APRIL 19th: 'TIS PITY SHE'S A WHORE

Please bring to class on Monday an envelope with your name on it, containing either $20 or $40, to reimburse me for our tickets.  The performance is on Saturday, April 25th, at 2:00, at the Duke Theater (address above).   The tickets are being held for me at the box office; I will distribute them in the lobby, so please arrive at least twenty minutes early.

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Steven Pinker (an evolutionary biologist) has a chapter on "Family Values" in his book How The Mind Works.  Here is part of what he has to say about the taboo that is at the heart of 'Tis Pity:

"The first problem children face in life is how to hold their own among siblings and peers.

The relationship between a brother and a sister has an added twist:  one is male, one is female, and those are the ingredients of a sexual relationship.  People have sex with and marry those with whom they interact the most – their co-workers, the boy or girl next door – and the people most like themselves -- those of the same class, religion, race and appearance.  The forces of sexual attraction should pull siblings together like magnets. . . .   There should be millions of brothers and sisters wanting to have sex and get married.  There are virtually none.  Not in our society, not in any well-studied human society, not in most animals in the wild. 

Do brothers and sisters avoid copulating because their parents discourage it?  Almost certainly not.  Parents try to socialize their children to be more affectionate with each other (“Go ahead – kiss your sister!”), not less.  And if they did discourage sex, it would be the only case in all of human experience in which a sexual prohibition worked.  Teenage brothers and sisters do not sneak off for trysts in parks and the back seats of cars.

The incest taboo is a a public prohibition against sex or marriage between close relatives.  Avoiding incest is universal; taboos against incest are not.  Brothers and sisters simply don’t find each other appealing as sexual partners.  That is an understatement:  the thought makes them acutely uncomfortable or fills them with disgust.  Repugnance at sex with a sibling is so robust in humans and other long-lived, mobile vertebrates that it is a good candidate for an [evolutionary] adaptation.  The function would be to avoid the costs of inbreeding:  a reduction in the fitness of the offspring."