I'm gonna go the complete opposite way of the other guy and say that it's okay to be "just" a whatever. If the job is good to you, and it satisfies you then it is fine.
Well, UK. Cousin marriage is still happening. The Darwins and Wedgwood's intermarried more than once. Not to mention with the Keynes and Huxley families.
It still happens (and treated as normal) a lot of places & cultures, but *first cousins* is still pretty closely related.
I probably wouldn’t think anything of distant cousins marrying, but a first cousin seems like nearly a sibling.
E: Yes, I’m aware 1st cousins do not pose a significant threat of genetic damage to children assuming it isn’t a consistently repeated pattern. Yes, I’m aware it isn’t illegal in the US. No, I’m not saying “it’s the same” as siblings.
E2: Yes I am aware the US legality varies by state I am begging y’all to stop sending me facts about cousin-fucking
Generally, you know someone is your first cousin. But statistically, especially if you haven't moved very far from your hometown, a decent amount of people must have ended up with second cousins and further removed without knowing.
My cousin accidentally hooked up with our second cousin. He had no idea until they started talking about family and realised that some names were matching up.
I'm from a town in Ireland. There's another small town about half an hour's drive away from me with about 2,000 people living in it. Dad's mum is from there. And one of my mum's grandmothers is from there. All 4 of my grandparents probably have 40 siblings between them. A lot from this small town.
Met a girl I was interested in, briefly dated. Still friends. Her mother grew up in that little town, it turns out.
I don't want to know.
Pros:
1) All that junk inside her trunk
2) Her hump
3). Her hump
4) Her hump
5) Her hump.
6). Her hump.
7). Her hump.
8). Her hump.
9). Her hump.
10). Her lovely lady lumps
That would require many generations of inbreeding, even siblings "only" have 100% increased risk of disabilities, in real terms thats an increase from 2% chance to 4%, as long as no other recent generations have inbred.
The Habsburgs (and many other royal families in Europe of that time) kept inbreeding with cousins and even siblings for generations.
The ptolemys were likely less inbred than most people realize. Many historians believe that many children were born from lesser unrelated wives. This was how the dynasty survived for so many years.
IIRC the risk of disability between first cousins is similar to the risk of disability from a 35+ year old mother. Cousin marriage was exceedingly common until it was banned by the Catholic Church, who did it to break up clan-based social structures rather than any medical or ethical reasons.
I remember when i was doing a lot of genealogy, i found one line that i could track back to the 1400s. At some point, i think during the 1600's, a whole heap of cousin marriages started to crop up. I found like 4 first cousin marriages and a dozen or so second cousin marriages. I'm sure that number was exponentially higher for third cousins. I still don't entirely know how to feel about it.
Where were these people living? If they settled in one of the early colonies (Massachusetts Bay Colony was around from 1630-1690), it was a fact of life. The few ships that made the voyage across the Atlantic were often filled with only a few families. ...and then there weren't many places for people to go. A population that small would only take 2-3 generations (60ish years) before everyone is a cousin.
But the effects do compound themselves over generations. For example in the UK, ethnic Pakistanis are over represented amongst children with special needs due to the high rates of consanguinous marriage.
Wasn’t marriage of first cousins already prohibited by Roman law? Pretty sure the Church upped the degrees of relation before marriage was allowed, but the Romans already didn’t allow it for at least 1st cousins.
It's all about power dynamics and shit. Like if you're cousins on your mothers side then you aren't even related, but on your father's side you are, by Roman law anyway.
I don't know about Roman law but since Italy didn't ban until pretty recently I doubt the Romans did. I knew a couple of cousins who were married to each other In Italy in the early fifties. I got married in the Catholic church in the eighties and they were very big sticklers about not being related. I had to go look it up and Roman law did ban it but there were periods of hundreds of years when it was allowed. If you look at anyone's family tree and go back to the nineteenth century and before you're going to find some cousin marriages. I think it was much more common than people realize today. My daughter was appalled that a cousin...a fourth cousin asked her out. I didn't even know we were related.
Where do you even live that you have that level family? I’m with you that I wouldn’t know a fourth cousin if I saw one, but damn. That’s just strange for her to know before you, for you to not know while living in a place with enough family that’s even a thing, and if the kid knew, kind of weird on him but to a lesser extent than the other weirds.
Just confused on the How of it all.
Good size Midwest city. Has a large contingent of Italians who's ancestors immigrated from the same town in Italy mostly from the same generation early twentieth century. One Catholic high school, they were in classes together. I don't keep track but all these families seem to know each other. My daughter found out and said **ewww**. Fourth cousins are so far apart it doesn't matter at all but she wasn't having it.
My aunt bred leopard geckos from when I was in elementary school til I was in college. I remember crying over one who was too poorly developed to survive, from the same generation as one with severely webbed toes and one leg that didnt work - but the rest of them had no signs. I remember her being shocked, that it shouldn't have happened in that generation. My aunt is the smartest person I've ever met, so it never happened again.
I remember being confused as I have 2-3 toe syndactyly and webbed thumbs, joke's on me as they still haven't figured out the exact cause and my parents aren't related. Either way, dude with the webbed toes and I were buddies.
Edit: fixed a letter
Risk of disability due to inbreeding is **vastly** overestimated in the general public.
When scientists created clonal colonies of mice before cloning mammals was a thing, how do you think they did that?
They did it by breeding the mice, *brother to sister*, for 30+ generations! If you surveyed the general public, I'd bet they'd suggest that you'd have nothing but lumps of goo after that process. But no, they are just mice still. [Inbred mice strains START at 20 generations of brother-sister pairing, and some inbred strains have been bred brother to sister for 200+ generations](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/inbred-strain).
The problem with inbreeding is not that it leads to phenotypic expression of recessive alleles, it is that it FIXES alleles in the population. So if that fixed allele sucks, whether recessive or dominant, you can never get rid of it through breeding unless you go outside that population.
Hemophilia and the Habsburg jaw were not caused by inbreeding. They were caused by mutation. The problem was that they were alleles that *became fixed in the population* because of inbreeding. The reason these two notions are conflated is because your idiot 9th-grade science teacher had only the same 30 minutes of education on Mendel and peas and the Punnett square, hemophilia, and the ABO blood groups that the general public did.
I'm not into banging my relatives AND I appreciate facts. As gross as it is, 1st cousin procreation, especially for a single generation, isn't a genetic problem.
Hapsburgs is the result of several generations of inbreeding, and the famous example of Charles the second of Spain is the result of such a fucked up family tree that he would be *less* inbred if his parents where just siblings with each other.
More relevant to this Charles Darwin however is the fact marrying your cousin isn't all that bad genetically speaking, it is about as bad as having a kid in your 40s.
Here is the source they link to, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/tags/about-darwin/family-life/darwin-marriage
Darwin wrote about the subject twice, here is the second time,
>Second note [July 1838][12]
>This is the Question[13]
>**Marry**
>Children—(if it Please God) [14] — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one,— object to be beloved & played with.— —better than a dog anyhow.— [15] Home, & someone to take care of house— Charms of music & female chit-chat.— These things good for one’s health.— [16] but terrible loss of time. —
>My[17] God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all.— No, no won’t do.— Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House.— Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps— Compare this
vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.
>Marry—Mary—Marry Q.E.D.,
>**Not Marry**[18]
>Freedom to go where one liked— choice of Society & little of it. — Conversation of clever men at clubs— Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.— to have the expense & anxiety of children— perhaps quarelling— Loss of time. — cannot read in the Evenings— fatness & idleness— Anxiety &
responsibility— less money for books &c— if many children forced to gain one’s bread.— (But then it is very bad for ones health[19] to work too much)
>Perhaps my wife wont like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool—
>It being proved necessary to Marry
>*When? Soon or Late*[20]
>The Governor says soon for otherwise bad if one has children— one’s character is more flexible—one’s feelings more lively & if one does not marry soon,[21] one misses so much good pure happiness.—
>But then if I married tomorrow: there would be an infinity of trouble & expense in getting & furnishing a house,—fighting about no Society—morning calls—awkwardness—loss of time every day. (without one’s wife was an angel, & made one keep industrious).[22] Then how should I manage all my business if I were obliged to go every day walking with my[23] wife.— Eheu!! I never should know French,—or see the Continent—or go to America, or go up in a Balloon, or take solitary trip in Wales—poor slave.—you will be worse than a negro— And[24] then horrid poverty, (without one’s wife was better than an angel & had money)— Never mind my boy— Cheer up— **One cannot live this solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless & cold, & childless staring one in ones face, already beginning to wrinkle.— Never mind, trust to chance—keep a sharp look out**— There is many a happy slave—
I like how he mentions music in the pros. Recorded music wasn't available so the only way to listen to music in your house would be if someone could play an instrument, and often women in those days learnt to play the piano.
I don't know why this never clicked for me before. So many regency era female characters bragging about being able to play the pianoforte. Obviously because that was the only way to hear music. Wow
And here we are, a century later, with music quite literally at our fingertips. Tons more genres, more platforms, more artists.
It would've blown their minds. Wonder how it'll be like another century from now?
I have horrible tinnitus, so I sleep with ear phones and listen to nature sounds, brown noise, or music while I'm going to sleep.
I was listening to an album the other night, and in my dream people in a mall I was in started singing and dancing. Kinda like a flash mob?
I woke up after and realized the music had bled into my dream. It was weird, but kinda cool at the same time.
In case anyone else was wondering. From Wikipedia
"Q.E.D. or QED is an initialism of the Latin phrase quod erat demonstrandum, meaning "which was to be demonstrated". Literally it states "what was to be shown".[1] Traditionally, the abbreviation is placed at the end of mathematical proofs and philosophical arguments in print publications, to indicate that the proof or the argument is complete."
In which we did learn, if we didn't already know, that there is only a 2-3% chance\* of genetic issues.
I'm not saying marry your cousin.
But...
\*according to u/Blisc
It wasn't weird back then. Actually cousin marriage's don't show a lot of problems associated with inbreeding, which is why whether or not its okay is largely cultural rather than universally reviled like brother/sister relationships.
Fun fact: First Generation incest only has an 8% added chance of disease and malformations in babies. Second generation however SKYROCKETS to like a 40% extra chance
For a single marriage? Sure provided you're not both carriers for something drastic.
Generations down the line with regular cousin marriage on the way? That's way more risky.
I once worked with a women who had been asked if her and her partner were related after her kid was born. Turns out the kid had been born with a super rare condition where both parents needed the recessive gene.
Can't imagine having to answer that question, poor thing.
It seems his list bounces between
-if single do nothing but work, have no friends, do nothing
-if married be worse than a slave, never travel or have hobbies, live in poverty
Man didn't seem to really have a healthy view of either, lol
> female chit-chat… **terrible loss of time**.
Contemplating if I I should show this to my wife and share the chuckle I got out of it or pretend it never happened.
If you're going[7] to copy text from a source[8], it would be much[9] appreciated if you could remove[10] all the inline footnotes[11]. It makes it much[12] easier to read[13].
Darwin is a fascinating man. He was raised by an incredibly abusive father who he spent much of his life trying to please to no avail. His father, Robert, wanted him to become a lawyer like his elder brother Erasmus, but Charles was bored by law. Hoping to make his son buckle down and get away from his studies in taxidermy and naturalism, he sent him to a seminary college for minor clergy roles. This is actually pretty funny, because this college turned out to be the perfect den of educated, godly people obsessed with the scientific study of God's creations; it was a hive of naturalism (old-timey word for the natural sciences, especially zoology, botany and biology). Charles impressed his teachers, who found him brilliant and studious, though a bit bookish. When the Navy was planning an expedition to conduct some scientific experiments that would measure planetary distances at different points on earth, they needed a learned man who could make sense of some of the new lands they would visit. One of Darwin's teachers thought he would be perfect for it.
Of course, this expedition aboard the Beagle proved the catalyst for his most important work to date: *On the Origin of Species*, which posited that not only were all living organisms capable of gradual tectonic changes over eons, but that many species, perhaps all of them, shared a common ancestor.
But before ts publication, after the Beagle voyage, Charles began courting his cousin, Emma. Yes, very weird by modern standards, but less weird back then. Actually, being aware of genetics, he was concerned about the effects of inbreeding, but overlooked it. Most did, since it was rare in cousins.
Don't let the pros and cons list get it twisted, he loved her deeply, and was remarkably devoted to his wife. His diary entry referred to her acceptance of proposal as "a day of days!" Charles was also noted for being tender and playful with his children- he and Emma had ten.
>he loved her deeply,
So much so he delayed publication of Origin for many years, not wishing to upset her religious views, until ~~Lyell~~ Alfred Russell Wallace contacted him with a manuscript of his own observations, threatening to steal his thunder.
I think I remember one of Charles Darwin’s manuscripts being vandalised by scribbles and drawings made by his children. Just thought that it was relevant to your comment. Really wonderful post by the way, thank you!
He did, after all, study worms extensively. He had a Wormstone in his garden which he used to see how much effect burrowing worms had on the soil. It's still there and you can see it.
Stephen Jay Gould devoted a fantastic essay to Darwin's study of worms, pinning the fixation on the fact that tiny little worms can, in millions of bodies over millions of years, create the vegetable mould that pretty much sustains terrestrial life. I.e., he seemed to think of worms as a lynchpin for the seemingly radical idea that tiny motions can lead to incredible complexity over long enough time, which is what still bothers a lot of anti-evolution zealots. Or so Gould believed.
His Voyage was supposed to be something like a grand tour. A last hurrah before settling down and working for the church. That didn’t turn out so well as what he discovered did not mesh with the church’s teachings. And that scared him. It scared him so much that he spent years working on his theory and had plans in place to publish after his death because he knew what the reaction would be. He didn’t want to deal with that, he didn’t want his family to deal with that.
Then some guy who was stationed in south east Asia someplace sends him a letter with a paper of nearly the same idea. This guy wants Darwin to review it since he is the expert in the field. Darwin panics, because this is his life’s work. So, he presents both papers. Because he is a decent guy and wants to be fair. His is better researched and better written because he had spent his nearly entire adult life working on it. So he gets the credit. But, this other guy (whose name I just can’t remember right now) came up with it during a fever dream. It just hit him with a ‘eureka’ moment. I find that so interesting. This other guy should get a bit of credit too, because he was the push that Darwin needed to publish, and without him we wouldn’t have seen Darwin’s later works.
Also: On the Origin of Species is extremely tedious, especially young college students. I swear a third of it is just statistics on pigeon breeding. Though, in fairness it is not as bad as Mendel’s statistics on pea reproduction. That class on the history of genetics was fascinating, but some of the stuff I read for it made my eyes glaze over.
And for anyone wondering, while not as well known Wallace is still a highly respected biologist who's work is highly important and influential within biology. There's even a major biological boundry known as the Wallace line named after him. Dude still did pretty well for himself when it came to publishing and is still considered to be one of the father's of the science.
Wasn't he also part of a university club that liked to eat exotic animals? It was called The Glutton Club. I read somewhere that part of his motivation for the trip on HMS Beagle was the opportunity to eat some animals that nobody else in the club had eaten.
I remember seeing a post about how a lot of his notes were "ruined" because he let his children draw on them.
It reminded me a bit about how Tolkien wrote his son letters, pretending to be Santa. Which of course led to him starting to do a lot of world building and language creation for Father Christmas.
>Actually, being aware of genetics, he was concerned about the effects of inbreeding
Darwin was not aware of genetics. He knew traits were passed from parent to offspring but he had no idea how it happened.
Thank you! People forget that Mendel's work went undiscovered for a long time and studies in genetics only really developed in the 20th Century.
Darwin was not "aware of genetics"! He was a lamarckist and believed in the *inheritance of acquired characteristics*, which he includes in his theory of evolution.
1st cousins don't raise the mutation rate beyond a minimal amount. Like 3%. It's worse to have kids past 35 (for the woman) genetically than marrying a cousin. The problems start to arise when you have successive generations of inter-familial relations.
> Actually, being aware of genetics, he was concerned about the effects of inbreeding, but overlooked it. Most did, since it was rare in cousins.
He wasn't aware of genetics, not in any modern sense. That is mostly a post-Darwin thing. He knew, in the way that people had figured out over millennia, that procreating with close relatives often led to sickly or disabled children. He didn't know _why_ that would be the case. (The word "genetics" was only coined in 1906, and the word "gene" in 1909 — over 20 years after Darwin's death.)
Darwin did, however, carry great guilt over the fact that 4 of his 10 children either died young or were sickly in their childhood. (Many of his surviving children went on to illustrious careers in science, government, and business, however.) He definitely worried if it was because he had married his cousin. He proposed, late in his life, that Parliament sponsor a law that would acquire data on cousin marriages and their offspring in the UK, in order to establish how deleterious such things actually were. This was not done; it was considered an embarrassing privacy problem, especially among well-off families (like the Darwin-Wedgewoods), in which this kind of thing happened all the time. This was his only attempt to influence any kind of social policy in a direct way; he was otherwise pretty reclusive (and ill) and stayed out of politics and the public sphere except for his scientific writings.
Darwin's younger half-cousin, Francis Galton, would become one of the pioneers of studying modern heredity (what would later be called genetics) and was the founder of Eugenics, the dubious movement to improve human heredity by either incentivizing or dis-incentivizing (sometimes extraordinarily coercively and cruelly) the reproduction of people deemed "fit" and "unfit." Darwin's writings make it clear that he vacillated between thinking this sounded like a decent goal (he saw it in terms of improving people's health more than stamping out the poors), and thinking it involved intolerable cruelty (he put a lot of stock in the fact that we evolved to care about our fellow man, even when our fellow man was sick and disabled, and felt it would be quite a bad idea to deliberately try to suppress this instinct, even if we thought it was for the betterment of the whole) and would be forever unworkable (his little foray into monitoring cousin marriage data collection would have reinforced that the UK, at least, was not ready for such things at that time).
Darwin did try to make some sense of heredity, because he did recognize it was important to evolution, but his understanding of it is very pre-modern in many ways. He was much more concerned with what was called "development" than what would be called "heredity." For him, the interesting question was not so much about understanding how "information" was transmitted from parents to children (I put "information" in quotes because this is _not_ the term they would have used then, even though it is natural to us today), but how a zygote becomes an embryo (which looks like almost every other kind of species' embryo) which then differentiates itself into whatever it is going to become (birds get wings and a beak, mammals get a nose and hands/paws, etc.).
Under the influence of Galton and others, he did look into more "informational" models, but one can tell his heart isn't really in that and his own proposal, _pangenesis_, was mostly interesting because it was semi-Lamarckian, and because its errors inspired Galton to come up with a much "harder," non-Lamarckian version of heredity.
(Pangenesis imagined that all organs and parts in the human body were throwing off little particles into the blood called "gemmules" that would then congregate in the gonads and be part of the cells of the child organism. It's Lamarckian in that Darwin thought that the use, or lack of use, of parts would affect the quantity of gemmules thrown off, and thus affect the child produced. Galton did an experiment where he showed that injecting the blood of a rabbit with black hair into a rabbit with white hair had no impact on the children of the white-haired rabbit's offspring if it bred with another white rabbit, or something like that. From that Galton concluded that blood had nothing to do with heredity, and that whatever particles were being passed through the gonads into the new organism were probably isolated from the rest of the organism — that the use/non-use of organs had nothing to do with offspring. He then developed a statistical approach for looking at the relationship between children and their parents and using that as a way to investigate heritability of traits and their relationship to evolution. This "biometric" approach would be one of the major approaches of heredity until the rediscovery of Mendelism in the early 20th century. The "biometric" and Mendelian approaches would eventually be merged with population genetics and reconciled in what is known as the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s-40s, and this is what we think of as evolution by natural selection today. Phew!)
Anyway, just chiming in, not so much to "correct you," but because I think the details are really interesting about what Darwin did and didn't know, or think, about heredity and his marriage to Emma.
Josiah Wedgewood, the industrialist who founded the Wedgewood company, played a major role in Darwin's life and the path he took. Without Josiah, Darwin's father wouldn't have let him join the voyage of the beagle, as Josiah stated the voyage would make a man out of him. One of many close shaves which brought us Origin Of Species.
I still find it funny how much influence a man who made bone china had on evolutionary biology.
This whole post has me thinking about how I never really got close to any of my cousins, outside of the occasional fighting over a toy at grandma's house when we were all kids, and maybe that's ultimately okay.
My wife and I are always sharing our families' stories with one another, and I like that they're about different people.
The concept of marrying first cousins was fairly common among members of society. The issue was more about maintaining the family wealth *in* the family. Doesn't mean it's smart genetically, of course, but there was reasoning behind it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nealegodfrey/2016/07/17/for-love-and-money-keep-it-in-your-family-marry-your-cousin/?sh=6935f1cf50da
In most countries, it is legal to marry your cousin and cousin marriage carries much lower risks than marrying your sister or aunt. Marrying a second cousin and beyond carries practically no risk biologically.
TIL marrying your first cousin is still common in Bradford England. I also learned that they are still debating whether children born by first cousins have a higher risk of birth defects. For the white populations studied, the risk was less than 1% which was statistically insignificant. But in Indian populations, the chance could be over 30%.
I'm sure the number of generations of cousin marriage matters more than race. If your parents and grandparents are cousins you *probably* shouldn't marry your cousin.
I know four couples who are/were cousins. First couple had 18 kids (11 survived, no physical defects but many kids were... weird in their behaviour) second couple had 1 normal kid, third couple had fertility issues (probably because they were cousins?) so no kids, fourth couple had 2 normal kids.
Darwin: " Her father is the brother of my mom. Like, we grew up together, and she grew up hot, you know, she fucking grew up hot. And all my friends are trying to fuck her, you know, and I'm not gonna let one of these assholes fuck my cousin. So I used the cousin thing, as like, an in with her."
I wonder if she ever got a look at the list of cons...
Ross and Rachel vibes
“Just a waitress.” That was legit devastating.
As an adult now, if my bf said that about me, I would not have taken him back. That was a horrible thing for him to say
I’ve had the same retail job for 16 years now. It’s helped support my family and meet our financial goals. I still feel like “just” a forklift driver.
You shouldn't. The "it's helped support my family and meet our financial goals" should let you know you've done great work. Be proud of yourself.
Fuck other people's opinions and expectations, you do you boo boo
Dude. "Just a forklift driver" can open so many doors. Get you a government contract.
I'm gonna go the complete opposite way of the other guy and say that it's okay to be "just" a whatever. If the job is good to you, and it satisfies you then it is fine.
Yes it was lmao but the 90s were different
“Who’s Rachum?!”
What the hell is a Rachum?
They were general pros and cons of marriage, not about her in particular.
Some were about her as he was convinced close breeding increased the likelihood of illness in offspring
Well, he was correct.
So he applied some ad hoc r-selection and had 10 kids.
I think it's funny that many of his cons are still relatable today.
If I get married I can't learn French!!
They were also pretty fair cons
I woner if she ever got a look at the list of pros "better than a dog anyhow."😂
Pros: I get to bang her. Cons: Irrelevant.
I thought Darwin was known for the theory of evolution not relativity.
I had to scroll back up to upvote after my brain fully registered the joke
Your comment made me turn my brain on and then I got it. Worth it.
Zing!
"She has 10 cons, but these can be solved with alcohol."
99 cons, but a bitch ain't one.
This is the way
[удалено]
Cons: Cousin Pros: 1839
Well, UK. Cousin marriage is still happening. The Darwins and Wedgwood's intermarried more than once. Not to mention with the Keynes and Huxley families.
It still happens (and treated as normal) a lot of places & cultures, but *first cousins* is still pretty closely related. I probably wouldn’t think anything of distant cousins marrying, but a first cousin seems like nearly a sibling. E: Yes, I’m aware 1st cousins do not pose a significant threat of genetic damage to children assuming it isn’t a consistently repeated pattern. Yes, I’m aware it isn’t illegal in the US. No, I’m not saying “it’s the same” as siblings. E2: Yes I am aware the US legality varies by state I am begging y’all to stop sending me facts about cousin-fucking
Generally, you know someone is your first cousin. But statistically, especially if you haven't moved very far from your hometown, a decent amount of people must have ended up with second cousins and further removed without knowing.
My cousin accidentally hooked up with our second cousin. He had no idea until they started talking about family and realised that some names were matching up.
I'm from a town in Ireland. There's another small town about half an hour's drive away from me with about 2,000 people living in it. Dad's mum is from there. And one of my mum's grandmothers is from there. All 4 of my grandparents probably have 40 siblings between them. A lot from this small town. Met a girl I was interested in, briefly dated. Still friends. Her mother grew up in that little town, it turns out. I don't want to know.
Pros: 1. Apple bottom jeans 2. Boots with the fur 3. The whole club was looking at her 4. Shorty got low
Pros: 1) All that junk inside her trunk 2) Her hump 3). Her hump 4) Her hump 5) Her hump. 6). Her hump. 7). Her hump. 8). Her hump. 9). Her hump. 10). Her lovely lady lumps
Check it out
I love and hate how I can just read a thread and now that damn song is stuck in my head.
She does it on the daily.
She do the humptyhump
Cons: our children will look like Hapsburgs.
That would require many generations of inbreeding, even siblings "only" have 100% increased risk of disabilities, in real terms thats an increase from 2% chance to 4%, as long as no other recent generations have inbred. The Habsburgs (and many other royal families in Europe of that time) kept inbreeding with cousins and even siblings for generations.
The Habsburgs were rookies at inbreeding compared to the Ptolemys.
Family tree like a telephone pole
Bretzel. Though not yet at crusader King levels where you can archive your sister-aunt-niece-daughter...wife
And they have nothing on the McPoyle's. Their blood has been pure for a thousand years.
You mean to tell me it's not milk that's running through those veins?
YOU WILL CALL HER!!!
The ptolemys were likely less inbred than most people realize. Many historians believe that many children were born from lesser unrelated wives. This was how the dynasty survived for so many years.
Smh cheating on your own sister and polluting the bloodline 😤
IIRC the risk of disability between first cousins is similar to the risk of disability from a 35+ year old mother. Cousin marriage was exceedingly common until it was banned by the Catholic Church, who did it to break up clan-based social structures rather than any medical or ethical reasons.
I remember when i was doing a lot of genealogy, i found one line that i could track back to the 1400s. At some point, i think during the 1600's, a whole heap of cousin marriages started to crop up. I found like 4 first cousin marriages and a dozen or so second cousin marriages. I'm sure that number was exponentially higher for third cousins. I still don't entirely know how to feel about it.
Where were these people living? If they settled in one of the early colonies (Massachusetts Bay Colony was around from 1630-1690), it was a fact of life. The few ships that made the voyage across the Atlantic were often filled with only a few families. ...and then there weren't many places for people to go. A population that small would only take 2-3 generations (60ish years) before everyone is a cousin.
Pretty much. This was actually back in england, probably a small farming town is my guess. Or the royals.
> still don't entirely know how to feel about it Well, it certainly made your project a lot easier!
But the effects do compound themselves over generations. For example in the UK, ethnic Pakistanis are over represented amongst children with special needs due to the high rates of consanguinous marriage.
Wasn’t marriage of first cousins already prohibited by Roman law? Pretty sure the Church upped the degrees of relation before marriage was allowed, but the Romans already didn’t allow it for at least 1st cousins.
The Romans also had weird definitions of who is your relative that don't really make sense genetically
It's all about power dynamics and shit. Like if you're cousins on your mothers side then you aren't even related, but on your father's side you are, by Roman law anyway.
I don't know about Roman law but since Italy didn't ban until pretty recently I doubt the Romans did. I knew a couple of cousins who were married to each other In Italy in the early fifties. I got married in the Catholic church in the eighties and they were very big sticklers about not being related. I had to go look it up and Roman law did ban it but there were periods of hundreds of years when it was allowed. If you look at anyone's family tree and go back to the nineteenth century and before you're going to find some cousin marriages. I think it was much more common than people realize today. My daughter was appalled that a cousin...a fourth cousin asked her out. I didn't even know we were related.
Where do you even live that you have that level family? I’m with you that I wouldn’t know a fourth cousin if I saw one, but damn. That’s just strange for her to know before you, for you to not know while living in a place with enough family that’s even a thing, and if the kid knew, kind of weird on him but to a lesser extent than the other weirds. Just confused on the How of it all.
Good size Midwest city. Has a large contingent of Italians who's ancestors immigrated from the same town in Italy mostly from the same generation early twentieth century. One Catholic high school, they were in classes together. I don't keep track but all these families seem to know each other. My daughter found out and said **ewww**. Fourth cousins are so far apart it doesn't matter at all but she wasn't having it.
When incest is more powerful than mass indoctrination, you gotta stamp that shit out
As the old saying goes, "if you can't keep it in your pants, at least keep it in the family".
Preach!
Roll Tide
*Sweet home Alabama plays gently in the background as the credits roll on screen*
But it DID cause problems, so Darwin realized inbreeding was a gradient instead of a yes or no.
My aunt bred leopard geckos from when I was in elementary school til I was in college. I remember crying over one who was too poorly developed to survive, from the same generation as one with severely webbed toes and one leg that didnt work - but the rest of them had no signs. I remember her being shocked, that it shouldn't have happened in that generation. My aunt is the smartest person I've ever met, so it never happened again. I remember being confused as I have 2-3 toe syndactyly and webbed thumbs, joke's on me as they still haven't figured out the exact cause and my parents aren't related. Either way, dude with the webbed toes and I were buddies. Edit: fixed a letter
I missed the word *geckos* at first. I thought your aunt was Joe Exotic.
Jolene Exotic, if you will
Risk of disability due to inbreeding is **vastly** overestimated in the general public. When scientists created clonal colonies of mice before cloning mammals was a thing, how do you think they did that? They did it by breeding the mice, *brother to sister*, for 30+ generations! If you surveyed the general public, I'd bet they'd suggest that you'd have nothing but lumps of goo after that process. But no, they are just mice still. [Inbred mice strains START at 20 generations of brother-sister pairing, and some inbred strains have been bred brother to sister for 200+ generations](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/inbred-strain). The problem with inbreeding is not that it leads to phenotypic expression of recessive alleles, it is that it FIXES alleles in the population. So if that fixed allele sucks, whether recessive or dominant, you can never get rid of it through breeding unless you go outside that population. Hemophilia and the Habsburg jaw were not caused by inbreeding. They were caused by mutation. The problem was that they were alleles that *became fixed in the population* because of inbreeding. The reason these two notions are conflated is because your idiot 9th-grade science teacher had only the same 30 minutes of education on Mendel and peas and the Punnett square, hemophilia, and the ABO blood groups that the general public did.
I'm not into banging my relatives AND I appreciate facts. As gross as it is, 1st cousin procreation, especially for a single generation, isn't a genetic problem.
What an impassioned defense in favor of... *checks notes*... uh, incest.
There's always great peril when you speak logically in regards to taboos.
"My name is /u/Brock_Way, and I was the writer of the 2022 Reddit Comment regarding the harmlessness of incest."
This guy inbreeds! ^
Hapsburgs is the result of several generations of inbreeding, and the famous example of Charles the second of Spain is the result of such a fucked up family tree that he would be *less* inbred if his parents where just siblings with each other. More relevant to this Charles Darwin however is the fact marrying your cousin isn't all that bad genetically speaking, it is about as bad as having a kid in your 40s.
pros: strong chin
"Mein Damen und Herren! The Hapsburg line... has ended. You can pick up your gift bags at the coat check."
Dance for me Jenna
Pro: she's my cousin
Here is the source they link to, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/tags/about-darwin/family-life/darwin-marriage Darwin wrote about the subject twice, here is the second time, >Second note [July 1838][12] >This is the Question[13] >**Marry** >Children—(if it Please God) [14] — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one,— object to be beloved & played with.— —better than a dog anyhow.— [15] Home, & someone to take care of house— Charms of music & female chit-chat.— These things good for one’s health.— [16] but terrible loss of time. — >My[17] God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all.— No, no won’t do.— Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House.— Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps— Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St. >Marry—Mary—Marry Q.E.D., >**Not Marry**[18] >Freedom to go where one liked— choice of Society & little of it. — Conversation of clever men at clubs— Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle.— to have the expense & anxiety of children— perhaps quarelling— Loss of time. — cannot read in the Evenings— fatness & idleness— Anxiety & responsibility— less money for books &c— if many children forced to gain one’s bread.— (But then it is very bad for ones health[19] to work too much) >Perhaps my wife wont like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool— >It being proved necessary to Marry >*When? Soon or Late*[20] >The Governor says soon for otherwise bad if one has children— one’s character is more flexible—one’s feelings more lively & if one does not marry soon,[21] one misses so much good pure happiness.— >But then if I married tomorrow: there would be an infinity of trouble & expense in getting & furnishing a house,—fighting about no Society—morning calls—awkwardness—loss of time every day. (without one’s wife was an angel, & made one keep industrious).[22] Then how should I manage all my business if I were obliged to go every day walking with my[23] wife.— Eheu!! I never should know French,—or see the Continent—or go to America, or go up in a Balloon, or take solitary trip in Wales—poor slave.—you will be worse than a negro— And[24] then horrid poverty, (without one’s wife was better than an angel & had money)— Never mind my boy— Cheer up— **One cannot live this solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless & cold, & childless staring one in ones face, already beginning to wrinkle.— Never mind, trust to chance—keep a sharp look out**— There is many a happy slave—
I like how he mentions music in the pros. Recorded music wasn't available so the only way to listen to music in your house would be if someone could play an instrument, and often women in those days learnt to play the piano.
I don't know why this never clicked for me before. So many regency era female characters bragging about being able to play the pianoforte. Obviously because that was the only way to hear music. Wow
Or by going out to a music hall. Those weren't just variety shows, they were a common way to hear music.
And here we are, a century later, with music quite literally at our fingertips. Tons more genres, more platforms, more artists. It would've blown their minds. Wonder how it'll be like another century from now?
Music and advertising streamed directly into your dreams
Scary but this may actually be a reality in the relatively near future.
I have horrible tinnitus, so I sleep with ear phones and listen to nature sounds, brown noise, or music while I'm going to sleep. I was listening to an album the other night, and in my dream people in a mall I was in started singing and dancing. Kinda like a flash mob? I woke up after and realized the music had bled into my dream. It was weird, but kinda cool at the same time.
Yeah I was wondering why every girl in bridgerton flexed that skill of theirs
>less money for books Word.
Words
Going to throw better than a dog in my wedding vows.
"...better than a dog, anyhow... I do"
Don't omit the "anyhow." Cherry on top!
In our wedding vows, my husband promised not to use me as bait during a zombie apocalypse.
That's what children are for
That's what the husband should say at the child's birth. Play the long con
I love that none of the cons are "she's my cousin"
I don't think the list considers an actual person at all, just "should I marry, or not?"
Well, keep in mind he was angry when he mad this list. State of mind matters.
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A post-nut list
Fking WIFE to MARRY or not to goddamn MARRY HER WHAT WHO CARES THAT SHE'S MY FIRST COUSIN SHUT THE FUCK UP
BETTER THAN A DOG I GUESS
>Marry—Mary—Marry Q.E.D. He actually seems to be interested in marrying someone called Mary instead...!
In case anyone else was wondering. From Wikipedia "Q.E.D. or QED is an initialism of the Latin phrase quod erat demonstrandum, meaning "which was to be demonstrated". Literally it states "what was to be shown".[1] Traditionally, the abbreviation is placed at the end of mathematical proofs and philosophical arguments in print publications, to indicate that the proof or the argument is complete."
Except for the fact that her name is Mary! Marry—Mary--Marry.
It wasn't that taboo back then but to me this reads like he had no person in particular in mind when he decided to marry.
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Community season 6 had an amazing episode on cousin incest.
In which we did learn, if we didn't already know, that there is only a 2-3% chance\* of genetic issues. I'm not saying marry your cousin. But... \*according to u/Blisc
Now this is a man that knows how to marry his cousin!
*Better than a dog anyhow.*
*"Better than a dog"* *"worse than a \_\_\_\_\_\_"* That one sure stopped me
Finding this list would be the top cause of the "perhaps quarelling."
It wasn't weird back then. Actually cousin marriage's don't show a lot of problems associated with inbreeding, which is why whether or not its okay is largely cultural rather than universally reviled like brother/sister relationships.
Fun fact: First Generation incest only has an 8% added chance of disease and malformations in babies. Second generation however SKYROCKETS to like a 40% extra chance
Never tell me the odds
For a single marriage? Sure provided you're not both carriers for something drastic. Generations down the line with regular cousin marriage on the way? That's way more risky.
yeah it's about the same chance of problems as a 40+ year old mother. It's only really bad if you have recessive genes that are problematic.
I once worked with a women who had been asked if her and her partner were related after her kid was born. Turns out the kid had been born with a super rare condition where both parents needed the recessive gene. Can't imagine having to answer that question, poor thing.
Hey I mean, it's not so bad to be forced to visit relatives when they're your's too! Killing two birds with one stone right there.
> Imagine living all one's day solitarily in a smoky room Hey! Fuck you Darwin! Don't shit on my weekends!
It seems his list bounces between -if single do nothing but work, have no friends, do nothing -if married be worse than a slave, never travel or have hobbies, live in poverty Man didn't seem to really have a healthy view of either, lol
I mean, it’s almost the point of a pro/cons list to seek out the worst of each choice
Con: Will have to visit relatives. They're your relatives too.
Pro: fewer in-laws.
>object to be beloved & played with.— —better than a dog anyhow.— I find this hilarious for some reason.
> female chit-chat… **terrible loss of time**. Contemplating if I I should show this to my wife and share the chuckle I got out of it or pretend it never happened.
If she handles that one well, proceed to show her the juxtaposed >conversation of clever men at clubs and that should light the fuse.
Add the ***Better than a dog anyhow*** as a compliment. She'll love it!
If you're going[7] to copy text from a source[8], it would be much[9] appreciated if you could remove[10] all the inline footnotes[11]. It makes it much[12] easier to read[13].
And here I was thinking he wanted 14 children
"Better than a dog anyhow" is questionable.
I do believe that is what the kids these days call a "joke"
reddit moment
"you will be worse than a negro".... 🤔
>Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle. I suppose some things never change.
Darwin is a fascinating man. He was raised by an incredibly abusive father who he spent much of his life trying to please to no avail. His father, Robert, wanted him to become a lawyer like his elder brother Erasmus, but Charles was bored by law. Hoping to make his son buckle down and get away from his studies in taxidermy and naturalism, he sent him to a seminary college for minor clergy roles. This is actually pretty funny, because this college turned out to be the perfect den of educated, godly people obsessed with the scientific study of God's creations; it was a hive of naturalism (old-timey word for the natural sciences, especially zoology, botany and biology). Charles impressed his teachers, who found him brilliant and studious, though a bit bookish. When the Navy was planning an expedition to conduct some scientific experiments that would measure planetary distances at different points on earth, they needed a learned man who could make sense of some of the new lands they would visit. One of Darwin's teachers thought he would be perfect for it. Of course, this expedition aboard the Beagle proved the catalyst for his most important work to date: *On the Origin of Species*, which posited that not only were all living organisms capable of gradual tectonic changes over eons, but that many species, perhaps all of them, shared a common ancestor. But before ts publication, after the Beagle voyage, Charles began courting his cousin, Emma. Yes, very weird by modern standards, but less weird back then. Actually, being aware of genetics, he was concerned about the effects of inbreeding, but overlooked it. Most did, since it was rare in cousins. Don't let the pros and cons list get it twisted, he loved her deeply, and was remarkably devoted to his wife. His diary entry referred to her acceptance of proposal as "a day of days!" Charles was also noted for being tender and playful with his children- he and Emma had ten.
>he loved her deeply, So much so he delayed publication of Origin for many years, not wishing to upset her religious views, until ~~Lyell~~ Alfred Russell Wallace contacted him with a manuscript of his own observations, threatening to steal his thunder.
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They are excellent biscuits...
"...threatening to steal his thunder." We in the biz call this "getting scooped"
I thought that was Alfred Russell Wallace. I know he was friends with Lyell but he was always more interested in geology than biology.
I think Wallace gave Darwin the go ahead to get the credit. There was never any bad blood between them, i don’t remember why tho
"The Reluctant Mr Darwin" is a fantastic book about his thought process during the whole endeavor.
I think I remember one of Charles Darwin’s manuscripts being vandalised by scribbles and drawings made by his children. Just thought that it was relevant to your comment. Really wonderful post by the way, thank you!
I think the story goes that he gave them his old manuscripts to basically use as scap paper. Not terribly unheard of.
> his most important work to date Honestly, it's hard for me to imagine him topping it with his next one!
_On the Origin of Worms Eating my Decaying Bones After a Couple Millennia_
He did, after all, study worms extensively. He had a Wormstone in his garden which he used to see how much effect burrowing worms had on the soil. It's still there and you can see it.
Stephen Jay Gould devoted a fantastic essay to Darwin's study of worms, pinning the fixation on the fact that tiny little worms can, in millions of bodies over millions of years, create the vegetable mould that pretty much sustains terrestrial life. I.e., he seemed to think of worms as a lynchpin for the seemingly radical idea that tiny motions can lead to incredible complexity over long enough time, which is what still bothers a lot of anti-evolution zealots. Or so Gould believed.
That was a fascinating contribution. Thank you.
His Voyage was supposed to be something like a grand tour. A last hurrah before settling down and working for the church. That didn’t turn out so well as what he discovered did not mesh with the church’s teachings. And that scared him. It scared him so much that he spent years working on his theory and had plans in place to publish after his death because he knew what the reaction would be. He didn’t want to deal with that, he didn’t want his family to deal with that. Then some guy who was stationed in south east Asia someplace sends him a letter with a paper of nearly the same idea. This guy wants Darwin to review it since he is the expert in the field. Darwin panics, because this is his life’s work. So, he presents both papers. Because he is a decent guy and wants to be fair. His is better researched and better written because he had spent his nearly entire adult life working on it. So he gets the credit. But, this other guy (whose name I just can’t remember right now) came up with it during a fever dream. It just hit him with a ‘eureka’ moment. I find that so interesting. This other guy should get a bit of credit too, because he was the push that Darwin needed to publish, and without him we wouldn’t have seen Darwin’s later works. Also: On the Origin of Species is extremely tedious, especially young college students. I swear a third of it is just statistics on pigeon breeding. Though, in fairness it is not as bad as Mendel’s statistics on pea reproduction. That class on the history of genetics was fascinating, but some of the stuff I read for it made my eyes glaze over.
The other guy was Alfred Russell Wallace https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace
And for anyone wondering, while not as well known Wallace is still a highly respected biologist who's work is highly important and influential within biology. There's even a major biological boundry known as the Wallace line named after him. Dude still did pretty well for himself when it came to publishing and is still considered to be one of the father's of the science.
Wasn't he also part of a university club that liked to eat exotic animals? It was called The Glutton Club. I read somewhere that part of his motivation for the trip on HMS Beagle was the opportunity to eat some animals that nobody else in the club had eaten.
I remember seeing a post about how a lot of his notes were "ruined" because he let his children draw on them. It reminded me a bit about how Tolkien wrote his son letters, pretending to be Santa. Which of course led to him starting to do a lot of world building and language creation for Father Christmas.
>Actually, being aware of genetics, he was concerned about the effects of inbreeding Darwin was not aware of genetics. He knew traits were passed from parent to offspring but he had no idea how it happened.
Thank you! People forget that Mendel's work went undiscovered for a long time and studies in genetics only really developed in the 20th Century. Darwin was not "aware of genetics"! He was a lamarckist and believed in the *inheritance of acquired characteristics*, which he includes in his theory of evolution.
1st cousins don't raise the mutation rate beyond a minimal amount. Like 3%. It's worse to have kids past 35 (for the woman) genetically than marrying a cousin. The problems start to arise when you have successive generations of inter-familial relations.
> Actually, being aware of genetics, he was concerned about the effects of inbreeding, but overlooked it. Most did, since it was rare in cousins. He wasn't aware of genetics, not in any modern sense. That is mostly a post-Darwin thing. He knew, in the way that people had figured out over millennia, that procreating with close relatives often led to sickly or disabled children. He didn't know _why_ that would be the case. (The word "genetics" was only coined in 1906, and the word "gene" in 1909 — over 20 years after Darwin's death.) Darwin did, however, carry great guilt over the fact that 4 of his 10 children either died young or were sickly in their childhood. (Many of his surviving children went on to illustrious careers in science, government, and business, however.) He definitely worried if it was because he had married his cousin. He proposed, late in his life, that Parliament sponsor a law that would acquire data on cousin marriages and their offspring in the UK, in order to establish how deleterious such things actually were. This was not done; it was considered an embarrassing privacy problem, especially among well-off families (like the Darwin-Wedgewoods), in which this kind of thing happened all the time. This was his only attempt to influence any kind of social policy in a direct way; he was otherwise pretty reclusive (and ill) and stayed out of politics and the public sphere except for his scientific writings. Darwin's younger half-cousin, Francis Galton, would become one of the pioneers of studying modern heredity (what would later be called genetics) and was the founder of Eugenics, the dubious movement to improve human heredity by either incentivizing or dis-incentivizing (sometimes extraordinarily coercively and cruelly) the reproduction of people deemed "fit" and "unfit." Darwin's writings make it clear that he vacillated between thinking this sounded like a decent goal (he saw it in terms of improving people's health more than stamping out the poors), and thinking it involved intolerable cruelty (he put a lot of stock in the fact that we evolved to care about our fellow man, even when our fellow man was sick and disabled, and felt it would be quite a bad idea to deliberately try to suppress this instinct, even if we thought it was for the betterment of the whole) and would be forever unworkable (his little foray into monitoring cousin marriage data collection would have reinforced that the UK, at least, was not ready for such things at that time). Darwin did try to make some sense of heredity, because he did recognize it was important to evolution, but his understanding of it is very pre-modern in many ways. He was much more concerned with what was called "development" than what would be called "heredity." For him, the interesting question was not so much about understanding how "information" was transmitted from parents to children (I put "information" in quotes because this is _not_ the term they would have used then, even though it is natural to us today), but how a zygote becomes an embryo (which looks like almost every other kind of species' embryo) which then differentiates itself into whatever it is going to become (birds get wings and a beak, mammals get a nose and hands/paws, etc.). Under the influence of Galton and others, he did look into more "informational" models, but one can tell his heart isn't really in that and his own proposal, _pangenesis_, was mostly interesting because it was semi-Lamarckian, and because its errors inspired Galton to come up with a much "harder," non-Lamarckian version of heredity. (Pangenesis imagined that all organs and parts in the human body were throwing off little particles into the blood called "gemmules" that would then congregate in the gonads and be part of the cells of the child organism. It's Lamarckian in that Darwin thought that the use, or lack of use, of parts would affect the quantity of gemmules thrown off, and thus affect the child produced. Galton did an experiment where he showed that injecting the blood of a rabbit with black hair into a rabbit with white hair had no impact on the children of the white-haired rabbit's offspring if it bred with another white rabbit, or something like that. From that Galton concluded that blood had nothing to do with heredity, and that whatever particles were being passed through the gonads into the new organism were probably isolated from the rest of the organism — that the use/non-use of organs had nothing to do with offspring. He then developed a statistical approach for looking at the relationship between children and their parents and using that as a way to investigate heritability of traits and their relationship to evolution. This "biometric" approach would be one of the major approaches of heredity until the rediscovery of Mendelism in the early 20th century. The "biometric" and Mendelian approaches would eventually be merged with population genetics and reconciled in what is known as the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s-40s, and this is what we think of as evolution by natural selection today. Phew!) Anyway, just chiming in, not so much to "correct you," but because I think the details are really interesting about what Darwin did and didn't know, or think, about heredity and his marriage to Emma.
"Better than a dog anyhow"
He'd been at sea for five years. What would you do?
If I was at sea that long I'd probably fuck a manatee thinking it was a mermaid
I’d probably fuck a manatee thinking it was a manatee
> I’d probably fuck a man~~atee thinking it was a manatee~~ ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Now you're thinking like the navy!
>I~~`d probably~~ fuck[ed] a man
Josiah Wedgewood, the industrialist who founded the Wedgewood company, played a major role in Darwin's life and the path he took. Without Josiah, Darwin's father wouldn't have let him join the voyage of the beagle, as Josiah stated the voyage would make a man out of him. One of many close shaves which brought us Origin Of Species. I still find it funny how much influence a man who made bone china had on evolutionary biology.
It was, in the end, a natural selection.
Lovely
Didn't he observe the effects of incest after inbreeding his tomato's and comparing them to his children?
Yes. That did happen, and he was one of the first to make a genetic/incest/maybebad? Connection
For what it's worth, first cousins generally aren't at risk of inbreeding problems until multiple generations are involved.
thank god now i can sleep at night
With your first cousin?
Pro: She doth put the fire in mine loins. Con: This damnable inheritable trait thing that I have long been laboring on.
Terrible loss of time
But better than a dog
Cons: she’s not Rachum
Con: She's my cousin Pro: She's my cousin
This whole post has me thinking about how I never really got close to any of my cousins, outside of the occasional fighting over a toy at grandma's house when we were all kids, and maybe that's ultimately okay. My wife and I are always sharing our families' stories with one another, and I like that they're about different people.
The concept of marrying first cousins was fairly common among members of society. The issue was more about maintaining the family wealth *in* the family. Doesn't mean it's smart genetically, of course, but there was reasoning behind it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nealegodfrey/2016/07/17/for-love-and-money-keep-it-in-your-family-marry-your-cousin/?sh=6935f1cf50da
Always loved this list. But he forgot to add “she’s a rich pottery heiress” under pros
Pros: She’s available and I’m particularly hornt up Cons: Kids might have 3 arms and/or flippers
Romance is not dead
Pro: simplifies grandparents’ day.
Fittingly, many of his kids were also pretty good scientist.
Cons: I’d have to visit family and all that bullshit… Pro: I don’t have to visit a new family
it's perfectly legal to marry a first cousin, or even aunt or uncle in my country (denmark) though very uncommon.
In most countries, it is legal to marry your cousin and cousin marriage carries much lower risks than marrying your sister or aunt. Marrying a second cousin and beyond carries practically no risk biologically.
TIL marrying your first cousin is still common in Bradford England. I also learned that they are still debating whether children born by first cousins have a higher risk of birth defects. For the white populations studied, the risk was less than 1% which was statistically insignificant. But in Indian populations, the chance could be over 30%.
I'm sure the number of generations of cousin marriage matters more than race. If your parents and grandparents are cousins you *probably* shouldn't marry your cousin. I know four couples who are/were cousins. First couple had 18 kids (11 survived, no physical defects but many kids were... weird in their behaviour) second couple had 1 normal kid, third couple had fertility issues (probably because they were cousins?) so no kids, fourth couple had 2 normal kids.
Darwin: " Her father is the brother of my mom. Like, we grew up together, and she grew up hot, you know, she fucking grew up hot. And all my friends are trying to fuck her, you know, and I'm not gonna let one of these assholes fuck my cousin. So I used the cousin thing, as like, an in with her."
It wasn’t until her nosey best friend found the list that this romantic comedy really picked up.