Agreed, my primary “evidence” is anecdotal - it’s from health professionals, traveller liaison officers and genetic research staff, all of whom I worked with in a professional capacity when I worked in local government in Cambs.
Which is not solid evidence by any means, certainly by the standards of SDMB, but the primary research is available in the professional journals if you have time, access and inclination to look.
It’s not the fact that the data is anecdotal that makes me dubious. It’s the fact that the conclusion can only possibly be reached if we accept a chain of correlation as being exactly the same as a chain of causation. That ain’t valid no matter what the quality of the primary data is.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
This is why we have a Royal Family, to encourage us to widen the gene pool, and not “roll your own”.
Before the days of widespread dissemination of information and an easily offended and litigious public, doctors would have their own code for classifying patients, e.g. “PFO” for "pissed and fell over*, “NFC” for “nutty as a fruit cake”, and NFN for “normal for Norfolk”. The folks of Norfolk do seem to get a lot of stick, much more than other isolated communities in the UK.
There’s a rather sweet little film, The Bridal Path (1959, IMDb) where our Hebridean island-dwelling hero is badgered out of his cousinous relationship to seek a bride less closely related on the Scottish mainland. This is triggered by the local doctor returning from a conference on genetics and realising why so many of his patients were “wrong in the head”. It has a happy ending - after many trials and tribulations, he gives up on the 10-fingered girls and returns to his sweetheart/cousin. I doubt, however, that this film will be remade any time soon.
The latest issue of American Scientist (Jan-Feb 2010) has a long review of Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England, Adam Kuper, which seems to be all about cousin marriage.
Intermarriage among upper middle class families was high for a number of reasons, mostly similar to that of royals: it kept power and control within the families. “More than 1 marriage in 10 was between first and second cousins.”
Darwin was concerned about the issue, and there has been a long controversy among his biographers whether his own cousin marriage spurred his long interest in interbreeding in plants and animals. He had his son do a study to determine whether cousin marriages had “injurious effects.” George Darwin poked at the issue in several ways and broadened it to include the middle as well as upper classes. His conclusions were that around 3.5% of marriages in the middle classes were between first cousins, but that rates of problems (such as entry into asylums) were equivalent, not higher.
Kuper does say that modern society is more prejudiced against cousin marriages, as so many of the Brits in the thread have posted. This may be because scientists after the first World War came down hard against them despite no new additional evidence. The most recent genetic studies finds no special risks unless such closeness is repeated for several generations.
The reviewers conclusion: “Cousin marriage amongst the English bourgeoisie between the 1790s and 1910s was pervasive and entirely commonplace,” but “hardly anyone used incest to describe cousin marriage in the period under consideration.” Makes for a better title, though.
I have lived in Essex, Leeds, Bristol and south London, and I cannot remember this topic ever coming up in conversation in any of those places. Did you actually discuss it with a broad cross section of people in all the places you mention, or are you just projecting your own opinions onto the people around you everywhere you go?
(If you do discuss this everywhere you go, you are either weird, or dating your cousin!)
My experience is like amarone’s, having lived my first 40 years in Britain, and now several more in the USA. In Britain it is not a subject that gets talked about very much,* but in America I have been struck by how often you do hear negative jokes and comments about it (though probably more from TV comedians and the like than in ordinary conversation). Maybe the attitudes of individual Britons today depends upon whether they are more culturally influenced by 19th century literature or American mass entertainment.
Incidentally, I am fairly sure that I have read that recent studies have determined that the risks of genetic problems from first-cousin interbreeding (unlike sibling interbreeding) are in fact very low, only marginally worse than the risks from reproducing with someone totally unrelated. (I believe, however, that the risk would build up if the practice of cousin marriage continued in the same family over multiple generations.) Sorry, I cannot recall the cite for this right now, but it might come back to me.
*At least amongst white people, amongst whom the practice is rare, even if not necessarily considered particularly icky. If **Mk VII** is correct in saying that the practice is common amongst British Pakistanis (and I have no reason to doubt it) then they presumably do discuss it, but not in a negative way.Am I being whooshed?
Not at all. I hadn’t yet seen your post when I was working on mine, but anyway I do not think the study I am talking about is the same as the one you discuss. (If it is the same, we seem to be concerned with different aspects of it).
Incidentally, all the stuff about Norfolk (inasmuch as there is any factual basis to it) is not necessarily about cousin interbreeding. It may be about incest between closer relatives (siblings, or parent-child, both of which, I think, count as incest anywhere), or, more likely, about the effects of inbreeding, even between people more distantly related than first cousins, over multiple generations. It is a multi-generation tradition of inbreeding that causes geneteic problems, not an occasional one-off cousin coupling.
[never mind]