Evolutionary theory predicts that humans should avoid incest because of the negative effects incest has on individual reproduction: production of defective offspring. Selection for the avoidance of close-kin mating has apparently resulted in a psychological mechanism that promotes voluntary incest avoidance. Most human societies are thought to have rules regulating incest. If incest is avoided, why are social rules constructed to regulate it? This target article suggests that incest rules do not exist primarily to regulate close-kin mating but to regulate (...) inbreeding between more distant kin and sexual relations between affinal relatives. Three evolutionary hypotheses about cousin marriage and affinal kin mating follow from this suggestion: Rules regulating mating between affinal kin are means of paternity protection. Cousin marriage is regulated because, if it occurs, it can concentrate wealth and power within families to the detriment of the powerful positions of rulers in stratified societies and the relatively equal social statuses of most men in egalitarian societies. Tests using the comparative method on a worldwide sample of 129 societies supported the three hypotheses. Two alternative anthropological hypotheses failed to be supported. (shrink)

Although disgust is recognized as a common and prominent emotion in healthcare, little is known about how healthcare professionals understand, experience and conceptualize disgust. The aim of the study was to gain an in‐depth understanding of how nursing and midwifery students experience, understand and cope with disgust in their clinical work. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Six participants (all women: two nursing students, four midwifery students) from a university in the South of England were (...) interviewed. Four superordinate themes with eight subthemes were identified. Overall, findings suggest that participants experience both moral and physical disgust; however, they find it difficult to talk about and use other terms to describe their experience. Findings are discussed through the lens of social identity theory, to understand the relevance of professional identity and how this might further maintain the disgust taboo. The strategies participants have developed in order to cope with disgust are explored and understood within the current healthcare climate. Future research should focus on ways of addressing the experience of disgust by healthcare professionals in order to improve the quality of care provided, especially in the climate of the COVID‐19 crisis. (shrink)