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What I've learned is that there's significant risk even for cousins who have children together, so even more for half siblings.
by reitanqild 7y ago
What I've learned is that there's significant risk even for cousins who have children together, so even more for half siblings.
- pgeorgi 7y ago... if the cousins' parents and grandparents are similarly closely related to each other, yes. Otherwise probably not.
- jacobolus 7y agoMy understanding is that 1 generation of first-cousin marriage is very low risk. The problem comes when you have many generations of family marriages in a row. The Catholic church tried to make cousin marriages taboo as a way to break up clans and solidify church power.
- blueblimp 7y agoYou're right. It's weird that people are rushing in here to defend inbreeding. What people might not realize is even when there's not a specific disease caused by the inbreeding, there is still an overall negative effect on health, "inbreeding depression". Here is a paper that estimates the effect in humans: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26131930 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26131930.