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Summer 2022 Family Retreat recap and post-retreat discussion

There is research on the prospect of marrying cousins proving that it isn’t what it is made out to be.
It’s searchable, no, I’m not going to do it.
 
steve said:
There is research on the prospect of marrying cousins proving that it isn’t what it is made out to be.
It’s searchable, no, I’m not going to do it.
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I've written about this before. Having children with 1st cousins raises the incidence of significant birth defects from 1.4% to 1.7%. That can be spun two ways:
  • It only increases the likelihood by .3%; or
  • Having children with 1st cousins raises the potential for birth defects by 21%.
The one that sounds scarier is the one that gets thrown around the most, and it wouldn't have the same suppressive effect if the fact that birth defects are highly rare were mentioned.

Having children with 2nd cousins has an almost imperceptible effect.

The increase in birth defects is much more pronounced when women don't start having children until after the age of 30. Or if they've previously had an abortion.

And all of this is complicated by other factors, including that, actually, occasional mating between 1st cousins, as long as it isn't done generation after generation, actually strengthens the gene pool and results in fewer birth defects. This practice has been engaged in for centuries by royal families, and the canard that they have larger than average percentages of defective children is just a myth.

[Had to edit the stats up above due to shifting from apples to oranges mid-sentence the first time around!]
 
Keith Martin said:
And all of this is complicated by other factors, including that, actually, occasional mating between 1st cousins, as long as it isn't done generation after generation, actually strengthens the gene pool and results in fewer birth defects
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Can you give a reference for that? It's quite interesting, and has parallels with animal breeding. In practice on a small farm the livestock are all closely related, especially because only a very small number of males are used and sometimes they are kept from the best bred on-farm. Yet birth defects are rare in agriculture (common enough for everyone to have seen them, but per thousand are very rare). I never thought about European royal families from the perspective of a selective breeding programme.
 
FollowingHim said:
Can you give a reference for that? It's quite interesting, and has parallels with animal breeding. In practice on a small farm the livestock are all closely related, especially because only a very small number of males are used and sometimes they are kept from the best bred on-farm. Yet birth defects are rare in agriculture (common enough for everyone to have seen them, but per thousand are very rare). I never thought about European royal families from the perspective of a selective breeding programme.
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Sorry; just one of those sets of data that fascinated me years ago but that I'm unmotivated to go research again. I learned what I needed to learn and then, as is always the case when it's just a temporary hunt, entirely failed to focus on the sources!

My original interest -- 3 decades ago -- arose from discovering that, prior to 2 generations before me, my father's family was very enamored of 1st cousins marrying each other -- and that didn't stop him from designing the Apollo 11 Eagle, his one brother from rising from a job installing nuts and bolts on the country's 1st nuclear power plant to running them himself and being consulted by the US Senate, or their other brother from being the operations manager of the Mayo Clinic.
 
Here’s a little known fact about me. I researched and utilized some higher level genetic studies working with rats back in my teens. I bred and sold rats that routinely sold for $500+ apiece. Some rare genetic traits that rendered 75% in vitro mortality. That convinced my tenured college professor great uncle that homeschoolers weren’t all idiots.

Yep. I sold rats.
 
NickF said:
Here’s a little known fact about me. I researched and utilized some higher level genetic studies working with rats back in my teens. I bred and sold rats that routinely sold for $500+ apiece. Some rare genetic traits that rendered 75% in vitro mortality. That convinced my tenured college professor great uncle that homeschoolers weren’t all idiots.

Yep. I sold rats.
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Now you can't use that at the next Retreat during Two Truths and a Lie... 😂
 
frederick said:
Since there is a close DNA relationship, will it work on politicians? But I don't know who you could sell them to(?)
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They are very indiscriminate breeders.
Worse than rats.
 
frederick said:
Since there is a close DNA relationship, will it work on politicians? But I don't know who you could sell them to(?)
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They sell to the highest bidder. Major multinational corporations, power brokers, foreign governments.
 
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