Chapter 25
What are the bad effects of inbreeding?
First let me assure you I have met a number of Muslim men and I liked every one of them. Two caveats: I have never met a Muslim woman nor have I met a Muslim man who was not on his home turf surrounded by what he knew and loved.
Many years ago, my mother and father would go on foreign trips. For my father, it was an educational trip as well as an occasion to merge temporarily with the local culture. In Europe, they would arrive by train, since that’s the way the Europeans did it, and then he would make arrangements to stay with a local family, again European style. When they went out to explore, he would take my mother to each of the significant landmarks. When they came to a museum, he would say, “There are five important things in this museum,” and lead her to each before they left. No museumitis there, eh?
After we lost him at what now seems like a tragically early age, I would take her on trips. Her style was adventure. Thus, we went places where we met so many young Muslim men. They were all wholesome, friendly, courteous, and sociable. And they treated my mother with exceptional kindness and attentiveness. If you want to win my heart, go back in time and be nice to my mother, now also long gone.
Now I read with dismay reports of military age young Muslim men doing anti-social things in countries where such misbehavior did not previously exist. I look at it and think, “Those are my friends, or would have been my friends, under normal circumstances.” Migration is a way, hideously enough, to turn good people into bad people. In my unlit inner broodings I wonder, “Are our overlords contriving something worse for us or are they playing it smart and sticking with the sure thing?”
Returning to reality, I’ll go into a news article. It is from Cairns, Australia. Yes, I have been there on one of my mother’s adventures. That was so long ago that this topic did not come up for discussion, and indeed it would have been strange if it had. But on September 30, 2015 an editor of Cairnsnews newspaper posted an article he evidently had spent a lot of time and effort producing, “Muslims suffer insanity, low IQ, recessive disorders from 1400 years inbreeding .” He cites work done by a Lockheed employee in Saudi Arabia, “Biological fallout from 50 generations of first cousin marriages.”
The source was involved with training Saudi men to pilot Lockheed aircraft. There was a problem with night vision. The full moon helped little. I have not heard elsewhere of night blindness being caused by inbreeding. Certainly, my own family tree is to the right of repose along the Sibly curve. We are outbred. And when I look around the room, I see a distinct absence of grandchildren much as I would like to have had them. Yet my night vision is good. When I was young(er), I used to amuse myself by going out on a moonless night and running headlong through the woods. I could not actually see anything except bits of sky for orientation, but when I pointed my eyes down, I never stumbled. Evidently my feet and my eyes were doing business without finding it fit to let me know about it. When my father was in the navy, officers were tested for night vision. They were placed in a darkened room and very slowly a projector was turned on showing the silhouettes of ships. When someone recognized a ship, he would so indicate. My father said he found it odd to be looking at all these ships when the other men (this was long ago) were just sitting in the dark. So personally, I kind of think rather than changing mating habits, they might have given the lads carrots.
Poor memories are reported, but I don’t think carrots, even garden-fresh raw carrots, would help there. Pilots and maintenance personnel alike needed constant reminding of things they had been told the day before. Apparently, the instructors were burning out faster than the cadet pilots were graduating.
Poor night vision just might account for the fact that Saudi pilots took years to learn to fly safely at night and even then, were not happy to fly out of sight of city lights. That puzzled me at first. They ride camels at night, don’t they? Well checking around a bit, it seems they don’t much, and besides, riding a camel is low status. The class that gets to fly fighters, drive cars I could never afford. But it isn’t just wealth; it’s hard to train Iraqis and particularly Afghans.
The editor goes on to cite Danish psychologist he regards well named Nikolai Sennels, who has studied Muslim inbreeding, specifically the marrying of first cousins. The assertion is made that Moses forbad marrying first cousins. That does not ring any bells with me, and I don’t think I’m alone: What does the Bible say about marrying your first cousin? (| NeverThirsty. ) Sennels has written a book, Holy Wrath: Among Criminal Muslims, which you may be interest in reading rather than a review of a review.
So, I approach with caution the assertion that Muhammad sanctioned such marriages. I read the Koran so many years ago (that’s what we called it back then) that my memory is dim. But the notion of Muslims marrying kin is not jarring to me. And I rather suspect that, like most Christians, Muslims depend on their scholars rather than look at sacred text and making up their own minds.
This particular scholar asserts that Muslims have been marrying first cousins for fifty generations. I like numbers, and fifty is definitely a number. But how he got through fifty generations of nation after nation and came up with the penultimate round number does puzzle me. I thought cousin marriages were only about half of the marriages in the Islamic world. So, I got on the internet and promptly learned that about half of marriages in Iraq are between first or second cousins. A bright red arrow labeled “continue” beckoned. Curious about what was left to say, I took the click bait and was promptly frozen up with warning saying malicious code was in my computer. It took the rest of the evening to get it straightened out to the point where I could extinguish it and go to bed.
I should have imagined that hazardous sites would be things like gossip, fake deals, women treated like horsemeat and so forth. But they nailed me good on inbreeding of all things. So, before you plunge into this world of hidden malice, you might consider plonking down a few bucks for a firewall.
We are alarmingly told that the damage may be irreversible. Hmm? Ah but he goes on to specifics, and the roughly half of marriages are apparently consanguineous. Now it seems to me that inbreeding ought to be reversible in a single generation but it’s only a guess. Maybe I should have mentioned it as an advantage of inbreeding. It seems prudent always to wonder before taking step, “If this does not work out so well, can I get back out of it?”
He cites the BBC as saying that a British Pakistani family is more than thirteen times as likely to have children with recessive genetic disorders. As I explained, perhaps too tediously, that just won’t wash. A smaller gene pool size will purge deleterious recessive genes faster than will a larger one. The mechanism of the tragedy is not genetic but epigenetic. The assertion is rephrased as, “While Pakistanis are responsible for three percent of births in the UK, they account for 33% of children with genetic birth defects.” And that, assuming the BBC has done the homework and fairly reported, makes sense. Pakistanis in the UK have a 100% greater chance of stillbirths and 50% increase in children dying in labor.
It seems that we ought to agree that excessive inbreeding is very, very bad. It kills babies and leaves birth defects on an army of innocent ones. I stand here and shout. I stand on by head, put out my tongue and scream. Too much inbreeding is very, very bad. If you undertook to kill babies in my presence, I would fight you with my last strength. Is it the worst thing you could possibly do? I’ll leave that to your judgement here in a bit. But clutch this truth to your heart: excessive inbreeding is odious beyond comprehension. And in a more abstract vein, the mechanism is not genetic but epigenetic.
Sennels is reported to relate that Muslim marriage patterns cause a ten-to-sixteen-point loss in the IQ of the offspring. They are slower at social development and an IQ below 70 increases four-fold. In Denmark, non-Western immigrants are three times as likely to fail the intelligence test required for entrance into the military, and in case it is relevant, the Arab world translates annually a fifth of foreign books as Greece alone does and Spain annually translates about 1,000 books while the Muslim world has translated that many over 12,000 years.
The tirade goes on to say that seven out of ten Turks have never read a book, only nine Muslims have won a Nobel Prize, mostly peace prizes, and according to Nature, they produce ten percent of the world average in scientific articles.
Sennels is a native of Denmark, where he avers that Muslim children are more likely to have special needs, with a third of the budget of Danish schools going to them, with fifty to seventy percent of such children having an immigrant background. Two thirds of the children of Arabic parents are illiterate after ten years in Danish schools. Then there is mental illness. More than forty percent of patients in Denmark’s biggest ward for the criminally insane have an immigrant background.
I have belabored the work of Sennel. It is hard to find much about the effect of inbreeding on human populations.
I did find an article addressing the issue among Norwegians, but they didn’t find anything. Although there are places in Norway where the population density is so low that one might expect a lot of first cousin marriages. But nay, our cold-hardened contemporaries there keep track of everybody, and will travel long distances to court kin who are not first cousins.
One might well imagine that security would be an advantage of close family ties and a mating strategy that favored cousin marriages. And maybe that is the case, but the numbers we get indicate that most serious crimes are committed by friends and relatives. The victim knows the assailant. Of two murders that occurred among people known by friends of mine during the terrible year 2020 or the day after, that was the case. If there is any truth to be found, it would require a directed study. That would risk offending the “core values” of our overlords, and I think it will not happen during my lifetime, so we shall dismiss it.
Well, then, what do criminality, insanity, poor socialization, death at or near birth, deformity and low IQ have in common? They are all contributors to lowered fertility. And that, oh my beloved reader, is where the rubber hits the road. Regrettable, nay tragic as those half dozen things are, they are in aggregate at known levels, still survivable by a population.
Indeed, as I show in my work on the computer program mentioned above, inbreeding causes infertility. Fertility, if I might remind you, breaks down most simply into pre-zygotic and post-zygotic elements. The word zygotic is taken from a Greek word for a yoke of oxen. Consider that reproduction is normally a cyclic phenomenon, with one generation of a population reproducing as the next generation. Envision the moment when the healthy sperm from a male makes physical contact with the healthy egg of a female. That, from a scientific standpoint, is where life begins. There are, of course, contradictory political pressures we shall ignore. If the egg and sperm combine, the combination is called a zygote. It has all the genome, epigenome and organelles it is going to get from the parents. If the two fail to combine, that is called pre-zygotic infertility. Prevent that combination, and you have snuffed a human life. Anything that prevents that zygote from going on to develop into a pregnancy, survive birth except because of some rare maternal factor, enjoy reasonable health, win a suitable mate and provide a healthy egg or sperm to a mate in normal fashion, is called post-zygotic infertility.
I would not have guessed it from sheer intuition, but it turns out that inbreeding does not cause pre-zygotic infertility. If only pre-zygotic infertility were operative, you might rejoice in inbreeding indefinitely, according to my computer program, and you should not incur infertility and thus none of the dreadful issues that so interest Sennel.
With post-zygotic infertility it is a different matter altogether. It produced both inbreeding depression and outbreeding depression. The program is complex. I once showed an earlier version to an expert, and all he would do was babble. “Ten ply. God, it’s 10 ply.” Actually, that version placed limits on how kin a pair a virtual couple had to be, and may have had a few more levels running at once, but it was only a post-zygotic model so it was probably about the same. Nonetheless, the post-zygotic phenomenon produces infertility whether the population size is too big or too small.
It is a fundamental principle of chemistry that if you do the same reaction you get the same product. So, whatever the post-zygotic infertility is doing in a large population, it’s doing it in the small population. We are not as a world on a binge of inbreeding except according to Sennel in the Muslim world. So, whatever is happening it is, by and large, from binge outbreeding, and what is happening is global and progressing infertility.
So along with the terrors Sennel names, we must consider what is going on in the world at large. I went to a fertility conference in Orlando now many years ago. During a plenary session we were addressed by a representative of the UN. She explained that the world over, sperm counts had declined to the point that the range of “normal” sperm counts was going to be lowered. I was stunned, but being shy I did not scream that they were hiding a catastrophic event. I think it is well known that penis sizes are smaller. I do not know about testosterone levels, but it is well established that teenagers are losing interest in sex. My own lack of reproductive success hardly makes me merit the title of super-stud, but oh dear how I longed for it.
On the female side, I wonder whether the average female pelvis is getting smaller. We used to do a study called pelvimetry. A film was taken with exact placement of position, film and x-ray tube so that magnification was known. Then bony landmarks along the birth canal were taken and compared with standard values. If the pelvic outlet was too small, the baby would have to be delivered by cesarian section, cutting through the abdominal wall and uterus, rather than by the more natural vaginal route. If pelvises were getting smaller, then a proper study of pelvimetries over time should show it. But I could find no such study, and the hospital where I had worked simply did not do the study often enough to produce an adequate statistical sample.
As a surrogate for pelvic size, one could look at the number of cesarian procedures. The last time I checked, they had indeed increased significantly. In a sane world, that should have been enough to prompt a study of change in pelvic size. But no, as I said, such a study was never done. There were a few mutterings that greedy doctors were doing unnecessary surgeries, but without any proven cases, that fizzled rather quickly.
So, there are not just two mechanisms of infertility. They are numerous. There is pre-zygotic infertility demonstrated by the computer program. I know of only one mechanism there. If you take deer mouse sperm from a bunch of reasonably closely related males, they will bunch up to form a sort of flying wedge. I don’t know that anybody has studied whether the wedge swims faster or more unerringly than a lone sperm, although intuitively it makes sense. “Unrelated,” which of course means very distantly related, sperm will not show the same formation. So, sperm can respond to kinship by sticking together. It makes intuitive sense that if the sperm can do it, an egg and sperm can do it. This should enhance their ability to form a zygote. I know of no other mechanism for pre-zygotic infertility.
The fact that there are both at least one pre-zygotic mechanism and at least one post-zygotic mechanism is already remarkable. This means that natural selection has gone right into the most fundamental reactions that make life possible and done some tweaking. On top of that, the large number of post-zygotic mechanisms that are so evident means that natural selection has gone in again and again and tweaked pathway after pathway relating to growth and development. It is utterly amazing that natural selection should “think” that governing reproductive pool size is so terribly important but humans are as oblivious as those turkeys I described. Alfred Russel Wallace, that contemporary of Charles Darwin, recognized at once that speciation was of critical importance for an organism to claim a new niche and maintain the old one. Darwin himself was a turkey. Yet one is almost forgotten while the lesser intellect is the stuff of license plates and window stickers.
Another factor to consider is divorce rate. Selection presumably favors the nuclear family. Women do the work, and take the risk in bringing up children. And unlike other species, where one sex might do all the work while the other has the bright feathers, women do what must be the terrible nuisance of making themselves look pretty. It is positively spooky how much they care. I can sit in a sandwich shop and have a good-looking woman come in. She will turn like a tank turret and look me straight in the eye for just an instant before registering that it’s just an old geezer. I had moved nothing but my eyes. They’ll do it across the street. It is the hunt for continued life programed in by natural selection. My father grew up in South Carolina, and once a divorced woman moved to town. One day he diverted his bicycle on the way home from school in hopes of catching a glimpse of this amazing person. He had never been in the same town as a divorcee before. Divorce certainly is a lot more common now. We no longer marry the moderately distant cousin of whom nature would approve.
I don’t have any numbers, but I strongly suspect that people don’t care about themselves as much as we used to. Much of infertility is people thinking they are choosing not to have children. That will not stand up to scrutiny. Work in Iceland and Denmark indicates that number of offspring is caused by kinship between a couple and among their ancestors and nothing else. This is true even though they may not know their own kinship, far less all their ancestors back ten generations.
A person who feels pretty good about him or herself might be expected to want to have children as a way to perpetuate the self. When selection is passing down judgement on whether to have those children, I would suspect the directive is interpreted at least in part as, “But I don’t like myself,” or “But I like myself a lot.”
I suppose you have realized by now that oubreeding will eventually lead to extinction. The problems spoken of by Sennel are bad, but they are not so bad as no babies at all. That is called extinction.