Re: The Forebears Paradox


Reading the posts to date, it appears that the problem lies in the way
I've defined incest too tightly, i.e. I've excluded the possiblity of
marrying a distant cousin. Such marriages might well have been more
frequent in the past when people didn't travel as often or as far as
they do today and consequently didn't have the contact with distant
communities to bring in fresh blood. Perhaps this is how racial
differences emerged. One could argue, then, that the existence of
different races proves the incest solution to the paradox (incest in
the loose sense of marrying distant cousins).

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