset. I, and I would say that the themes were not like, Oh, we're related. Oh, we're brother and sister. Oh my God. We're so, so, so, so related.

It was more like, I've known you for a long time. And it's like, there's a lot of fondness and familiarity, which is, I think that's like something that people. Like an intimacy scenarios, like it's, it's,

Malcolm Collins: it was weirdly, they can't imagine becoming like, like close to someone in any other circumstance in our sort of fallen society.

Yeah, maybe

Simone Collins: it's, yeah, maybe it's even a, this generation thing, which is super interesting, but yeah, I would, I think that your theory, I mean, obviously it would be worth testing and it'd be really great to see that data, but it holds to me. Like, I bet that [00:12:00] a lot of this is like only children who just would want a partner who like really knows them and understands them and has known them all their lives.

And like, yeah. Well, in that, in that scenario, your golf, your golf, big titty sister is totally that person, which is by the way, like one of the themes of the recordings that I

Malcolm Collins: listened to. So another really interesting thing here is, is something else you were asking, which is like actually what genetic effects does this have?

Yeah, I'm really excited because I've heard

Simone Collins: so

Malcolm Collins: many stories. This is well studied. Okay. So if you're talking about. First cousins, there are some issues, but not really that much, probably about as much as you'd expect from a woman who is 40 years old or older having kids. I don't know. I don't know. I actually think it's probably less than that.

When you're talking second cousins, it's basically nothing. It's basically nothing. It is, it is hugely overstated in Western cultural tradition that it is dangerous to marry your cousins. And the question is, is why? It's illegal in the US, right?[00:13:00]

Simone Collins: It is illegal

Malcolm Collins: in the U. S. I think it's illegal to marry your siblings, but not cousins.

I can Google this. , you're right.

Simone Collins: Yeah, because I think this was like a plot point in the movie Splash, where I think the mermaid woman had to get a blood test and was worried about that, and the blood test was to make sure they weren't related, and she was like, oh god, my secret.

Malcolm Collins: Wait, they would test people to what? Yeah, I think

Simone Collins: they yeah, I think in the movie Splash Real

Malcolm Collins: thing that they test people to make sure they're not related like she knew she wasn't related to him

Simone Collins: Let's see. They were in the state of New York in this movie I, I'd have to go

Malcolm Collins: back and I know in our state you can't marry a first cousin.

I just checked, but it's not a problem for us. I'm just saying I don't know. I didn't get the blood test. I'm very familiar with like, like, yeah, you know, no,

Simone Collins: we both know our genealogy well enough to know that we're not first cousins and also our family histories don't

Malcolm Collins: geographically overlap. Why is there this huge negative stigma if it actually isn't that big of a genetic issue?

Right? And the answer comes down to, and we wrote a lot [00:14:00] on this, so I'm going to see what I can remember off the top of my head, because we've done a, I think we did a detailed history of this in the Pragmatist Guide to Relationships, or it might be in the Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality, I never remember which of our books.

But it's the Catholic Church is what caused this phenomenon. So, historically, when a wealthy person would die without any heirs You would all their, their, their wealth and property would automatically go to the Catholic church. And when people were had these closer related family networks, that was much less likely to happen.

I forgot the actual mechanism of why that was less likely to happen, but it just, I think it was like, it was easier to know where the, the, the Stuff would go when they died, so if they didn't have any heirs, there'd be like close family members somewhere or something like that. These interconnected family networks, like these clans of people who would intermarry, intermarry, intermarry.

This wasn't good for the Catholic Church.

So I asked an AI about this, , and the AI said, By barring [00:15:00] marriages out to the extreme degrees, like fifth or seventh cousins, the pool of eligible partners was extremely limited, especially in smaller communities. This led to more marriages being blocked or needing special dispensations from the church after paying fees.

Increased church income and authority. When marriages were barred or childless, property and inheritance lines were disrupted, lands and assets flowed back to the church rather than being passed down in families. The intricate rules and genealogy tracking around consanguinity also gave more control, influence, and income generation for the medieval church.

However, it should be noted that this is still just a theory. The Catholic Church may have truly believed such strict rules were religiously warranted or necessary at the time. Thank you for covering your butt, AI. Thank you for covering your butt.

Malcolm Collins: The Catholic Church made a ruling God, I want to say, I just remember it was like comical. It was like up to 17th's cousin.

It was between 5th and 7th's cousin, but that's still insanely high.

Malcolm Collins: You were not allowed to marry without special [00:16:00] papal dispensation. And this was used. Oh yes. Yeah. Control who could marry who really aggressively by the church because that basically meant if you're talking like, you know, 16th century France or something like that.

You are never going to meet a human in your life who isn't a 16 year old, like, cousin. You're in some little

Simone Collins: village, like, good luck. But then, I mean, I don't know if they were that cumbersome. I'm sure people got married anyway.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, no, no, no, no. So if you were poor, it didn't really matter. But if you were rich, it gave the church the ability to control who could marry who.

And that's what really mattered, right? It was about the money. At that point of history, they got dispensations for this all the f*****g time. Oh, you just pay your fee. Yeah, you just basically pay a fee to the church. And that was another reason why these rules were useful. So, but anyway, you know, obviously the fees are higher if you're richer, but all of the royal families were inbreeding like crazy.

Like they completely ignored these rules. So Yeah, sometimes to

Simone Collins: their detriment, right? [00:17:00] Like the Habsburg line got a little

Malcolm Collins: So massively to their detriment. So this created a really negative phenomenon where, so this, this is in created a stigma in the common population which was like, well, don't marry anyone.

You're, you're even distantly related to like third or fourth cousins, when in reality it is genetically optimal to marry a third or fourth cousin.

Simone Collins: Being genetically optimal in a small community. Now

Malcolm Collins: give me No, no, no. A third or fourth cousin, not in a small community, period.

Simone Collins: Just in terms of

Malcolm Collins: having more descendants.

No, in terms of having healthier descendants. Mmm. So, so you seem to be unfamiliar with this, but there are genetic incompatibilities between people. If

Simone Collins: you Yeah, okay, walk, walk me through this, because I'm actually not really familiar with, like, genetic incompatibilities.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so the results aren't super high in humans, like, it's not that big an issue.

But there are some negative genetic effects. From marrying and having kids with someone who's distantly related to you. A [00:18:00] lot of people will say well, I mean, who's like super,

Simone Collins: super, super not related

Malcolm Collins: to you. Super, super, super not

Simone Collins: related to you..

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so there, there is something called Hybrid vigor that you see in other animal populations.

This is like why a mule is stronger than a you know, the two animals that make it up. Like, it's typically a better animal. You, you, generally when you have animals that are born of So what is a mule? Is it a donkey and a horse? It's thought so. Yeah, and it's typically stronger, smarter, more resilient than either of the two parent species.

When you have two species create a an animal an offspring litter, like, really distantly related, you can get a phenomenon called hybrid vigor, where these individuals, like, dramatically outperform other individuals. So, what you're actually looking at is, if you're talking, like, inter ethnic marriages, right, you might actually end up with genetically more fit kids than distantly related people of the, your same ethnicity.

Simone Collins: Ah. [00:19:00] Ah. Interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So if you're looking at like optimized for genetics marriages the two probably best are going to be inter ethnic marriages from like really distantly related people and people who marry fairly close but not like siblings or first cousins. Oh, that's really

Simone Collins: interesting. Yeah.

Well, and I guess the easiest way to marry someone who is more likely to be genetically Similar to you, if you're marrying within your own ethnic group is. To look for a an inherited cultural match. So if like both of you have a Jewish history or an Islamic history or a Calvinist history or a Catholic history, then you're more likely to be of a group that like kind of was relational.

Within the past. Well, that's what

Malcolm Collins: we would recommend. I actually think that all of the effects we're talking about here are like basically trivial. It's like a fun game to talk about them, but certainly I wouldn't optimize who you're actually marrying off of this sort of stuff. So [00:20:00]

Simone Collins: you're not saying we should go on 23andMe and find our cousins and then reach out to them and be like,

Malcolm Collins: BTWs out of the marriage platform.

No, I am not saying that. So there's also other effects that could be at play here. It could be that less wealthy people have more kids than more wealthy people. Less educated people have more kids than more educated people. Those two things probably correlate with people who marry, like, first cousins and stuff like that.

So, you know, there's probably a lot of other factors at play here. I, I assume the study probably controlled for that, but hey, it might not have. Who knows? But a lot of time people are like, here's the thing I bet the study didn't control for, and they don't go to check to see if the study controlled for it.

And I'm almost certain the study controlled for that, so I'm just going to throw out that See, I thought But anyway, so hold on, hold on, hold on. Okay. The, the actual genetic effects of all this are trivial. Completely trivial. Like, I would not take this into account. I would say, yeah, do marry somebody who has like a similar world perspective as you, which can often be like a shared [00:21:00] history of religious perspective or something like that.

I think that's just useful from like a marriage and cultural fidelity standpoint. It'll make it easier to pass your culture and your values down intergenerationally. Right. But. Outside of that, the positive effects you would get from any of this are pretty trivial and it's mostly we made this episode to have a funny title about people marrying cousins because people would guffaw and be like, no, no, no.

And then we talk about some data and some science and some kinks and isn't that what Base Camp is all about, Simone? That and religious craziness. We only talk about sex, politics, and religion. As one should. Very appropriate, but wait, give another thought on this topic, Simone. I

Simone Collins: thought your original pitch was really going to be just, you know, a year third or fourth cousin is more likely to be intuitively culturally aligned.

So even if, you know, one of you became Baptist, the other one's an atheist, your intuitions that like had, you know, shaped your family over. [00:22:00] generations that, that ultimately I think affected their sociological traits that are genetically coded would be more compatible. That's, that's where I thought you were going to go with this.

And I don't, I mean,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. As genetic selection technology gets better and gene editing gets better it will become easy to, for people to be able to marry their siblings without the negative genetic effects that we have today.

Simone Collins: Fix it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. What do you, do you think that that should be allowed or do you approve of what are, and let's be clear, like it is eugenics for a government to say we will make it illegal for people to marry their siblings or cousins because of the negative genetic effects that has on their offspring.

So do you support that type of eugenic regulation?

Simone Collins: So I'm So, yeah, intuitively, I could never condone a policy that allows for you know, [00:23:00] unnecessarily people to be born who suffer from, you know, pretty serious conditions. And these can be, you know, just like crippling, either life shortening or Life, you know, they'll never, they'll never be able to live independently.

Like I, I cannot condone that. So I cannot condone like sibling marriage and to a certain extent, even cousin marriage, because I I've heard of these devastating effects and I can't deal with it because I care a lot about babies and children and people. And I hate that. I hate that. I care. But I do now, if we could just eliminate that, I don't even think that society is as grossed out by sibling marriage as we would like to think when you look back at like the Egyptian gods and the Greek gods and like Japanese anime being weird about like twins being romantically entwined.

Like there seems

Malcolm Collins: to be all that. That's interesting. There

Simone Collins: seems to be a deep human intuition. That's like kind of hot for sibling relationships and sibling romances. Even when you look at like the hunger games, there's a district one sibling like group [00:24:00] that, you know, kind of has a little bit of a, I'm sure there's some slash friction there.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, I wonder, yeah, it's like conceptually I understand, but the Western mark effect and you grew up basically as a single kid, so you wouldn't have the Western work effect as strongly as I would.

Simone Collins: I grew up, you didn't have a female sibling,

Malcolm Collins: so you wouldn't know, but I had a brother and. The Western work effect works strongly enough in me that I would find the idea of sleeping with anyone who he has slept with or even kissed.

Oh my gosh. It's that strong. Hugely disgusting. Oh,

Simone Collins: that's so weird. But then what about all the I

Malcolm Collins: would rather eat a spoon full of s**t. Then do that. I literally, I would rather eat a spoonful of s**t.

Simone Collins: Well, I mean, lots of rationalists are now doing that just to get someone else's microbiome. So

Malcolm Collins: it's kind of, Oh yeah.

Oh, I'm trendy. But no, and this is one of the things where like, when I look at the, the setup that Andrew Tate has with his brother, where like, I think they share where you're like household. Yeah. I'm like, how can he like, but he must not have this effect. It must not have affected him as strongly as it affects

Simone Collins: [00:25:00] different women.

Like it is not clear exactly whether they share female partners or whether they don't. And so probably they don't share female partners because yeah, that would

Malcolm Collins: be kind of gross. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but you can understand why it'd be really gross. The idea of hooking up with someone who your sibling hooked up with.

Simone Collins: I'm so disinterested in hooking up with anyone who's not you that like, I can't even imagine, like, I've never wanted to hook up with anyone before I met you. Like, so I just. Like, I can't. Oh my

Malcolm Collins: gosh, this also reminds me of those, like, identical twin fantasies. Where is somebody finding identical twins who also, because the twins said to have not grown up around each other, otherwise they'll find each other disgusting, like, normally.

So not only

Simone Collins: do you find identical twins. Yeah, I know, but we also found, like, your whole theory that you came up with, that I think is really strong in the Pregnancy Guide to Sexuality, is that normally People are, you know, attracted to and repulsed by the same things, you know, attracted to this, you know, youth and repulsed by poop, but then sometimes people have a sign switch.

So it is [00:26:00] possible that on the repulsed by siblings front, people could have a sign switch and just like Oh, that's a really

Malcolm Collins: strong point. Okay, so just the concept that she's going over here from our Pregnant Disguised as Sexuality. Is it sexuality should be thought of as like a switchboard of like positive to negative signals generated by certain environmental stimuli where a positive signal would be arousal and a negative signal would be disgust.

But these are operating using broadly the same neural pathways just with an inverse signal applied. And so it means that in humans, most of the volume settings are sort of preset, but it is possible for some time. time in a person's development, for the modifier, the, like, basically multiplying it by negative one gets switched.

So, if it's something like the Western Mark Effect, which would normally have a very, very strong negative modifier affiliated with it, if it gets switched, it becomes a very, very strong, positive multiplier, or if it's something that's usually a really, really [00:27:00] strong positive multiplier, when it gets switched, it becomes a really, really strong negative

Simone Collins: modifier.

Yeah. So that's what I assume is going on, but, but I do want to like, just emphasize again, that across cultures, you know, we're talking ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and then like modern Japan, that there's like, This kind of weird fascination and almost reverence for sibling romances and pairings. So I don't like, I, I feel like once society gets past the genuine health hazards of sibling pairings.

That maybe there wouldn't be the same intuitive collective disgust that we would expect based on the way that

Malcolm Collins: society is seen as the sign of a hedonistic decline of a society. I mean, when I think about periods of history where sibling marriages became more common and stuff like that, I'm thinking like elite Roman families right before the collapse.

I'm thinking like, you know, it's actually practiced rather

Simone Collins: than just fetishized.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it seems to, well, I think they're probably [00:28:00] cross correlated, and I think it's a sign of a collapsing system. Hmm. Um, and it's a sign of a collapsing system, not because it is, like, intrinsically immoral or anything like that.

It's a sign of a collapsing system because it's a system that is beginning to throw out the cultural rules that evolved you know, usually with their religion and with their culture. Like we talk about in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion, how cultures evolve over time. Well, almost every culture is going to evolve a disdain towards sibling relationships because of the negative effects that had the cultures that allowed that ended up dying out.

So when you see a wealthy group in a society or a powerful group in a society, Throwing out that one rule, which is core to almost every cultural group in human history for basic evolutionary, like cultural evolutionary reasons that is a group that is likely throwing out a lot of other things that lead to civilization or collapse.

It's just a sign of. How much they've been willing to ignore of their ancestry and their culture in the pursuit [00:29:00] of, in the moment, hedonism or removing in the moment suffering, i. e. the suffering of I want that. Why can't I have that now? And that is the, the, the, the people who do that, they are the people who are lost and who will be wiped out by this wave of infertility we're seeing in our society now.

But anyway, I love you, Simone, and what a cursed world it would be in if you had been born my sister.

Simone Collins: Yeah, thank goodness I just look like your sister.

Hi, I'm Todd Richards. I know. We're in love. And, um, so we were wondering if it's possible if you could put us down in the same town. Right. Or the same street. At least at the same time, if possible. How about the same family? Yes.

That would be great, yeah. No. No. No. No. No.

Simone Collins:

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I love you too, gorgeous. I love you to death, Simone. Thank you so much.

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