…and this is a 
An almost biblical curse
Category: Genetics
Posted on: June 18, 2007 6:08 PM, by PZ Myers
There are a couple of small towns on the border between Utah and Arizona that are basically feudal theocracies, ruled by a particularly nasty splinter sect of polygamist Mormons. It's got some truly ugly social consequences — daughters are prizes given away to church leaders, while sons are competitors who are driven away — but now it turns out that there also some biological consequences. The community is deeply inbred, and their prize is the possession of the highest rate of fumarase deficiency in the world, with at least 20 afflicted children in the last 15 years. Fumarase is an enzyme in the Krebs cycle; deleterious mutations in these genes cause a metabolic disorder called fumarase deficiency.
It's not a nice innocuous disease. It's variable in its severity, but bad cases lead to debilitating mental retardation, frequent seizures, characteristic appearance (a large head, coarse features), and death. With care, affected individuals can live for many years, but they'll never be self-sufficient and they do require near-constant attention.
And because it is widespread in a small isolated community, that for various reasons (including religion) is neither a desirable destination for new residents nor will its population try to integrate with the outside world, it's going to get worse. Half the children born to a pair of carriers will be carriers of the disease themselves, and those nice big Mormon families produce lots of children. Not only are the young girls in this community forced to marry and start spawning baby after baby, but compound the horror with the idea that some will be having children who will need to have their diapers changed for 20 years…
Comments
Two words: Hybrid vigor.
You would expect rural people to know at least a little something about inbreeding. But no, if something is wrong with a HUMAN baby then it must be God's will. And then there are White supremacists. They want to inbreed too. Don't they know that the best thing for the species is to stick a pole in the gene pool and stir, stir, stir.
Posted by: Cappy | June 18, 2007 6:20 PM
There was a movie about this. The Hills Have Eyes.
Posted by: Ezekiel Buchheit | June 18, 2007 6:21 PM
I have a Mormon coworker (whom I always refer to outside work as 'The Mormon') who denies that there are contemporary Mormons practicing polygamy with the usual, "Oh, but those aren't real Mormons."
So I guess these guys aren't real Mormons. I just thought I'd let you all know that important distinction.
Posted by: Brownian | June 18, 2007 6:22 PM
Well it's plain obvious that Jesus hates Mormons.
Duh. Even Brownback could tell you that.
Posted by: Steve_C | June 18, 2007 6:24 PM
Ooo! Ooo! Maybe it's not real fumarase deficiency either. I'll bet somebody sinned. 10,000 people, surely one of them sinned at some point. This is just God punishing them for their sins. It'll clear up.
Posted by: Jessica Guilford | June 18, 2007 6:26 PM
Simple lesson: Inbreeding, wether ideological or biological, is always bad for the health of a population.
Posted by: DragonScholar | June 18, 2007 6:35 PM
hey, if it helps get rid of fundamentalists let 'em keep it up.
Posted by: garth | June 18, 2007 6:39 PM
So... They have a colony out in BC, where all the nuts and flakes hang out (several current and ex-religious communes out there that I know of), and they periodically swap underage girls back and forth between BC and Arizona/Utah for the purposes of forcing them into what would probably be considered sex work under the Canadian Criminal Code. Is the lack of action here on the Canadian government's part (there is at least a Charter grievance here that I can see, and likely a Criminal Code violation or six) have to do with misplaced "respect" for religion, the loony-ass wingnuts currently running our government, or the fact that these days you can't get the Canadian federal government interested in the human rights of religious and ethnic minorities unless you practically hold a gun to their collective heads?
Now I'm really ticked off.
Posted by: Interrobang | June 18, 2007 6:44 PM
This book is a good account.
Posted by: jeffk | June 18, 2007 6:45 PM
Heh, off-topic, but you remind me, Jessica, that our cat Shaman lived with a chronic Pseudomonas infection the last few years of his life--managed, but never cured.
Mr. Raven and I used to talk about how, when we got ourselves some money, we'd get Shaman some real Monas. :)
Posted by: RavenT | June 18, 2007 6:49 PM
Interestingly enough, that's not necessarily the case.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 18, 2007 6:51 PM
Strictly speaking, Brownian, your co-worker is correct: they aren't "real" Mormons, any more than Lutherans are "real" Catholics. They no longer follow the doctrine of the official church, which has excommunicated them.
What they ARE is a nasty little cult of personality... I know some folks who have been involved in helping the boys kicked out of these communities so the old men can have more little girls to rape. It's a seriously fucked up way of life. Humans != elk.
That said, the primary reason these groups get like this is because of stupid theocratic crap like bigamy laws. The Mormon church had to denounce polygamy as a concession to joining the United States (and more to the point, to avoid having the US Army come in, wipe them out and take their land). If polygamy were legal, and could be practiced openly, the pressure to follow a cult leader would be enormously lessened.
Nothing like the threat of state oppression to foster paranoia, isolation and hostility.
Openly allowing polygamy would allow these people to practice their faith without fear of prison and CPS, while allowing the legal authorities to focus on the true lawbreakers, like the guys marrying 13 and 14-year-olds, forced marriages and the like.
Posted by: BruceJ | June 18, 2007 6:53 PM
Ahem, sorry to differ, there, but there are thousands and thousands of examples of the opposite. We call it "agriculture" and "animal husbandry"...
So long as you cull the recessives from the gene pool, inbreeding does nothing but fix certain traits into the population.
Posted by: BruceJ | June 18, 2007 6:58 PM
And a concomitant tendency to vote Republican.
Posted by: Warren | June 18, 2007 6:59 PM
The Bountiful, BC polygamous community has been the subject of a couple of TV shows which are online -- the CBC's Fifth Estate (here) and a discussion on This Hour dealing with the legal issues (here). The legal status of the investigation is still in limbo:
From here:
A special prosecutor will look into criminal charges for a polygamy case that has stymied lawyers and politicians because of its lack of witnesses and constitutional support.
"There is some concern that the religious rights of a particular sect or a particular person will trump any right to prosecute," said Attorney General Wally Oppal.
But that's not a constitutional opinion Oppal agrees with, so the government hired high-profile Vancouver criminal lawyer Richard Peck to conduct a review of the results of a police investigation into members of the southeast British Columbia community of Bountiful.
RCMP investigators have been looking into charges of polygamy and other alleged offences of a sexual nature and submitted a charge recommendation report to the Crown last fall.
Those charges were reviewed by the B.C. Criminal Justice Branch and an opinion was given to Oppal, however a branch spokesman refused to say what the legal recommendation was on charges.
Geoffrey Gaul said the branch made its opinion known on the issue more than decade ago, and that's part of the reason why a special prosecutor was appointed.
"We have opinions from outside, from private lawyers, that question the constitutional validity of polygamy prosecutions."
Posted by: QrazyQat | June 18, 2007 7:04 PM
BruceJ:
You can only take that argument so far before you run into the need to do the risk-benefit analysis on the issue that you should have done in the first place. FLDS-style polygamy is inherently asymmetrical, as even without the abuses you mention it doesn't offer the women the same opportunity of self-determination as it does the men.
There is a solution -- it's called polyamory -- but I'm pretty sure that's not what Joseph Smith had in mind when he started accumulating wives, and I'm also pretty sure that's not what Warren Jeffs and his people have in mind out there in Colorado City/Hilldale. Polyamory as it's practiced most frequently is rather more egalitarian and generally completely open in terms of acceptance, and as much as it seeks out people to join what can be very, very complicated relationship geometries, it also discourages those who can't handle it. But polyamory as it's currently understood can't be practiced in an environment such as the FLDS church anyway, because it presumes equality of the sexes; LDS polygamy traditionally has not.
Posted by: Brian X | June 18, 2007 7:04 PM
BS, they are mormons who would likely claim the 'real' mormons you speak of have forsaken their church. Of course Lutherans aren't real catholics, they don't claim to be such. The FLDS do claim to be mormons.
Posted by: JimC | June 18, 2007 7:14 PM
I've driven through Colorado City, Arizona, one of the biggest of those communities. It's creepy as hell.
They're already a burden on the welfare system (2nd, 3rd, etc wives file for welfare as "single mothers") and evade taxes (by leaving homes "unfinished"); now they'll need more healthcare attention too? Great. Nice religion they've got there.
Posted by: markbt73 | June 18, 2007 7:21 PM
Yes! So all we have to do is go to the Utah/Arizona border, and closely monitor the population for a few dozen generations. Or more. Every parent who has a fumarase deficient child is immediately sterilized, as are any other children. If we have a test for heterozygotes, even easier--sterilize them all. We also take the children of deficiency-free families and inbreed them with each other.
It can work!
Of course, the problem with applying agricultural practices that work so well to human populations is that, unfortunately, people insist on being allowed to procreate sloppily, and get all complainy and weepy when necessary ruthlessness is applied. We'll have to work hard to make them obey.
Posted by: PZ Myers | June 18, 2007 7:24 PM
I second that recommendation, and add that if you like audiobooks at all, you should get it in that form. Krakauer is a good reader, and this book will scare the hair off you.
Posted by: Bill Dauphin | June 18, 2007 7:25 PM
Bruce, long term you'll likely accumulate bad recessives that cannot
be easily culled anymore. See the various genetic problems heavily bred dog races have.
And when new conditions arise it is best to have some fresh blood
to cross in. That is why it is so dangerous to e.g. wipe out all
the alternative cow races or why there are huge efforts at saving
alternative grains.
Posted by: n | June 18, 2007 7:27 PM
A better analogy might be, are the Womenpriests "real Catholics"? They say yes, the Vatican says no.
Posted by: Vasha | June 18, 2007 7:34 PM
I don't understand why the fundies are so opposed to polygamy. I understand that there is nothing in the bible strictly forbidding it, and, after all, their favorite Old Testament heroes did it.
I'm guess it's a tradition where all good Christian menfolk get to feel that they are being temperate and righteous by not giving free reign to their 'evil' carnal urges, at least publicly.
Posted by: RamblinDude | June 18, 2007 7:41 PM
Arguably it's the Mormon church that's failed to follow its own doctrine.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 18, 2007 7:41 PM
I'm not American so, please enlighten me: is any of this legal? Don't you people have laws against marrying underage girls against their will? I am not kidding: how can this be possibly tolerated?
Posted by: Frenchdoc | June 18, 2007 7:48 PM
JimC and Brownian:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, with about 12 Million members do call themselves Mormons. Originally being called Mormon was a derogatory term--now it's in common use. That said the members of the big church are aghast to think that the polygamist groups are called Mormon. They have their own derogatory term for them: "Poligs" LDS Mormons are not allowed to associate or do business with Poligs. Poligs tend to be very standoffish and will generally only speak when spoken to, etc. They often own remodeling businesses and have large farms. They do have some banks, etc.
Short-creek/Colorado City, is probably the strangest place to go to in the US, but they do have a cafe or two in town. Think the movie "Deliverance" if you go there. If you've seen HBO's "Big Love" then think the leader and the compound and ignore the main characters, and you've got a decent representation.
Alan
Posted by: Alan | June 18, 2007 7:49 PM
Nice article in today's Guardian:
Atheists: stand up and be counted
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/adam_rutherford/2007/06/atheists_stand_up_and_be_counted.html
Still, I can't help feeling a little cynical about all of this. The Guardian (like Salon) likes to run constant opinion pieces for/against religion/atheism, which generate lots of discussion and advertising revenue. Sometimes I think we're all playing into their little game.
Posted by: Christian Burnham | June 18, 2007 7:53 PM
Alright! Start the betting pool! How long do you think until PZ's most recent comment gets mined?
Posted by: archgoon | June 18, 2007 7:58 PM
Alright! Start the betting pool! How long do you think until PZ's most recent comment gets mined?
Posted by: archgoon | June 18, 2007 7:59 PM
If you've ever read the book "Under the Banner of Heaven", the author talks about some of these towns. There is frequently a Mormon patriarch who controls the community, and they will sometimes "explain" these genetic defects as punishments from God, rather than the unhealthy practice of inbreeding. What a sick place.
Posted by: tinyfrog | June 18, 2007 8:01 PM
Christian Burnham:
Shrug. If people are profiting off of open debate which they are facilitating, I have no problems with that. Its a good thing when economic incentives align with social incentives.
Posted by: archgoon | June 18, 2007 8:02 PM
Several comments rolled into one...
Brian X says:
I never said that FLDS-style polygamy was healthy , fair or not horribly sexist, merely that making it illegal compounds the problem*. Of course it doesn't offer women "the same opportunity of self-determination as it does the men." Neither does the Baptist dogma on marriage, that the wife submit to her husband.
Equality of the sexes is not the issue, it is that the fact that the entire relationship is illegal, which fosters the paranoid delusions of the leaders of this cult.
*This is similar to 'The War On Drugs'. The vast amount of social and personal damage done by drugs is due to their illegality, not their deleterious effects. You don't see too many people burglarizing houses, and committing armed robbery to satisfy their alcohol addiction, do you?
This doesn't mean that I don't think that drug addiction is good, merely that we need to separate the fundamental problems we're dealing with: the legal sphere versus the health sphere. They can be separated, we saw that when we repealed Prohibition.
JimC says:
Back when Luther nailed his theses to the door, they damn well claimed to be Catholics. They don't any more, but at the time they did claim to be The Church.
To the Official Mormon Church, they aren't Mormons, regardless of what the apostates say, and for Official Mormons this is what counts.
I do think it's a bunch of silliness, but to the believer's it's a big deal.
markbt73:
The welfare and tax evasion are deliberate dogma of the leaders, as a means of "destroying Babylon" by sapping it's wealth.
Of course the fact that this allows them to accumulate their own wealth all the time has nooooothing to do with it. Oh no. All these dirt-poor folks, and Warren Jeffs was captured in a caravan of five or six $50K SUV's....
Posted by: BruceJ | June 18, 2007 8:16 PM
The article in 'The Guardian' is a good one.
Gospel of Reason is another one worth reading.
Posted by: RamblinDude | June 18, 2007 8:19 PM
No, it's not legal, and these are exactly the crimes for which Warren Jeffs is standing trial right now.
First, this is going on in VERY rural, nearly inaccessible areas along the border of Utah and Arizona. You can see the Law coming a LONG time before they get there.
Second, because these towns sometimes straddle the border, they've taken advantage of jurisdictional issues, running to the Utah side when the Arizona authorities come to town, and vice versa.
Third, there's almost no way that many of these issues can be brought to the courts without a Jonestown or Waco-style standoff.
Fourth, they've been protected by sympathetic members of law enforcement, the judiciary and the legislature in both Arizona and Utah.
Utah is essentially a Mormon theocracy (although that's changing; the population dynamics of the state are shifting) and Arizona, especially northern Arizona is also heavily Mormon. The political power structures there are still sympathetic to them as 'oppressed religious minorities'
Finally, any prosecution needs cooperating witnesses and complainants from within the community; and this just isn't going to happen.
Posted by: BruceJ | June 18, 2007 8:24 PM
DragonScholar - Simple lesson: Inbreeding, wether ideological or biological, is always bad for the health of a population.
Oddly, no.
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=11510&ch=biotech
What really ruined the population in that little FLDS commune was that selection was just some fucktoad old men dividing up the 14 year olds. If ability to chose wives was granted via fights to the death, you would have a much healthier population (perhaps even than the general population).
I hate religions... they can't even inbreed right.
Posted by: Tatarize | June 18, 2007 8:28 PM
Brucej: Nice post. Edifying for me too.
Posted by: RamblinDude | June 18, 2007 8:31 PM
Calling the odd sects in the Arizona Strip "Mormons" is a lot like calling Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, just another Catholic diocese.
Posted by: Ed Darrell | June 18, 2007 8:38 PM
Well, look on the bright side. Inbreeding and genetic diseases might just be their karma.
I've seen pictures of some of these polig cultists. They actually do sort of look weird, like maybe their parents were a little too closely related.
This is far from a victimless crime. I don't know the situation now but in the past, the vast majority of these clowns were on welfare. How else do you have big families with one wage earner who isn't very bright or educated in the absolute middle of nowhere?
Might be different now, in the past the state of Utah wasn't too crazy about supporting fleets of kids. The way they sidestep the polygamy laws is by only registering one marriage, all the rest are officially off the records and the women claim single motherhood.
Besides the economics, there are the issues of forced underage marriages, child sex abuse and so on. In times past, the various subcults used to shoot it out over dominance issues.
Waco pretty much ended serious efforts to control these strange groups. No one is going to risk another standoff that ends in piles of dead.
Posted by: raven | June 18, 2007 8:41 PM
My understanding was that the growth of the early christian church was partly supported by its focus on monogamy. This was an incentive for early (male!) followers, particulalry among common-folk to commit as christians and have some chance of regular sex and protecting their wifely property.
Posted by: pkiwi | June 18, 2007 8:42 PM
But isn't outlawing gay marriage supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening?
Posted by: T. Bruce McNeely | June 18, 2007 8:50 PM
THanks, BruceJ, that explains it. It's even worse than I thought when there is a whole socio-political structure that supports that. What a disgusting state of affairs... "oppressed religious minority"?? Gimme a break!
Posted by: Frenchdoc | June 18, 2007 8:54 PM
I thought I had discovered Inbredville in St. Cloud, MN. Apparently it gets worse.
Posted by: mndarwinist | June 18, 2007 8:54 PM
This just goes to show Evolution is working.
Posted by: Nick Hodge | June 18, 2007 8:57 PM
I first heard about this colony of creeps a few years ago, and it never fails to make my blood boil. All those poor girls...And the fact that the spineless cowards who govern these states are letting them get away with it only compounds the horror. My advice is to come down on these fuckers like the wrath of God, send in the bloody Marines (or CF in the case of my country) and free those girls by force. It'll never happen with our current leadership, and it probably is really bloodthirsty on my part, but it's no more than these cultists deserve. The United States has participated in much fouler deeds for much less worthy causes (Canada to some extent as well), so this little military intervention isn't actually all that bad in contrast. Free the girls, get them into some loving families, then wipe the rest of the place off the face of the earth. I'll not have these compounds defiling our nations an instant longer.
Posted by: Canadian Ronin | June 18, 2007 9:05 PM
How ironic - just a few weeks after you decry 'Idiocracy', you end up complaining about inbred morons on welfare.
Ha!
Posted by: Caledonian | June 18, 2007 9:05 PM
Hahah... yesss...
I don't know if this made the national news or not, but the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention on June 14th, the State Legislature (both houses) voted not to put a marriage-amendment question on the ballot in November 2008. The super-majority required to defeat the motion was achieved.
The failure of Massachusetts to take a serious step towards undoing the work of those "activist judges" has surely brought about the end of civilization as we know it. I expect the divorce rate to hit 100% by September, and for men to begin marrying their dogs by Christmas.
Posted by: Kseniya | June 18, 2007 9:22 PM
That's a good point, assuming one can correctly view Idiocracy as a film about the effects of inbreeding. Is it "inbreeding" if it involves 100% of the population?
Posted by: Kseniya | June 18, 2007 9:28 PM
Ack! Mormons!
Seriously, I just can't understand why anyone would want to be in a religion that lets you have more than one wife but doesn't let you drink.
Posted by: Dan | June 18, 2007 9:30 PM
If 100% of the population has children with close family members, then yes.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 18, 2007 9:34 PM
Just goes to show you can't fool Mother Nature. In the end, she is gonna win every time.
Her house. Her rules.
Posted by: Larry | June 18, 2007 9:42 PM
Please tell me this is just a really tone-deaf metaphor...
Posted by: Azkyroth | June 18, 2007 9:50 PM
Of course it's illegal, frenchdoc but that area of Arizona might as well be on the moon. It's rural, arid, miles away from anything even remotely resembling civilization, let alone a law enforcement agency and cut off from all of the above by rugged terrain the likes of which Conspiracy nuts claim NASA used as a backdrop to shoot the "Moon Landing."
That's why the settlers moved there in the first place; you'd have to be nuts to want to live there unless you had a hard-on for Biblical reenactment and underage girls.
Posted by: Keith | June 18, 2007 9:50 PM
Natural selection at work.
If we encourage such behavior it will accelerate the process, and produce a most profound example of how the substitution of blind faith for reasoned vision is a moral contradiction.
If we point out the fallacy of such behavior it may produce a longer and more substantial misery for both the reasoned rationalists and the deluded sectarians ...
What are we to do in order to produce the greatest benefit for future generations?
Posted by: Ben Abbott | June 18, 2007 9:51 PM
I'm not a scientist, in the formal sense of the word, but I assume a lot of you guys/gals are and I've got a question I've wondered about for a while.
I had always heard that a sign of inbreeding in a population was an increased incidence of crossed eyes. I always thought this was a wives tale until about 20 years ago when I was forced to spend a couple years in a fairly isolated, close-knit rural North Florida town that shall remain unnamed. I quickly noticed two things about the townsfolk there. First, an inordinate percentage of the population had the surname "Starling". Second, I have never seen so many cross-eyed people in my life!! It was seriously noticeable. Of course I couldn't confirm that the Starling family was any more or less likely than the resident interlopers to have crossed eyes. Maybe it was something in the water. But I was kind of freaked out about it.
Is there any acutal scientific correlation between inbreeding and some genetically caused medical condition that manifests itself by crossed eyes, or was this just some Twilight Zone thing?
Posted by: sailorman | June 18, 2007 9:53 PM
This sort of abuse makes my blood boil as well, not least because I have a daughter of my own. But unfortunately, this approach probably wouldn't work, since it assumes that these girls aren't so thoroughly brainwashed and emotionally crushed that they wouldn't simply seek out a similar arrangement with another "Good
ChristianMormon man" out of the belief that it's their duty as women and god's will. Funny how religious devotion so often parallels Stockholm syndrome...Posted by: Azkyroth | June 18, 2007 9:54 PM
Ah... Right! I was viewing the entire population as the community, rather than as a collection of inbred communities.
It's hard (if not quite impossible) to imagine, though, given the high degree of mobility and the robust taboos against inbreeding that already exist...
Posted by: Kseniya | June 18, 2007 9:56 PM
If you've seen the movie, I'm sure you remember Cletus.
Given his fecundity, his immediate community was almost certainly dominated by his descendents within four generations.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 18, 2007 10:03 PM
sailorman, I'm out my field here, but I've also noticed some ocular malformations among communities I presumed to be inbred (not crossed-eyes per se).
Here's an abstract of a paper which alludes to such.
Posted by: Ben Abbott | June 18, 2007 10:19 PM
I agree with previous commenters, read Under the Banner of Heaven for a better understanding of the history of the Mormon church, when and how the split occurred, etc. Of course, if you have heart or circulatory problems, see your doctor before reading this book.
There was an attempt to take the children away from the FLDS, at one of their towns, several decades back. It fell apart as the media came in, saw screaming children being pulled away from their parents by the authorities, and you can guess the rest.
Posted by: Robster, FCD | June 18, 2007 10:32 PM
I don't think we need another Waco.
Posted by: Kseniya | June 18, 2007 10:38 PM
We've got several more Wacos already. Maybe what you're worried about is a "Waco siege?" Well, what would you propose, then?
Posted by: Azkyroth | June 18, 2007 10:40 PM
On the contrary, we need a lot more Wacos.
Posted by: Caledonian | June 18, 2007 10:49 PM
What kind of Waco are we talking about, here? The government-defying community Waco, or the horrific massacre Waco?
Posted by: Kseniya | June 18, 2007 11:17 PM
Who knows, perhaps Warren Jeffs' flock will ultimately benefit from founder effect, genetic drift, and reproductive isolation. That way they might shift off our present fitness peak and (by virtue of future fortunate mutations or perhaps divine intervention), pass through a genetic bottleneck and, Haldane willing, emerge on a different fitness peak whose ascent will turn them into a community of supermormon supermen. Or perhaps into a new species of knuckle-dragging, sister-raping, child-molesting ground foragers. Evolution is funny like that. :)
Posted by: N.Wells | June 18, 2007 11:19 PM
I first read that as "Haldol willing." Heh.
Posted by: Kseniya | June 19, 2007 12:02 AM
Hitchens makes a great argument in "God is not great" that this kind of nonsense is child abuse. Indeed, raising children in an environment rich in bullsh*t is probably child abuse - but using them as sexual enticements for church elders... ICK!
Why is this allowed? Oh... Right... it's religion.
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | June 19, 2007 12:18 AM
Man this stuff makes me angry. I for one have no problem calling them Mormon. If Mormons can call themselves Christian because they claim to believe in Jebus, then these people are Mormons by virtue of claiming to believe in the doctrine of the BoM.
The freedom allowed to all Americans should not give a group the right to strip others of their rights through coersion. But there is no simple solution as the residents don't seem to think their rights have been violated. Maybe I'm not giving these girls enough credit, (and I apologize if that's the case) but if she is brought up to obey her parents in all things, why would she ever consider their asking her to marry her cousin to be wrong?
Posted by: Mikeinjapan | June 19, 2007 12:27 AM
The freedom allowed to all Americans should not give a group the right to strip others of their rights through coersion. But there is no simple solution as the residents don't seem to think their rights have been violated.
very common in cults.
Posted by: Ichthyic | June 19, 2007 12:34 AM
She wouldn't, unless enough of the outside world leaked in - and it seems the community is purposefully located and administered to minimize that.
What does a person born into slavery know about liberty?
Posted by: Kseniya | June 19, 2007 12:37 AM
Geez, and to think this isn't far from Vegas here, and that my wife and I recently drove through that area on our way to Zion National Park...kind of freaks me out. I hope these cruel "prophets" get what they deserve.
Posted by: Josh Huddleston | June 19, 2007 12:55 AM
Not necessarily, PZ. The number of people with the allele in the population will increase if the mean fitness times the population growth rate is >1. But the mean fitness decreases with increasing frequency, so eventually there will be an equilibrium. I might do the maths later if I'm bored.
Oh, and another thing. Kin selection helps, because the people with the condition will be looked after by their relatives, who will therefore spend less time reproducing. Hamilton Rules!
Bob
Posted by: Bob O'H | June 19, 2007 1:55 AM
I read an interview a while ago with two young women who had escaped from their FLDS community and their marriages to much older men. (I think the girls might've been 15 when they were forced to marry men in their 60s.)
Both women had horrific stories of abuse to tell... and both told the interviewer they were absolutely convinced they were going to hell. Because, molestation and inbreeding or no, the Prophet is the Prophet and his word is absolute law. In this world and the next. He had pronounced damnation upon them, and they both seemed to think that was what they had coming to them.
(Has anyone else read Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, featuring an especially spooky sect of Mormon polygamists? Ew, ew, ew.)
Posted by: RedMolly | June 19, 2007 2:24 AM
This is a typical heavy mind control, isolated, inbred cult.
The women are probably barely educated and most of that is religious indoctrination. From what I've read, most of them have never spoken to or even seen an outsider close up. They've been taught that outsiders are evil and out to get them. Partly true, outside authorities including the LDS church have nothing but contempt for them. The women are married off very young, early teens, and of course, are soon pumping out babies. So now you have mothers who have families and children that they aren't exactly eager to abandon.
So, OK, you have a barely literate young girl, who knows nothing of the outside world, who has been taught to fear outsiders, has no idea or concept of how to earn a living by herself, and is married and has a few kids and is 16. Plus all her family and friends and whole life are in that cult.
Under those conditions, it is a wonder that any of them manage to break away and those are few and far between. If you think of Waco, Heavens Gate, or Jonestown, you get an idea of what sort of hold cults can have on their victims. Sometimes they drink the poisoned kool aide, secure in the knowledge that the mothership is right behind the comet.
Posted by: raven | June 19, 2007 2:53 AM
The FLDS are in the area they are in for a reason. This is very remote, inhospitable territory. It is true desert. I was in the area once on vacation in the summer. It was 116 degrees F. in the shade. Astronauts train there for simulated Martian missions.
The population density is low. In addition, they have penetrated the local power structures to one extent or another. The local cops used to be polygamists from the cult. For all I know they still are. The local politicians and judges seem to be co-opted. They are probably all Mormons of one sort or another anyway, this is Utah after all.
I read somewhere once that the state and federals had set up some observation posts. And that if anyone wanted out of the cult, they could ask for sanctuary and help and would get it. Whether that is the case or not, who knows. With a 1000 FEMA Michael Brown clones running important federal programs, lot of good it would do anyone.
Posted by: raven | June 19, 2007 3:06 AM
"Oh, but those aren't real Mormons."
Yeah, like the 'No true Scotsman" fallacy isn't a real fallacy.
Posted by: truth machine | June 19, 2007 6:04 AM
Strictly speaking, Brownian, your co-worker is correct: they aren't "real" Mormons, any more than Lutherans are "real" Catholics. They no longer follow the doctrine of the official church, which has excommunicated them.
Are you the result of inbreeding? How else to explain such stupidity? Given two groups, each of which calls themselves Mormons, what exactly makes one group "official"?
Posted by: truth machine | June 19, 2007 6:11 AM
Non-biologist here...
Wikipedia says about inbreeding: "Inbreeding may result in a far higher expression of deleterious recessive genes within a population than would normally be expected"
However, it does not really explain why this happens. Could anyone explain or point me to some more info please as I'm struggling to understand.
Posted by: astromcnaught | June 19, 2007 6:30 AM
Um, Cal? You can't just leave us hanging like that, it's not gentlemanly.
Posted by: xebecs | June 19, 2007 7:35 AM
Several commenters have mentioned how remote this place is. I thought I'd give a description of the trip near there I took a year ago to give people unfamiliar with the area a better notion.
From Grand Canyon National Park (South Side), you have to drive about 150ish miles northeast of the park exit to get to the nearest Colorado River crossing. In that whole time you will never pass a town as big as the small tourism town immediately outside the park -- in fact, most "towns" will be little more than two mobile homes relatively near the same crossroad (which will be dirt -- pretty much only the US highways are paved in NW AZ)
Once you cross the Colorado river, you drive about 200 miles west through completely empty desert -- beautiful scenery, but no sign of civilization other than that road. Then you reach a cross road. The North Side of Grand Canyon National Park is about 80 miles south of you, Colorado City, AZ, about 80 miles north. We turned south to the canyon, and reached the north side of the canyon in time for a late lunch, a quick gawk at OMGWTFBBQ! grand canyon north side (not much different from the South, other than being 4000 feet higher elevation) and then we had to turn around and leave, because it was already going to be almost 10 in the evening when we reached our hotel reservation for that evening.
My point:
When those of us who have been to this part of the country say it is remote, (to paraphrase Douglas Adams) we are not saying it is like a long walk down the block to the Pharmacy. Northern AZ is huge and empty, and it is very easy for me to understand why, as much as they may want to, law enforcement has been able to do little.
When they caught Warren Jeffs, he was in Las Vegas, IRCC -- in other words, even though there was a longstanding warrent for his arrest, they did not even bother to get him in his stronghold, they waited for him to leave it.
Posted by: DoonboggleFrog | June 19, 2007 7:36 AM
Hi there, AstroMcNaught: Here's a snip from the National Biological Information Infrastructure website: http://www.nbii.gov/
It just means that when you have a small population, individuals breed with close relatives. So that after a few generations, the bad genes (which are present in all of us) that we carry on only one chromosome, become "fixed" and are carried on both chromosomes. This happens by chance, and without an influx of new chromosomes, the genes don't have a chance to vary, or reassort among the gametes.
"Small effective population size can result in a high occurrence of inbreeding, or mating between close relatives. One of the effects of inbreeding is a decrease in the heterozygosity (increase in homozygosity) of the population as a whole, which means a decrease in the number of heterozygous genes in the individuals. This effect places individuals and the population at a greater risk from homozygous recessive diseases that result from inheriting a copy of the same recessive allele from both parents. The impact of accumulating deleterious homozygous traits is called inbreeding depression - the loss in population vigor due to loss in genetic variability or genetic options. "
Hope this helps
SG
Posted by: Science Goddess | June 19, 2007 8:34 AM
Ummmm....closer to a 1000 foot difference between the elevations of the south rim and the north rim.
Posted by: NJ | June 19, 2007 8:41 AM
For More on this subject, check out www.exmormon.org
FLDS Polygamists are following the doctrine established by Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, and NEVER REMOVED from their scripture, Doctrines and Covenants. While the mainstream Mormon Church outwardly renounced polygamy in 1890 in order to gain statehood, it was secretly practiced by members and leaders into the 20th century, and is still believed to be practiced in the Celestial Kingdom, the highest level of Mormon heaven, where every man is a god and has unlimited wives and "spirit children" borne by them to populate his planet.
Yes, FLDS and others caught practicing polygamy today are excommuncated by the regular LDS church, but the practice comes straight out of the foundations of orthodox LDS belief, and a blind eyes is often turned by the law to polygamists in the Mormon corridor of Western states.
Polygamy is a malignant system that harms women and children who are chattel of the priesthood-holding males. Genetic defects are just one piece of its nasty legacy, others being child brides forced to marry old men, the "lost boys", young men thrown out to fend for themselves so they will not compete with the old men for young women, and all varieties of child abuse. American polygamy is the direct legacy of the LDS church, no matter how they try to distance themselves from it.