Should plural marriage (more than one partner) be legalized?

[Sweeney]

67. The socially un regulate sexuality of some men is a problem.

Among the Native Americans who were very aware of the incest taboo could trace their lineage back generation. Totem Poles are just such a genetic lineage.

Where people know their history some measures can be exercised against incest, or even close consanguineous relationships. Unregulated and with wide spread infidelity, there is no way of knowing. And I have personally heard of people who had close and even sexual relations with their half sister because of wild oats sowed in youth in small towns. Finding out who their sons were dating it was flip out time, and time to get everyone together for a talk about who knew who back when.

When a father has multiple wives; and only the rich and the powerful have wives, the genes of a hand full of men predominate. In the next generation, if the same condition maintains, those same sets of genes will again predominate as the general genetic diversity declines. If a hundred men are breeding in a thousand adult community, in a relative short period of time all families will be closely related. Considering that such communities are already closely related before that style of polygamy began, the concentration of the same genetic traits and problems will be intense.

Where one woman has multiple husbands, or sexual relationships, she will have a child with only one at a time. Her breeding is limited, and the breeding of a man is not. One man could conceivably be the father of thousands where one mother is at most likely to parent 10 children. That idea of Papa was a rolling stone. Where ever he laid his hat was his home is an unseen threat to genetic diversity.

You might find it help full to draw this out as a graph. In normally diverse populations genetic traits tend to cancel each other out. If you say of visible traits on children, that they will usually be those of the mother or the father; still, a small fraction of the grandparent's traits will go straight through to the child. Essentially, the parents give to the child what they are, with each contributing half. What two grand parent have given to one parent is half each. Considered as individual traits, what makes itself unmixed from a grandparent to grandchild is incredibly small. With inbreeding all of that changes rapidly, and each generation becomes a carbon copy of the one before it, genetic weakness and all.

I have a weak grasp on this subject, and have never read much on it or studied it. I am sure that you could surpass my knowledge with only a little study; but you know now what I know.