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My Wild Dreams

Life & Events > Relationships > Go Ahead! Kiss Your Cousin!
 

Go Ahead! Kiss Your Cousin!

In Paris in 1876 a 31-year-old banker named Albert took an 18-year-old named Bettina as his wife. Both were Rothschilds, and they were cousins. According to conventional notions about inbreeding, their marriage ought to have been a prescription for infertility and enfeeblement.
In fact, Albert and Bettina went on to produce seven children, and six of them lived to be adults. Moreover, for generations the Rothschildfamily had been inbreeding almost as intensively as European royalty, without apparent ill effect. Despite his own limited gene pool, Albert, for instance, was an outdoorsman and the seventh person ever to climb the Matterhorn. The American du Ponts practiced the same strategy of cousin marriage for a century. Charles Darwin, the grandchild of first cousins, married a first cousin. So did Albert Einstein.
In our lore, cousin marriages are unnatural, the province of hillbillies and swamp rats, not Rothschilds and Darwins. In the United States they are deemed such a threat to mental health that 31 states have outlawed first-cousin marriages. This phobia is distinctly American, a heritage of early evolutionists with misguided notions about the upward march of human societies. Their fear was that cousin marriages would cause us to breed our way back to frontier savagery—or worse. "You can't marry your first cousin," a character declares in the 1982 play Brighton Beach Memoirs. "You get babies with nine heads."

So when a team of scientists led by Robin L. Bennett, a genetic counselor at the University of Washington and the president of the National Society of Genetic Counselors, announced that cousin marriages are not significantly riskier than any other marriage, it made the front page of The New York Times.
. The study, published in the Journal of Genetic Counseling last year, determined that children of first cousins face about a 2 to 3 percent higher risk of birth defects than the population at large. To put it another way, first-cousin marriages entail roughly the same increased risk of abnormality that a woman undertakes when she gives birth at 41 rather than at 30. Banning cousin marriages makes about as much sense, critics argue, as trying to ban childbearing by older women.
But the nature of cousin marriage is far more surprising than recent publicity has suggested. A closer look reveals that moderate inbreeding has always been the rule, not the exception, for humans. Inbreeding is also commonplace in the natural world, and contrary to our expectations, some biologists argue that this can be a very good thing. It depends on the degree of inbreeding.
The idea that inbreeding might sometimes be beneficial is clearly contrarian. So it's important to acknowledge first that inbreeding can sometimes also go horribly wrong—and in ways that, at first glance, make our stereotypes about cousin marriage seem completely correct.
That discussion in my next post.
Based on an article that appeared in DiscoverMagazine.com: https://discovermagazine.com/2003/aug/featkiss




posted on May 12, 2011 10:19 AM ()

Comments:

I didn't meet my second cousin on my mother's side until I was 40 but
I was very attracted to him. Drat it! We were both married at the time.
comment by elderjane on May 13, 2011 6:55 AM ()
At forty, you probably would have had no problems, as the chances of your having a child would have been greatly reduced. When I was a teenager, I became acquainted with a nice-looking young man from a neighboring town. When I mentioned that I wouldn't mind dating him, my mother told me that I needed to put that idea out of my head. It seems he was the illegitimate son of one of my uncles. Well, how was I supposed to know!!
reply by redimpala on May 13, 2011 9:20 AM ()
Consider (if you believe it) Adams and Eve and their children. Although the Bible mentions no sisters to Cain and Abel, there are mentions of a "Lilith." They would have no choices except inter-marriages. The Pharoahs were always married to a sister, too, although some of those unions were for show only.
comment by jondude on May 13, 2011 5:14 AM ()
In the case of Adam and Eve, they were genetically perfect. The Israelites all intermarried because they were all the offspring of the eleven brothers of Joseph, whom he brought to Egypt during the famine.
reply by redimpala on May 13, 2011 9:26 AM ()
yeah but I can't think of any of my cousins I'd wanna marry. yuck. good post.

reguards
yer everyone in West By God breathes a sigh of relief pal
bugg
comment by honeybugg on May 13, 2011 2:42 AM ()
Same here!!
reply by timetraveler on May 13, 2011 4:05 AM ()
I think it probably helps the genetic odds if one has both maternal and paternal first cousins to pick from. In my case, for example, my mother was an only child and had no cousins at all, so I just have paternal cousins. I have done some genetic/health profiling in my family, and there are some health issues to consider, which I've seen continue into my first cousins' children, even though all my cousins married out of the gene pool. Granted, most don't wonder about such things when dating and falling in love. But human genetics is a fascinating topic. Humans have so many genes that even couples with a similar genetic make-up don't necessarily replicate the genetic 8-ball which they both may carry. And couples who are not related in the least can get zinged by recessive traits and illnesses in their children. I myself chose not to have children because of such issues in my family. I wonder if genetic counseling is getting more popular. It can be very helpful.
comment by marta on May 12, 2011 8:33 PM ()
Unless a family is already aware of a genetic predisposition within its family, I don't think young people give much thought to it.
reply by timetraveler on May 13, 2011 4:04 AM ()
Amazing and entertaining article!!
comment by jerms on May 12, 2011 7:28 PM ()
Aw! Thank you. Happy you liked it.
reply by redimpala on May 12, 2011 8:12 PM ()
this might explain JoeZ...
comment by aussiegirl on May 12, 2011 5:25 PM ()
Joez isn't a queen let alone a princess!!!
reply by greatmartin on May 13, 2011 6:49 PM ()
Nothing explains JoeZ.
reply by tealstar on May 13, 2011 4:07 AM ()
Now, why didn't I think of that!!
reply by redimpala on May 12, 2011 8:13 PM ()
reply by marta on May 12, 2011 8:12 PM ()
reply by jerms on May 12, 2011 7:27 PM ()
That's ANOTHER good thing about being gay--we don't have to worry about inbreeding!
comment by greatmartin on May 12, 2011 4:31 PM ()
Nor outbreeding either!
reply by redimpala on May 12, 2011 8:13 PM ()
I think the taboo is wider spread than just in America. My Greek-born mother (born before 1900) was so misinformed on the specifics of the taboo that she forbade me to date my brother-in-law's brother (it was a convenience date, not a "thing"). I tried explaining to her that we were not related and that, in any event, we were just being friendly. She was also spooked about real cousins and got upset when I danced with a distant cousin at a wedding. (Drat. Him I liked.)
comment by tealstar on May 12, 2011 2:34 PM ()
Well, I suppose it also persists in other societies as well, though we seem to have a particular problem with it here in the United States.
reply by redimpala on May 12, 2011 3:02 PM ()
With all the broken marriages and unusual domestic arrangements these days, I'm sure a lot of people don't even know for sure who their blood relatives are, so there are probably more close relatives getting married than anybody knows.
comment by kitchentales on May 12, 2011 11:45 AM ()
That's quite true. I will discuss that in more detail in the next post.
reply by redimpala on May 12, 2011 11:54 AM ()
I knew a married couple who proudly announced to all and sundry that they were brother and sister. They enjoyed seeing the look on people's faces before explaining that his widowed mother married her divorced father and each were adopted by the others parent. She thought it was so cool that she didn't have to change her name when they married.
comment by nittineedles on May 12, 2011 10:39 AM ()
reply by jerms on May 12, 2011 7:28 PM ()
That would set people back a bit until they explained how it came to be.
reply by redimpala on May 12, 2011 11:55 AM ()

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