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... Or the doctor in question could just have moved to Dewsbury, in West Yorkshire. (n the mid-1980s I made an early career mistake and qualified as a pharmaci

... Or the doctor in question could just have moved to Dewsbury, in West Yorkshire. (n the mid-1980s I made an early career mistake and qualified as a pharmacist. I did my pre-registration work at the -- now closed -- district hospital in Dewsbury, a Yorkshire town of roughly 60,000 people. Dewsbury is in a steep valley and the working-class population tended not to travel: according to an older relative who worked there all his life, he knew co-workers who had been born, worked, lived, and retired in Dewsbury without ever travelling more than ten miles away from their birthplace. (Automobiles didn't really become a mass-cultural phenomenon there until the 1950s-1960s.) Cue lots of first-cousin marriages. During the 1970s, a Pakistani immigrant community arrived ... also from an isolated mountain valley town that didn't have much time for exogamy. The hospital serving a city of 60,000 people shouldn't have a 30-bed cystic fibrosis ward (CF is an inborn error of metabolism) ... but Dewsbury needed one. (CF has a frequency of roughly 1 in 3000 in Northern Europe, so you'd expect 20 living cases in a town the size of Dewsbury: but they wouldn't need hospital beds simultaneously! The local frequency was much higher.) Nor should it have exotic conditions like familial hypobetalipoproteinaemia showing up in the population. Again, Dewsbury had that. In fact, Dewsbury was so notorious for genetic disorders that house officers and registrars training in the relevant fields got rotated there from the big teaching hospitals in Leeds (the nearest big city). Upshot: if you get geographically isolated communities with religious cultures that discourage exogamy, you get really weird genetic disorders cropping up within surprisingly few generations.

growlist 7y ago
Also in Surrey. A relative worked with visually impaired children, one of them of Pakistani heritage and having albinism, and this kid said one day "it's because we marry our cousins". This is one of those situations where the authorities etc. being all cringey and PC about things harms the very people they are trying to protect.
- cstross 7y ago
  It's not specific to Pakistan: the same problem tends to be seen in many if not all cultures with a strong dowry tradition. If substantial wealth is transferred with a bride, there's a powerful incentive to marry within the family. (This used to happen in Europe, but during the middle ages the church banned cousin marriages for political reasons: it stopped the nobility consolidating too much power.)
  - iguy 7y ago
    It was certainly common for a long time in many places, and still is across what's now the muslim world (although I think it long predates Islam). But I'm not sure dowry tradition is quite the right marker, IIRC it's much less common in Hindu tradition (where the pattern was larger caste groups instead). But it's certainly a way of concentrating power in the family. And presumably, for a very long time, having lots of grandsons of undivided loyalty was important in conflicts with the neighbouring family/tribe... worth the individual fitness cost (and the extra miscarriages etc -- many of these strange illnesses would of course have killed the child).
    - masklinn 7y ago
      > still is across what's now the muslim world (although I think it long predates Islam). It can trivially be seen to have little to do with islam in examples like the House of Habsburg, and the famously ignominous end of the Spanish line. Or orthodox jews (the endogamous set is wider than just a family, but you still see lots of rare genetic conditions crop up, and some jewish communities don't even stray outside of it e.g. Mashhadi jews). Though it does look related to Arabization. While first-degree cousin marriage has gotten quite a bit rarer used to be extremely common across the globe, and aside from the middle-east it also remains legal throughout eurasia (except for a few eastern european countries and notably china where it's entirely banned and india where it's dependent on culture and religion) and south america > IIRC it's much less common in Hindu tradition It's less common but hardly non-existent: according to Shrikant Kuntla, Srinivas Goli, T.V. Sekher, Riddhi Doshi via wikipedia[0] rate of consanguinous marriage is 25% of indian muslims, 15% for indian hindu, and under 10% for other indians. State / culture presents a much wider spread, from 1.2% in Himachal Pradesh to 38% in Tamil Nadu. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage#India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage#India
      - iguy 7y ago
        Well, royalty are special and weird, and a drop in the bucket, and prove little. My point was that it was a widespread pre-islamic custom, not one which arrived with the book; the geographical correlation with islam is because (as cstross says) it was largely stamped out in Europe a thousand years ago. It's my understanding that cousin-marriage was rare among european Jews, but a bit more common elsewhere. (Not sure if as high as the surrounding peoples, not sure.) There are indeed rare and interesting genetic conditions in some Jewish groups, but that's another story. (Am surprised by Tamil Nadu's 38%, thanks. But certainly north-indians take dowry pretty seriously, while avoiding cousins.)
- jasonmp85 7y ago
  How did being PC harm anyone in this case? It appears they knew exactly what was doing it and clearly said so?
  - growlist 7y ago
    I'm slightly surprised it's not obvious to you but giving you the benefit of the doubt: if we had had more open discussion/education about the horrible effects cousin marriage can have it might have helped change attitudes in the Pakistani community, but this was apparently resisted due to cringey PC fears about saying anything that might offend said community; the latter evidently a completely legitimate fear given the weaponising of offence by the left. If you still dispute what I'm saying, I'm far from the first to say it - below is from 2005: 'The Labour MP Ann Cryer has called for British Pakistanis to stop marrying their first cousins... Speaking to the Guardian, Ms Cryer said: "I'm not calling for a ban or a change in the law because that would mean changing the law for everyone. I'm simply calling for an enlightened debate. We've avoided discussions on this subject. People are being politically correct.'
    - lostlogin 7y ago
      > given the weaponising of offence by the left. Is this left versus right thing? I note that the quote you provide comes from a centre left source.
      - akiselev 7y ago
        It really isn't. The "right" has been doing the exact same thing for ages. See the weaponization of anti-semitism allegations by the Republicans (against Ilhan Omar most recently) or Tories (against Corbyn and Labour in general). It's not a new phenomenon. Before racial/ethnic issues came to the forefront, partisans used religion and other relevant ideologies.
        growlist 7y ago
        > weaponization of anti-semitism Labour is the only party apart from the BNP to be investigated over allegations of racism by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

growlist 7y ago

Also in Surrey. A relative worked with visually impaired children, one of them of Pakistani heritage and having albinism, and this kid said one day "it's because we marry our cousins". This is one of those situations where the authorities etc. being all cringey and PC about things harms the very people they are trying to protect.

cstross 7y ago
It's not specific to Pakistan: the same problem tends to be seen in many if not all cultures with a strong dowry tradition. If substantial wealth is transferred with a bride, there's a powerful incentive to marry within the family. (This used to happen in Europe, but during the middle ages the church banned cousin marriages for political reasons: it stopped the nobility consolidating too much power.)
- iguy 7y ago
  It was certainly common for a long time in many places, and still is across what's now the muslim world (although I think it long predates Islam). But I'm not sure dowry tradition is quite the right marker, IIRC it's much less common in Hindu tradition (where the pattern was larger caste groups instead). But it's certainly a way of concentrating power in the family. And presumably, for a very long time, having lots of grandsons of undivided loyalty was important in conflicts with the neighbouring family/tribe... worth the individual fitness cost (and the extra miscarriages etc -- many of these strange illnesses would of course have killed the child).
  - masklinn 7y ago
    > still is across what's now the muslim world (although I think it long predates Islam). It can trivially be seen to have little to do with islam in examples like the House of Habsburg, and the famously ignominous end of the Spanish line. Or orthodox jews (the endogamous set is wider than just a family, but you still see lots of rare genetic conditions crop up, and some jewish communities don't even stray outside of it e.g. Mashhadi jews). Though it does look related to Arabization. While first-degree cousin marriage has gotten quite a bit rarer used to be extremely common across the globe, and aside from the middle-east it also remains legal throughout eurasia (except for a few eastern european countries and notably china where it's entirely banned and india where it's dependent on culture and religion) and south america > IIRC it's much less common in Hindu tradition It's less common but hardly non-existent: according to Shrikant Kuntla, Srinivas Goli, T.V. Sekher, Riddhi Doshi via wikipedia[0] rate of consanguinous marriage is 25% of indian muslims, 15% for indian hindu, and under 10% for other indians. State / culture presents a much wider spread, from 1.2% in Himachal Pradesh to 38% in Tamil Nadu. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage#India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage#India
    - iguy 7y ago
      Well, royalty are special and weird, and a drop in the bucket, and prove little. My point was that it was a widespread pre-islamic custom, not one which arrived with the book; the geographical correlation with islam is because (as cstross says) it was largely stamped out in Europe a thousand years ago. It's my understanding that cousin-marriage was rare among european Jews, but a bit more common elsewhere. (Not sure if as high as the surrounding peoples, not sure.) There are indeed rare and interesting genetic conditions in some Jewish groups, but that's another story. (Am surprised by Tamil Nadu's 38%, thanks. But certainly north-indians take dowry pretty seriously, while avoiding cousins.)
jasonmp85 7y ago
How did being PC harm anyone in this case? It appears they knew exactly what was doing it and clearly said so?
- growlist 7y ago
  I'm slightly surprised it's not obvious to you but giving you the benefit of the doubt: if we had had more open discussion/education about the horrible effects cousin marriage can have it might have helped change attitudes in the Pakistani community, but this was apparently resisted due to cringey PC fears about saying anything that might offend said community; the latter evidently a completely legitimate fear given the weaponising of offence by the left. If you still dispute what I'm saying, I'm far from the first to say it - below is from 2005: 'The Labour MP Ann Cryer has called for British Pakistanis to stop marrying their first cousins... Speaking to the Guardian, Ms Cryer said: "I'm not calling for a ban or a change in the law because that would mean changing the law for everyone. I'm simply calling for an enlightened debate. We've avoided discussions on this subject. People are being politically correct.'
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    > given the weaponising of offence by the left. Is this left versus right thing? I note that the quote you provide comes from a centre left source.
    - akiselev 7y ago
      It really isn't. The "right" has been doing the exact same thing for ages. See the weaponization of anti-semitism allegations by the Republicans (against Ilhan Omar most recently) or Tories (against Corbyn and Labour in general). It's not a new phenomenon. Before racial/ethnic issues came to the forefront, partisans used religion and other relevant ideologies.
      - growlist 7y ago
        > weaponization of anti-semitism Labour is the only party apart from the BNP to be investigated over allegations of racism by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.