Posted on 12/22/2008 6:18:42 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
Inbreeding is the source of jokes about British royalty and is associated with increased birth defects among offspring. The practice is so reviled that 31 U.S. states ban marriage between first cousins or allow it only if the couple has undergone genetic counseling or at least one partner is sterile or no longer fertile because of age.
But those laws "seem ill-advised" and "should be repealed," a geneticist and medical historian write in today's PLoS Biology. "Neither the scientific nor social assumptions that informed them are any longer defensible."
The US "cousin marriage" prohibition stretches back to the 1858, when Kansas barred such marriages; Texas was the most recent state to pass a ban, in 2005, write Diane Paul, a political scientist emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Hamish Spencer, head of zoology at the University of Otago in New Zealand. (European countries didn’t ban the practice because there, "the rich and noble were marrying" their cousins, Spencer tells us. "In America it was immigrants and the rural poor — a much easier target of legislation than your monarch.")
First cousins share about an eighth, or 12.5 percent, of their genes, according to a 2002 study in the Journal of Genetic Counseling. Because of that overlap, there's a 1.7 percent to 2.8 higher risk of intellectual disability and genetic disorders, including seizures and metabolic errors among children whose parents are first cousins than among the general population, says Robin Bennett, a certified genetic counselor and lead author of that research.
That elevated risk is "comparable to a 40-year-old woman having children and we consider that perfectly acceptable," Spencer tells ScientificAmerican.com. "I can't imagine a law saying they're not allowed to have children."
The father of evolution, Charles Darwin, married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, as did Albert Einstein...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciam.com ...
We are headed for no taboos.
That is what they want. No rules and no judgements of anyone. All because some one’s feelings might get hurt. What the weaklings fail to understand is that not everyone is oversensitive like them.
but but we are told not to worry about his stuff. We are told we are paranoid
Headed? V’s wife.
Scientists — the priests of atheist culture.
Soooo, what do we have left? Multiple partner marriages, underage marriage, and bestiality? Have I missed anything?
Why do I get the feeling this will be good news for Bubba Clinton? Probably makes a few more women eligible to be hit on.
Maybe we should just make it illegal for dumb sickly people to reproduce. Oh, that wouldn't be politically correct. My bad.
I’m sure the local Smith family with extra fingers and toe webbing agree that it’s just paranoia.
All well and good, but what happens when you compound that risk over several generations. I think we all know the answer. Jimmy gets six fingers and a room temperature IQ.
Well Mrs V, they haven’t advocated animal love. Yet. *yuk*
Girl robots, now cousins. Scientists are trying to increase their odds of getting lucky. An incremental ε for getting a date is enough for those horny toads.
Marriage between cousins is commonplace in the Middle East.
Don’t you wonder about their childhood’s?
I don't mean she had an adamantium skeleton or could shoot beams out of her eyes, but she most likely had a defect in a clotting factor on one of her X chromosomes that was new to her.
It was not “inbreeding” that made hemophilia a problem in Royalty, it was that because of Queen Victoria, the Czar of Russia, the Kaiser of Germany, and the King of England were all cousins. Everyone says “inbreeding”, but it was outbreeding to other royalty, and an unfortunate mutation in the X chromosome (of which men have only one and are thus more susceptible).
West Virginia solved the incest problem by banning family reunions.
Darwin was a ‘redneck’???
Check out what the intellectuals have in mind next.
And should be able to marry their Mom?
Hmmmm, wonder if they wanted to kill Daddy and blind themselves out of guilt? Make it all legal. /Sarcasm off
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