Cousin Marriage
gregladen | April 26, 2013I gave a talk at the Brookdale Public Library last night as part of the celebration of DNA day. DNA Day, or DNAD for short, was created about the time of the "completion" (more or less) of the Human Genome in 2003, and is set to be on the date of the publication of the famous research on the structure of DNA.
The point of the talk was to link behavioral biology and the anthropological study of kinship with the practice of conducting personal genealogy. There was a time when I did a fair amount of genealogical research, in connection with historic archaeology, which in turn was part of…
razib | November 25, 2009The New York Times has an article on cousin marriage that's up. Here's some important bits:
Shane Winters, 37, whom she now playfully refers to as her "cusband," proposed to her at a surprise birthday party in front of family and friends, and the two are now trying to have a baby. They are not concerned about genetic defects, Ms. Spring-Winters said, and their fertility doctor told them he saw no problem with having children.
The couple -- she is a second-grade teacher and he builds furniture -- held their wedding last summer on a lake near this tiny town in central Pennsylvania. But their…
razib | April 13, 2009Over at Secular Right I point out that Romania is set to decriminalize consensual sexual relations between adult first-order kin. That is, incest. There are a few angles that this story offers. First is the moral-ethical one. From a rational individualist perspective how reasonable are laws which ban consensual sex between adults who just happen to share distinctive genetic information? The love that dare not speak its name because of alleles which are identical by descent?
Of course all this rational talk is irrelevant for most people. Incest is gross, repugnant and immoral. Not because…