Father, daughter arrested after 3 dead babies were found buried in the basement of their their home. A case of incest!

What a horrible story! Incest does exist!

Father, daughter arrested after 3 dead babies were found in their home - The Jerusalem Post DNA tests revealed the dad had fathered the babies with his [20-year old] daughter.

Incest Isn't Taboo in Nature

I have my doubts about this meta study! Nice catchy headline, but does it hold up under scrutiny? Caveat: I did not have the time to read the whole research article.

It almost appears the authors of this study were determined to show publication bias:

"I [second author of the study] think publication bias is a massive issue in science in general. And this is because we have preconceived ideas of what we expect to find. I think if you ask almost everyone: ‘do you think animals should avoid mating with a relative?’ The answer is, ‘yes, of course, most likely.’ ..." 

This quote is at the top, just below the abstract, of the research article:

"“We consider it a real possibility that the perception of ubiquitous inbreeding avoidance in nature follows from a mistaken view that it is the theoretical expectation.”"

"... Here, we synthesized 677 effect sizes from 139 experimental studies of mate choice for kin versus non-kin in diploid animals, representing 40 years of research, using a meta-analytical approach. Our meta-analysis revealed little support for the widely held view that animals avoid mating with kin, despite clear evidence of publication bias. Instead, unbiased mating with regards to kinship appears widespread across animals and experimental conditions. ...
Our findings highlight the need to rethink the widely held view that inbreeding avoidance is a given in experimental studies."

Incest Isn't Taboo in Nature: Study | The Scientist Magazine® (contains an interview with second author of the study) Avoiding inbreeding appears to be the exception rather than the norm for animals, according to a new meta-analysis of experimental studies.

Here is the link to the underlying research article:

Meta-analytic evidence that animals rarely avoid inbreeding (no public access, but The Scientist article contains link to PDF file)

The early Catholic Church may have helped spark Western individualism

Very recommendable! 

I have read many things before how the Bible strengthened individualism and freedom in Western countries. Following article adds another important dimension to it that I was not aware of.

"Leaders of that branch [Catholic church] became obsessed with what they saw as incest, ... and launched a “marriage and family program” that eventually banned marriages between even distant cousins, step-relatives and in-laws. Church policies also encouraged marriage by choice instead of arranged marriages, and small, nuclear households, with couples living separately from extended family members. ... When the researchers zoomed in on rates of marriage between cousins, they found that for each 500 years a country spent under the influence of Western Church, this type of marriage dropped by 91 percent. "

"These societies are often described today as Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, or WEIRD for short ... (Henrich coined the acronym in a seminal 2010 study in Behavioral and Brain Sciences)." This acronym, in my opinion, is not much more than a publicity stunt!

The early Catholic Church may have helped spark Western individualism | Science News: Early Catholic Church decrees transformed families and may help explain why Western societies today tend to be individualistic and nonconformist.