Cousin couples website:
My friend has sent another link:
http://www.cousincouples.com/
visited July 25, 2010
The site explains that it is about 18 years old and has as its mission serving the interests of couples who are cousins. Not the least of these is combating the deep seated prejudice against such matches. They point out the real but only slightly increased risk of problems with the pregnancy against background and compare it with more significant risk factors like alcohol, tobacco and teenage mothers. I shall not duplicate their site, but invite you to take a look.
While that is an advocacy site with a clear cut policy, this site is different. I really don’t have any policy to propose or to defend. As I mention on the opening page, this is research, not advice.
All right then, yes, I do have something I recommend. I recommend that we find out what is going on and let people know what the implications of their choices are. Only then can they make truly free choices. Right now, with everyone – me included – ignorant of just exactly what those choices mean, nobody is free. Of course I have a pretty good idea, and that should be obvious from what has gone before. There is a limit on the size of a randomly mating population of any animal. Exceed that limit, and infertility will result and the population will fall. As to whether it goes to zero, apparently sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. The relevant factors are things that much need study and are not being studied.
In fact the very phenomenon of decreased fertility with increased population size, although quite clear from the scientific literature, is almost universally ignored.
Now while I speak of population size, the web site above speaks of cousins. They have an interest in first cousins couples since those face the most severe social pressure and in some states are illegal. According to the site, such laws are pretty much peculiar to the United States.
But I must acknowledge that the size of a random mating gene pool and the average kinship of those in that pool are, at equilibrium, specifically related. If you know one you can calculate the other, not that I have a formula for you, but there is one somewhere. So I suppose I am talking about marrying cousins as being the only hope the human species has of surviving. At least that is what the entire mountain of evidence I have looked at indicates.
Since first cousins, according to the Iceland study I have mentioned so frequently, have a low fertility, and since first cousins, according to the site, have few problems, I begin to think that consanguinity might just be the way to solve the world’s population problem. If people only married others of the right degree of kinship, the population could be stabilized at any level desired. Right now the population is utterly unstable, and that is not good news.
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