http://www.mikedash.com/extras/forteana/ask-bizarre/hitler

I really need to read up more on “hybrid” vigor; etc.

____________

[same anonymous here.]

found out about studies done by some scientists in brazil on sickle cell, talassemia…
etc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/03/health/03CND-COUS.html

This is a very good article. I will bookmark it so that I can go through some of the sources when I have more time. Your speculation that resource-driven development in Arab states has allowed for higher rates of cousin marriage strikes me as accurate. Not so much, I think, in allowing it in general, because development is not prerequisite for higher rates, as you point out. But given that development had happened to support a standard of living as high as Saudi Arabia’s, would cousin marriage have persisted this much if it was human capital driven? My guess is no.

I have not watched the Channel 4 special. However, I wish that Ms. Ahmad’s comments in her Telegraph piece had been as careful as yours. The worst mistake is this:

” We know the children of first cousins are ten times more likely to be born with recessive genetic disorders which can include infant mortality, deafness and blindness. ”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1305078/TAZEEN-AHMAD-Three-uncles-deaf-Five-aunts-died-babies-Why-My-grandparents-cousins-married.html

Various versions of this false statement have now spread to many papers. Our own New York Daily News reprinted it as the first line of its article, now the leading article on Google News if you search for “cousin marriage.” In the NYDN version the main inaccuracy was in omitting that these are *recessive* disorders — not all genetic disorders. They should be quoting the rate of all genetic disorders to avoid misleading readers who don’t understand the difference. Due to all this, I had to lap it up when Ms. Ahmad was given a rebuke by this writer:

http://peoplewithvoices.com/2010/08/24/politicizing-cousin-marriages-plays-into-the-hands-of-the-far-right/

In America our situation is quite different from the British one because, alone among Western nations, we have laws banning cousin marriage. In fact, we even have laws criminalizing cousin couples in several states that are still prosecuted in rare cases:

http://reason.com/blog/2010/08/20/not-tonight-honey-its-a-felony

This is mostly ignored as a political issue, since our rate of first-cousin marriage is maybe 0.1%. But I think it can hardly be denied that it constitutes discrimination. As someone personally involved, I do feel some envy for the status of gay marriage as an issue, which at least has a recognized public case and Lawrence v. Texas on its side. And someone even did a poll on it once! (I admit I wouldn’t trade, in all fairness. Cousin marriage is less socially accepted but is also legal in more states.) Your characterization of American attitudes toward cousin marriage as “not particularly positive” is quite an understatement. As Paul and Spencer say, it is “highly stigmatized.”

This post comparing the two issues is well worth reading:

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/07/seriously-what-about-cousin-marriage.html

One other issue that has been on my mind recently is the difference between South Indian and Muslim cousin marriage. Cousin marriage rates in South India are actually surprisingly high, over 30% in many states according to consang.net. Yet at first glance this seems like a much more open society than many Arab nations like Iran or Egypt with comparable rates: the Telugu film industry is second only to the Hindi one in India, there are many foreign IT partnerships being welcomed there, and as you noted, the position of women actually seems higher in south rather than north India. I think we might want to be more careful when talking about social consequences to distinguish between cross- and parallel-cousin marriage.

…

Anon – I agree to your comment there is a significant difference between cousin marriage and marrying within one ethnicities.

I really need to read up more on “hybrid” vigor; etc. Still learning so again will be more careful in the future.

_________

that sounds racist. breeding within an ethnic group isn’t the same as inbreeding as in cousin marriage.

p.s. my family is from bangladesh, a low trust muslim society, and cousin marriage is not very common either.

My adult daughter says that everybody knows about this problem, but they marry their cousins anyway. The reason is that Arab society is a very low-trust society for those outside one’s own family. So most who marry cousins are doing it because the cousins are the only ones the family TRUSTS. In Morocco, men and women have plenty of opportunities to meet others, yet a fair number still marry their cousins.

Officially men and women are not supposed to be meeting before they marry, and in the old days, a man had to make an offer of marriage toward a woman he saw, but did not know, in order to even get to know her (which is supposed to take place after the marriage). Most Moroccan men are afraid to take such a chance of marrying a totally unknown woman, so settle on the safer bet of marrying a cousin, who they have gotten to know within the family context, over many years. They say that “at least they know what they are getting.”