Posted on 02/11/2012 9:52:19 PM PST by Slings and Arrows
When your society has inhabited a small, remote island for countless generations and boasts a population of only 300,000, the odds of having sex with a relative are significant. Luckily, Icelanders now have a handy tool to avoid family-sex.
Íslendingabók—meaning "book of Icelanders"—is an online incest avoidance search engine. Plug in your name and that of a potential mate, and the site searches a genealogical database to see how closely you're related. It's likely that you'll have some overlap many generations back—in which case you're probably safe from mutant children. But if you share great-grandparents, you might want to reconsider your Nordic hookup.
But there's a twist! As GlobalPost reports, new research says sexing with a distant cousin is actually beneficial for fertility, as your genes are more comptable than someone from the other side of the planet. So, avoid creepy incest, but seek out good incest. Iceland—constantly at the top of quality of life lists, and an easy place to sleep with an attractive cousin. [GlobalPost via TNW]
From our Strange but True Department: West Virginia doesn't allow first-cousin marriages.
Yeah, and Illinois doesn’t allow political corruption.
It wouldn’t matter, unless they were making donations or withdrawals from a sperm bank.
I’ve heard that too. Probably a lot of folks named with the local equivalent of “John Johnson.”
Iceland could surpass Hong Kong...
I knew a couple in college that had two kids. I believe the wife took the husband’s last name. His name was something like Frer Thorson, and the wife’s name was Inga Thorson.
Their little boy was Thor Frerson, and the daughter was something Ingandaughter (or however one spells daughter in Iceland - dotter?) Pretty confusing.
Of course one first cousin marriage every 5 generations is about equivalent to a 5th cousin marriage every generation. The Pharaohs had dynasties of several hundred years based on sibling marriage. The recessive genes would be filtered out rather quickly by infanticide. The Hawaiian royalty also had sibling marriage. We are all pretty closely related, with our DNA being more than 99% common just by being human. It is likely that some of our visual diversity is due to a different corps of parasites living in/on us, and not so much our DNA variation.
Or Jane Johnsdaughter, as the case may be - Denmark only fairly recently dropped the practice themselves.
the Russians do something similar, with your middle name being derived from your parent’s first name, but with last names being inherited from the father.
Hmmm...there are counterexamples.
There’s two solutions to this. One is to be like the British Royal Family. Another is to learn 400 words of Icelandic, fly out to Iceland and celebrate diversity in a good way.
My dad had his dad’s name as a middle name, I have my dad’s as my middle, and my son has mine - but we ain’t commies! It is pretty odd (to me anyway) how they keep track of things what with changing last names and all. Although I guess back in the days of the Soviet Union that may have been a good thing!
Dang, where I come from, Iceland is a codeword for “Alabama”.
White crackers of the frozen north UNITE!!!!!
Obviously, the latter, since same-sex sex doesn't have genomic consequences.
Cousins are good for practice.
Yee-haw.
Wow! You learn something every day!
I didn’t know there is good incest, and I’m from Missippy! I need to ask around about that.
*face palm*
OT, but I flew over Greenland and Iceland a few years ago. Those ice bergs must be huge! They were very prominent at 40,000 feet.
Knew some Eritrean people. The kids take the dad’s first name as their last name.
Just ask a good Democrat.
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