When reading Stephen Colbert's very funny book I Am America (And So Can You!), I kept getting the impression that at least one of Colbert's writers was a reader of mine. Nothing at all was ripped off, but a lot seemed riffed off, which I very much like. Then I came to an entire page of the bestseller on the less-than-burning topic of cousin marriage, confirming my surmise.
So, for the benefit of Colbert writers, let me point out that the scientist, Alan Bittles, whose research I used most for my pre-Iraq war article on cousin marriage has a new pro-cousin marriage book out, Consanguinity in Context:
A Perth-based researcher has called for an end to the stigma surrounding marriage between cousins, after uncovering evidence that the health risks have been greatly exaggerated.
Murdoch University adjunct professor Alan Bittles has shed new light on the consequences of intra-familial marriages, which he says are on the rise in Australia due to increased migration.
Bittles has sought to address common misconceptions of same-blood marriage, from a social, medical and religious perspective, in a new book based on 35 years of research.
Bittles claims more than 1.1 billion people are either married to a close relative or are the offspring of such a marriage, which are common in many Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu and Jewish communities.
In his book, Consanguinity in Context, Bittles called for greater understanding and acceptance of the practice, which is largely taboo in Western countries.
He said there was a general belief that first cousin marriages lead to negative genetic outcomes, yet a large majority of children born to first cousins are healthy.
And in many cases of those born with defects, non-genetic factors were often to blame.
It's kind of like how society is always getting upset at people who drive with their infants on their laps while texting. A large majority of the time, however, the baby doesn't fly out the window of the moving car. And even if the infant does land on its head, it probably didn't inherit good brains to start with, so no biggie. Likewise, why is society worried about Muslim immigrants forcing their daughters to marry a first cousin from the Old Country as part of an immigration fraud scheme and then having the taxpayers pay for a lifetime of care for the offspring with birth defects?
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61 comments:
Arabs Suffer From High Rate Of Gene Disorders (Al Arabiya)
It's a scientific problem, not a political one.
If interbreeding between close cousins isn't such a bad thing, then why did so many old and successful cultures -- for example the Medieval Church, the Navajos to the Zulus -- consider it abhorrent and unclean? And why did the royal lines which practiced inbreeding end up producing so many defective specimens?
Looks like Bittles has decided to fill the well-rewarded niche of "apologist for cousin marriages among immigrants to Britain." Instead of prosecuting them, he says, the UK must legalize them--to heck with Western sensibilities.
Of course the next thing is that instead of trying to avert the costs of caring for the drooling and twitching products of consanguineous procreation, the UK must welcome such costs, and subsidize cousin marriages by raising taxes on those workers whose industrial productivity isn't shot to hell by the burden of caring for offspring with serious genetic disorders, or by the well-documented depression of IQ and every other phenotypic advantage by inbreeding.
Eastern European Jews had cousin and uncle/niece marriage and generated a high IQ population.
One of the many Anonymous said:
"Eastern European Jews had cousin and uncle/niece marriage and generated a high IQ population."
True, but the Ashkenazim are also famously cancer-prone and susceptible to a number of other diseases that are almost certainly hereditary.
One of the many Anonymous said:
"Eastern European Jews had cousin and uncle/niece marriage and generated a high IQ population."
True. And the Ashkenazim are also famously cancer-prone and susceptible to a number of other diseases that are almost certainly in large part hereditary.
Hunter S. Thompson made the observation while covering a 1982 Palm Beach scandal centered on the ugly divorce of Peter & Roxanne Pulitzer that rich men after investing a lot of time, effort and money in the production of beautiful daughters see no reason to share them with anyone else. Why dilute the genes one has worked so hard to assemble?
At this rate, Sailer will be saying the Pope, Castro, Chavez, Steven Spielberg, and the Japanese Prime Minister are also readers of his blog.
From the Saudi Journal of Kidney Disease and Transplantion . 2012 Jan;23(1) 158: Etiology of Chronic Kidney Failure in Jenin District- Palestine. conclusion: The high frequency of inherited kidney disease in some families may be explained by the very high incidence of consanguineous marriages especially among cousins in these families.
"Eastern European Jews had cousin and uncle/niece marriage and generated a high IQ population"
Its called endogamy, the Rothschild did the same to keep the wealth in the family.
Eastern European Jews had cousin and uncle/niece marriage and generated a high IQ population.
Really? Among first cousins and first uncles/nieces?
Now that the door has been opened by gay marriage, it was only a matter of time. Polygamy is next.
I never cease to be amazed at how the land of my ancestors now spits on every virtue, every distinction, every folkway, every hard-earned insight that once made them admired.
Rothschilds: several uncle-niece dynastic marriages.
Uncle-niece marriages are legal in Rhode Island, but only if you are Jewish. (My guess is that this is a very old piece of legislation).
Uncle-niece marriages are legal in Rhode Island, but only if you are Jewish.
Yuck, how icky is that...
Uncle-niece marriages are legal in Rhode Island, but only if you are Jewish.
I find it hard to believe a distinction would be made at all, even putting aside the constitutionality of it. Can you provide a citation to the statute?
Ed West from the Daily Telegraph reads iSteve. Not sure about the Pope.
I think you will find that Rhode Island's special dispensation for Jews to marry their cousins is explained by anti-Semitism. Because Jews were a very small community, and were discriminated against, Gentile bigotry sometimes left them no other option but to marry their cousins.
Now that the door has been opened by gay marriage, it was only a matter of time. Polygamy is next.
Nope. Polygyny is eugenic. The powers that be are pushing dysgenics.
Uncle-niece marriages are legal in Rhode Island, but only if you are Jewish.
I find it hard to believe a distinction would be made at all, even putting aside the constitutionality of it. Can you provide a citation to the statute?
It was certainly still valid law at the time of the famous decision in In re May's Estate, 114 N.E.2d 4 (N.Y. 1953). Of the 48 states of the Union then, uncle-niece marriage was outlawed in 46 of them, except for Georgia, which allowed it across the board. RI was unique in its statutory exemption for Jews. I do not know if the exemption was closed after May.
I thought Steve's case against cousin marriage was about the kind of society we want to live in, not the health consequences?
In his book, See No Evil Robert Baer tells of the CIA employee who was a US-born Indian of a certain caste. He failed the polygraph on the calibration question of whether he had sex with his female relatives. It turned out that because no women of his caste were available, he was copulating with his mother and sister. Apparently this was acceptable morally in his particular variant of his religion. The CIA cashiered him anyway. (Page 37, should you desire to check this story out such as on Google Books.)
Apart from the genetic problems associated with cousin marriage, I worry about the corruption and nepotism that many immigrants bring to the west.
Somehow countries in the West found a way to become high trust, low corruption, prosperous and functional societies. So why are we bringing in vast numbers of immigrants from dysfunction hell holes? Most of these immigrants will bring their dysfunctional culture with them.
It is not just the countries where cousin marriages are common that are corrupt. Russia, China,sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Mexico, and Central America are all highly corrupt. Hong Kong and Singapore have markedly less corruption, but they were British colonies. The low-corruption British culture and the high-IQ east Asians was a good combination.
Anonymous said... 4/28/12 5:38 PM
"the Medieval Church, the Navajos to the Zulus -- consider it abhorrent and unclean?"
Petition for Dispensation from Consanguinity
we conclude that the last 2500 years of Proto East Bantu...descended social organization was dominated by unilineal societies practicing 'preferential' cross-cousin marriage.
While twentieth-century anthropological field research suggests that Apache bands
in general maintained matrilocal social organization and endorsed cross-cousin marriage,
considerable evidence shows that for the eastern Lipan and their Mescalero relatives, such rules,
had they existed at all, fell into disuse after 1750. A flexible marriage system had to be
implemented to incorporate so many newcomers into the society.
Aaron Lopez, the famed Jewish merchant and slave trader of the 1700s, made a home in Newport, Rhode Island. He helped keep the Revolutionary Army supplied.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Lopez
The whole cousin marriage thing reminds me of what Paul Graham (whose essay I read by reading iSteve) said because it's an arbitrary taboo if you look across time and culture (every culture has one, but they all differ on really significant points)
"It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise...
Changes between the past and the present sometimes do represent progress. In a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's because we're right and they're wrong. But this becomes rapidly less true as you move away from the certainty of the hard sciences. By the time you get to social questions, many changes are just fashion. The age of consent fluctuates like hemlines...
You might find contradictory taboos. In one culture it might seem shocking to think x, while in another it was shocking not to. But I think usually the shock is on one side. In one culture x is ok, and in another it's considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that's shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one..."
I mean, I agree that cousin marriage is problematic for a social fluidity and high trust, but the science of condemning it has always seemed suspect to me. Do you guys who refer to the Hapsburgs and hill billies everytime this comes up realize how much you sound like people who bring up phrenology and Hitler everytime HBD or eugenics comes up?
Veracitor said...
"drooling and twitching products of consanguineous procreation"
"depression of IQ and every other phenotypic advantage by inbreeding."
Was Lysenko reincarnated?
BROTHER–SISTER MARRIAGE IN ROMAN EGYPT
"According to official census returns from Roman Egypt (first to third centuries CE) preserved on papyrus, 23·5% of all documented marriages in the Arsinoites district in the Fayum (n!102) were between brothers and sisters. In the second century CE, the rates were 37% in the city of Arsinoe and 18·9% in the surrounding villages."
"in fact, if only by chance, some of the most prolific couples recorded in the census returns are full siblings"
From the Wikipedia write-up on the colonial Jewish merchant Aaron Lopez, there is some interesting information to be gleaned about immigration. It appears that by 1762, Rhode Island authorities felt Rhode Island was already overcrowded.
"The court reasoned that the 1740 act was intended to increase the population of the colony, and since the colony had grown crowded the law no longer applied."
eHarmony now matches immigrants to cousins
A single cousin marriage, from cousins in a population that doesn't make a habit of it, doesn't increase risk of genetic disorders much.
Where you start getting problems is in populations where cousin marriage is predominant. Too much reinforcement in the population at large. Also, cousin spouses are likely to be too closely related due to endogeny in past generations.
Two American first cousins from a culture where that's rare can likely safely marry and have children, in other words. In populations where it's been common for generations, on the other hand, parents who want healthy grandchildren would do well not to marry their daughter to a cousin.
various posters said...
"uncle-niece marriages"
Voltaire married his niece.
List of coupled cousins
Charles Darwin and his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood.
Albert Einstein and his first cousin (through his mother) and second cousin (through his father), Elsa Löwenthal née Einstein
H. G. Wells, author, and his first cousin, Isabel Mary Wells (first wife)
Avunculate marriage
Leonidas, King of Sparta and his half-niece, Gorgo
Ed West from the Daily Telegraph reads iSteve. --Davis
OT, but what's with all these English Eds as of late?: Ed West, Ed Milliband, Eddie Izzard, Eddie Redmayne. I thought the English prefered "Ted" and left "Ed" to the Yanks. (With the occasional "Ned" in both countries.)
Or is it a trans-Atlantic "cool", as with all the young Garys and Waynes born to Britproles long after those names were tired out in America? (And Ian, Colin and Trevor in the opposite direction.)
Gentile bigotry sometimes left them no other option but to marry their cousins....
Jews and everyone else... Marriage to second cousins was common in colonial America. No doubt it disgusted the Jesuits who ran Quebec!
There was a first-cousin marriage among the Gardiners of Gardiner's Island, New York's first English family. David Parshall and Mary Gardiner (grandchildren of David Gardiner, son of founder Lion) married ca. 1704.
Gardiner's Island was a very small community.
"Among first cousins and first uncles/nieces?"
First cousin marriage was widespread as late as the 19th Century. Charles Darwin was married to his first cousin, and it was he in fact who suggested that inbreeding may cause genetic diseases, before anyone knew what a gene was.
On the other hand, our objection to endogamy has gone a bit too far when people find it repulsive when 3rd or 4th cousins marry (quite often not even finding out until after their marriage). Third cousins share about 0.78125% of their DNA. 4th cousins share 1/4th of that. At that point the amount of shared DNA is noise, probably not much riskier than marrying someone of the same ethnic group.
"think you will find that Rhode Island's special dispensation for Jews to marry their cousins is explained by anti-Semitism. Because Jews were a very small community, and were discriminated against, Gentile bigotry sometimes left them no other option but to marry their cousins."
Oh, piss off, Sally. The bigotry moves in both directions.
Rosalind Franklin, the X-ray crystallographer who helped to discover DNA, was the granddaughter of a rich English Jew - a rich English Jew whose will stipulated that any descendant marrying a gentile would be disinherited (though the clause would later be thrown out in court). See her biography, The Dark Lady of DNA.
The father of English poet Siegfried Sassoon, a member of the Jewish Baghdad merchant family, was disinherited for marrying Siegfried's mother because she was a gentile.
This was all happening in a Great Britain that had already had a Jewish prime minister and where Jews were routinely appointed to positions of power.
And then there are projects like Birthright Israel, which encourage American Jews to marry other Jews and which are openly supported by prominent Jewish political advisers (Elliot Abrams) and billionaires (Sheldon Adelson).
Note that outside of Haredi Jews, the religious pretense for intramarriage is all but gone. Few people really believe in Leviticus anymore. But Jews are perfectly free to encourage their own to only marry other Jews (as all of us should be free to direct our loved ones about the acceptability of various ethnic groups with regards to marriage). But let's not pretend their insistence on marrying each other is was due primarily to outside bigotry.
"Uncle-niece marriages are legal in Rhode Island, but only if you are Jewish."
Or, if you have the balls to challenge that "preferential" treatment in a court of law; or start a religion where uncle/niece marriages are legal.
"It's a scientific problem, not a political problem."
It's a floor wax AND a dessert topping!
Cousin marriage, schmousin marriage. The real issue is that people from these cultures simply don't belong here in any large numbers simply because they're too foreign from us. This is the West, and we are the Westerners and they are not.
They have no love or loyalty for us. They just showed up to grab our stuff.
The subcons kicked out the British because the British were simply Not Them.
Time for Britain to return the favor.
"So why are we bringing in vast numbers of immigrants from dysfunction hell holes?"
Because racism is evil.
Because preferring your own culture to a foreign own is eveil.
Because believing that America should exist for the benefit of Americans is evil.
Because the big business "Right" and the anti-American Left want it that way.
An intelligent culture is strength. In the absence of an intelligent, well-defined culture you get consumerism. Business likes that, too.
"and then having the taxpayers pay for a lifetime of care for the offspring with birth defects?"
In the UK, birth defects among the offspring of the cousin-marriage set (mostly Pakistani & Bangladeshi) are apparently ten times those in the general population, so this is certainly an issue. From what I can tell though, it is the repeated multi-generational required cousin marriage that causes this. The occasional first cousin marriage among Anglo-Saxons does not seem to have the same effect.
"Bradford has three times the national rate among children for disabilities including deafness and blindness."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9714000/9714582.stm
But the benefits are great, because it keeps the migration chain going. A UK passport is a great benefit - why not keep it in the family?
"Families in Bradford are still arranging marriages and choosing brides and grooms among their extended family back home - one in four children in the study had a parent brought over for marriage."
I imagine that when the first immigrants to the UK earned enough to take a holiday in the old country and visit family, their tales that the government would pay you to have children (and the more you had, the more money you got) would probably have been greeted with the same kind of incredulity that doubtless met 16th-century UK sailors, reporting that West Africans would pay with bags of gold dust for knives, combs and mirrors.
"True, but the Ashkenazim are also famously cancer-prone and susceptible to a number of other diseases that are almost certainly hereditary."
Yeah, my Grandma(Irish Catholic) has Crohns disease. I went to a get-together regarding this disease and we were the only ones whe weren´t Jewish.
At this rate, Sailer will be saying the Pope, Castro, Chavez, Steven Spielberg, and the Japanese Prime Minister are also readers of his blog.
If only... the world would be a much better and saner place
I believe Ashk. cousin marriage is covered in Efron's Defenders of the Race--around 7% at the end of the 19C in the shtetlach of the Pale, in part due to small population size in such towns. The phenomenon has since declined to insignificance--around 1% perhaps--and the orthodox are notoriously disciplined about genetic screening. Compare this to 50-70% for many Muslim communities. Bittles is doing a very serious disservice for Muslim groups with his apology. Many Muslims quite literally do not understand the hazards of consanguinity and engage in the practice out of habit and ignorance. I know of cases in which changes in marriage partner were made at the last minute due to education of the dangers.
The whole pop culture meme of: "inbreeding causes retardation and flippers and hillbillies and DELIVERENCE" comes from Charles II of Spain who had a pituitary hormone deficiency and mandibular prognathism aka Hapsburg lip.
So... six thousand years of recorded history and billions of people inbreeding but there was one guy 300 years ago with a deformity.
Sort of like genetic parthenogenesis, marry a cousin and your DNA will rearrange itself to give children genes for deformities which neither of the parents have.
Search Charles II spain inbreeding:
"The Role of Inbreeding in the Extinction of a European
Royal Dynasty"
"Inbreeding May Have Doomed Spain's Habsburg Dynasty"
"Inbreeding brought down Spain's Habsburgs: study | Reuters"
"How inbreeding killed off a line of kings"
As if it's highly unusual for a royal family to be inbred. Every royal family in europe at the time was simarly inbred. Every royal family in the world at that time was inbred. Everey royal family since recorded history was inbred.
But if one royal family out of thousands has a genetic disorder, then it must be because they are inbred, even though they all are.
And heres the punchline:
mandibular prognathism aka Hapsburg lip is
autosomal dominant.
pic
The archetype of the 'inbreeding expresses recessive traits turning you into deformed DELIVERENCE people is actually a dominant trait.
In real life mental retardation can caused outbreeding with someone of a different blood type.
Erythroblastosis fetalis
"Rh disease and ABO incompatibility disease are caused when a mother's immune system produces antibodies against the red blood cells of her unborn child. The antibodies cause the baby's red blood cells to be destroyed and the baby develops anemia."
"Babies who survive pregnancy may develop kernicterus, which can lead to deafness, speech problems, cerebral palsy , or mental retardation ."
Hillbillies in the appellation mountains would have a relatively higher percentage of rh negative blood and therefore would have a higer amount of rh incompatibility.
Really? Among first cousins and first uncles/nieces?
Yes.
"Uncle-niece marriages are legal in Rhode Island, but only if you are Jewish."
Yuck, how icky is that...
ANTI-SEMITE!!!
Polygamy is next.
But only if you're Muslim.
Nope. Polygyny is eugenic. The powers that be are pushing dysgenics.
I think you'll find I've solved that above.
I think you will find that Rhode Island's special dispensation for Jews to marry their cousins is explained by anti-Semitism. Because Jews were a very small community, and were discriminated against, Gentile bigotry sometimes left them no other option but to marry their cousins.
Wait, you really were serious...
Why does ANTI-SEMITISM!!! never keep them where they're welcome?
P.S., Jews erected the wall of bigotry and racism between the world and themselves. Hence its ubiquity.
Baer tells of the CIA employee who was a US-born Indian of a certain caste. He failed the polygraph on the calibration question of whether he had sex with his female relatives. It turned out that because no women of his caste were available, he was copulating with his mother and sister.
Wrong Wrong WRONG!!! It was heathen bigotry.
The CIA cashiered him
See?
On the other hand, our objection to endogamy has gone a bit too far when people find it repulsive when 3rd or 4th cousins marry [...] probably not much riskier than marrying someone of the same ethnic group.
Right. Isn't a random member of the same race (or was it ethnic group?) roughly as related to you as a 4th cousin?
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were first cousins.
Veracitor said...
Arabs suffer from high rate of gene disorders
"several genomic diseases such as the blood disorder thalassaemia, diabetes, breast cancer and Down’s syndrome have reached epidemic levels"
1. blood disorder thalassaemia. Recessive trait. Could be avoided by eugenically mating with somone chosen because the don't have the allelle.
2. diabetes. Not a recessive trait.
3. breast cancer. Not a recessive trait.
4. Down’s syndrome. Not a recessive trait. Caused by advanced maternal age. Could be avoided by eugenically having children while very young.
There's a problem with the biological reductionist view of cousin marriage. Yes, on an individual level, cousin marriage isn't all that bad. But on the society level, if lots of people have children with their cousins, and only their cousins, it tends to create countries like Iraq, with a bunch of competing clans jockeying for influence in the government (or killing each other outright).
And as Steve pointed out, most cousin marriage in the west is a vehicle for chain migration that fills up western countries with hostiles from abroad, so in that context it's terrible.
In general, I would guess that whether or not inbreeding is harmful in a population depends in part on the genetic quality of that population. If especially smart, healthy relatives marry each other and are fecund, then there's probably a likelihood that they'll have smart, healthy, attractive offspring (though harmful recessives can still lurk under the surface and pop up in these pairings). So maybe the reason reason Pakistani cousin marriages produce so many sick children is that they're Pakistanis, rather than because they're inbreeders.
"1. blood disorder thalassaemia. Recessive trait. Could be avoided by eugenically mating with somone chosen because the don't have the allelle.
2. diabetes. Not a recessive trait.
3. breast cancer. Not a recessive trait.
4. Down’s syndrome. Not a recessive trait. Caused by advanced maternal age. Could be avoided by eugenically having children while very young."
2. Diabetes has a strong genetic component, though. My mother constantly watches out for the disease her mother and brother both have it. My guess is that inbreeding would amplify this effect.
3. See reasons why diabetes is a concern in inbreeding.
4. I'm actually surprised by this. I was under the impression that most children with Down's were born to older women, and I was also under the impression that Arab women tended to marry very young. But maybe there's a genetic disorder that makes them more prone to errors in meiosis, leading to higher rates of trisomy?
If Jews really did a lot of marriage within family, they would be mocked and saddled with the "inbred" label like Southerners are.
"Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were first cousins."
More evidence that inbreeding leads to low IQ!
This is an excellent example of the things that Steve brings up that don't even, seemingly, occur to anybody else, despite their undeniable significance for culture. It's linked and commented here:
http://ex-army.blogspot.com/2012/04/more-curmudgeonry.html
Anonymous said...
If Jews really did a lot of marriage within family, they would be mocked and saddled with the "inbred" label like Southerners are.
**********
Have you really looked at any photos of Anthony Weiner, or Deborah Wasserman-Schultz, or Adam Sandler, or Betty Friedan, or . . . ad nauseam?
@melykin - "It is not just the countries where cousin marriages are common that are corrupt. Russia, China, sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Mexico, and Central America are all highly corrupt."
russia and china both have long histories of inbreeding or endogamous mating.
i'm not so sure about the others, but mexico, i think, also has a long history of endogamous mating.
@ads - "I agree that cousin marriage is problematic for a social fluidity and high trust, but the science of condemning it has always seemed suspect to me."
Effect of Inbreeding on the Evolution of Altruistic Behavior by Kin Selection
anonymous said - "First cousin marriage was widespread as late as the 19th Century."
g. h. darwin calculated that the first-cousin marriage rate in england in the 1870s ranged from 1.5% to 4.5%, the upper classes marrying cousins more than the lower classes.
this is as opposed to cousin marriage rates in places like saudi arabia or pakistan today which are 50%+.
Inbreeding brings out the qualities, bad and good, which are already there. It is essential to animal breeding, but in animal breeding, they just cull out the undesireable ones. Nature did this to the human population for millennia, but today technology and sympathy prohibit this. So inbreeding must be highly restricted.
It's interesting to me that of the two humans I know well who are most probably the products of incest, both are very successful people. One is a former Air Force pilot and a tenured professor and the other missed being an Olympian due to an unfortunate accident: she has three children now who are all exceptional academically and athletically in school. The first is probably mother-son incest and the second even more probably brother-sister.
But even more common are the "Funny Looking Kids", malformed, retarded and/or disabled, from such unions. I worked in a state hospital for a while and met several such specimens. For them, abortion would have been a blessing.
"And as Steve pointed out, most cousin marriage in the west is a vehicle for chain migration that fills up western countries with hostiles from abroad, so in that context it's terrible."
True, but this problem needs to be addressed directly, because otherwise the invaders will find a way around it, such as "you marry my cousin and I'll marry your cousin," etc.
They don't want to be part of our societies. They don't want to assimilate. If all Pakistanis in Britain wanted to do was marry wanted to do was marry other ethnic Pakistanis they could do so without travelling back to Pakistan. There are about 2 million ethnic Pakistanis already in Britain - a large enough population by far to be self-sustaining, to provide an ample breeding pool.
But they want to continue the invasion. They want to keep the native culture "fresh." And they want to help out their families abroad.
So banning incestuous marriages isn't enough. It will only stop when the Brits say, "OK, we've had enough of the people from your shores.If you want to marry a native Pakistani, marry them and settle down in Pakistan." How many British Pakistanis would do so? Not a single one of them.
We have to direct this invasion firectly, by cutting off immigration entirely from non-assimilable populations. Because they've only taken the indirect methods to be what they are: weakness and cowardice.
William II of Orange was marrried to his cousin as was Queen Victoria.
The English and British royal families have been doing this for ages.
It was only when the rival Royals (Guelphs?) were doing it was wrong.
My late mother did a substantial amount of genealogy, taking several lines back to 17th C. America and beyond. Two of my ancestors (my 7th or 8th great-grandparents, iirc) were 2nd cousins, both the great-grandchildren of a man of some renown. They had 11 children (though perhaps stillbirths weren't recorded). One died, somehow, at 17. Another died in infancy, with his parents, as a result of a genetic deficiency known in layman's terms as "Injun scalping," during the 1758 raid on Friendship, Maine. The other 9 all survived well into adulthood, several of them into their early 80s. I'd add that they survived into adulthood despite the fact that many were still young when their parents were murdered, which can often be a detriment to longevity.
First cousin marriage is, well, gross. But we've taken our repulsion to "inbreeding" to some point beyond the ridiculous. A friend was telling me about a couple she knew who discovered shortly before their wedding that they were either 4th or 5th cousins. People they knew were whispering and wondering if it was weird or "icky" or dangerous.
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