“Cell mass of protoplasm” might be a garbled understanding of molar pregnancy, or gestational trophblastic disease. The risk of GTD is higher among mothers below 20 and over 35 years of age, and with paternal age over 45. It’s possible that a given community would have more pregnant women and fathers in these age groups than the general population would. There are also reports of familial increased risk for GTD. A cursory Google search didn’t turn up any particular association with LDS and GTD, though.
“Cell mass of protoplasm” could also just be garbled bullshit, too.
How about “One egg gets fertilized and splits, giving twins. Of the two now completely independent growing cells, one splits and one does not. Now there are 3. The rest of the development process continues per normal.”
If that’s how it works we’d naively expect that the prevalence of identical twins vs singletons would be X%, triplets vs twins would be about X2, and quads to triplets would be about X3. Per wiki X for identical twins vs singles is about 0.3%
Less of course all the partial or total miscarriages involved in any newly fertilized egg. Which of course become more likely as the number of developing blastocysts then embryos compete.
See this article on multiple births for more supporting my contention. Which also admits that identical multiples are so rare that the error bars are much larger than the statistics.
A couple of clarifications to start- first the LDS church proper does not endorse nor allow polygamy; they abandoned the practice over a hundred years ago. But there are splitter groups that still practice those ways and they were in the news within the last few years and do seem to cling to the border between the two states to avoid investigation by either. Second, he definitely meant mental disabilities (and I think he mentioned specifically those along the autism spectrum but I couldn’t remember exactly so phrased it more generally so I wouldn’t have to slog through an hour and eight minute podcast.) After having heard news reports (and a few rumors about “those Mormons” from proper LDS friends), then hearing this podcast—I have no trouble believing the communities being discussed have both the inbreeding problem, and the age challenges mentioned by brossa.
I will gladly link to the podcast if anyone would care to hear the source material. In fact, I will describe it so it may be easily found: it is Seth Andrew’s The Thinking Atheist Podcast #112; The Mormons from June of 2013. (And it is over an hour and a half long.)
True - but fumarase deficiency a.k.a. “Polygamist Downs” which has spiked in FLDS poly communities isn’t just intellectual disability. Some folks might be hoping for just “funny in the head” disabilities but it’s all a roll of the dice.
Yes. That is why I am careful to abbreviate them as “FLDS”, the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints which are definitely not mainstream Mormons.
And thank you VERY much for stating where in the podcast what you refer to is located. I wish more people would do that.
I think all the discussion of Mormons and polygamy is getting off track with respect to the OP. While inbreeding is of interest, let’s try to stick more closely to the subject of the OP.