Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Married to a first cousin

Every year an estimated 8 million children--6
percent of total births worldwide--are born with a serious birth defect of genetic or partially genetic origin. Additionally, hundreds of thousands more are born with serious birth defects of post- conception origin due to maternal exposure to environmental agents. At least 3.3 million children less than 5 years of age die annually because of serious birth defects and the majority of those who survive may be mentally and physically disabled for life.
This report from the March of Dimes is the first to provide a global estimate of serious birth defects of genetic or partly genetic origin. It details the birth prevalence rates and the numbers of affected births in 193 countries.


According to a global report on birth defects
which was conducted in 2006, 21 out of 22 countries most affected by birth defects per 1000 live births are Muslim majority countries and the following
countries are the ones most affect by birth
defects per 1000 live births:
1. Sudan 82.0/1000
2. Saudi Arabia 81.3/1000
3. Benin 77.9/1009
4. Burkina Faso 77.0/1000
5. Palestinian territories 76.6/1000
6. United Arab Emirates 75.9/1000
7. Tajikistan 75.2/1000
8. Iraq 74.9/1000
9. Kuwait 74.9/1000
10. Afghanistan 74.8/1000
11. Oman 74.8/1000
12. Syria 74.3/1000
13. Pakistan 73.5/1000
14. Nigeria 73.5/1000
15. Kyrgyzstan 73.4/1000
16. Qatar 73.4/1000
17. Bahrain 73.3/1000
18. Jordan 73.1/1000
19. Libya 73.0/1000
20. Tunisia 72.7/1000
21. Morocco 72.3/1000
22. Yemen 72.1/1000



Inbreeding which involves marriage between cousins is an islamically valid and approved practice.
Inbreeding is a major cause of birth defects in children so its very likely that the whole cousin marriage thing has a huge role to play in recorded high rates of birth defects in Muslim countries.

When poor folks do it, it's incest, when royalty does it, it's creating an heir to the throne.

I think it shows up in Amish communities also.

Such kin groupings may be extremely nepotistic and distrusting of non-family members in the
larger society. In this context, non-democratic regimes emerge as a consequence of individuals turning to reliable kinship groupings for support rather than to the state or the free market. It has been found, for example, that societies having high levels of familism tend to have low levels of generalized trust and civic engagement, two important correlates of democracy. Moreover, to people in closely related kin groups, individualism and the recognition of individual rights, which are part of the cultural idiom of democracy, are perceived
as strange and counter-intuitive ideological abstractions.

Between 1780 and 1845, the population of Ireland mushroomed from about three million to about eight and a half million....

Look at the numbers. The population tripled in size over less than three generations, a veritable explosion. And the growth wasn’t evenly spread, taking place disproportionately among the vast mass of Gaelic Catholic subsistence farmers in the West and the South. Someone born in those areas in the 1820s and 1830s was typically one of a very large family, ten or more, whose parents and grandparents would also typically have come from families the same size. So if your twenty aunts and uncles did their demographic duty, you could easily have two hundred first cousins, all almost probably living within walking distance.....

Gaelic society had always been tribal, but this was tribalism on steroids. Everyone was literally closely related to everyone around them. No wonder Ancestry’s DNA service is so good at identifying genetic groupings in particular areas of Ireland – the period 1780-1830, the outer limit of its standard autosomal DNA test, is exactly the period when we very obligingly got together and married our cousins like rabbits....

Cousin-density like this also left its mark on a more recent Ireland. Membership of the two main political parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, often appears to be inheritable, with great masses of relatives voting for (or knifing) each other .

I have over 30 female first cousins. Six of them were born the same year as me. Add in another six a year older or younger and I was surrounded with girls my age. I tapped a few of them when I when I was in my teens and twenty's. Played I'll show you mine if you show me yours with a bunch during the puberty years.
A little youthful play is different from marring and raising kids.

A handful of families settled the western part of the county where I grew up. When I was a kid we'd have some fairly large family reunions on a Sunday afternoon every year. I'm at least distantly related to many family names there. It's entirely possible that people in a setting like that would pair up with a distant relative without even realizing it unless you went back 5 generations to check. I'd say that situation exists in many places. Maybe not so much today,..because people are much more mobile than they used to be.

Everybody has 64 great-great-great-great grandparents,...and the number of descendants that 64 people create gets very large. Anyone who is a member of a family that's lived in the same area for several generations will be blood relatives of a *bunch* of people in that area,..even some that they won't know.

A handful of families settled the western part of the county where I grew up. When I was a kid we'd have some fairly large family reunions on a Sunday afternoon every year. I'm at least distantly related to many family names there. It's entirely possible that people in a setting like that would pair up with a distant relative without even realizing it unless you went back 5 generations to check. I'd say that situation exists in many places. Maybe not so much today,..because people are much more mobile than they used to be.

Everybody has 64 great-great-great-great grandparents,...and the number of descendants that 64 people create gets very large. Anyone who is a member of a family that's lived in the same area for several generations will be blood relatives of a *bunch* of people in that area,..even some that they won't know.

You could have saved a lot of typing by just sayin you played bumpin uglies with a cousin...

I believe the saying is "Closer kin, deeper in".

This happens in stock all the time. Breeding two genetically close individuals generally goes one of two routes or a combo of the two:

1. The offspring has accentuated the shared strong points of the related individuals' genetics and has a good outcome......we call this line-breeding.
2. The offspring has accentuated the shared weak points of the related individuals' genetics and has a poor outcome......we call this inbreeding.

If the genetics of both sides of the breeding have no strong points to begin with it doesn't take a geneticist to figure out what the results going to be.

So.....if a couple from West Virginia get a divorce, are they still brother and sister????

So.....if a couple from West Virginia get a divorce, are they still brother and sister????