Those of us who are history buffs and / or royalty buffs will know that “the Queen” (don’t we Americans think of Her Brittannic Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II as simply “the Queen”?) . . . the Queen and her husband the Duke of Edinburgh are second cousins.
And third cousins.
And that the family trees of most royal and noble families throughout Europe are so multiply intermarried, interwoven, and interconnected, that the job of teasing out all the relationships of any one individual royal to the present-day heads of the other major houses, would cross the eyes of even the most expert genealogists.
As I understand it, this was done to jealousy retain power within the same family structure. It’s also why so many royals were genetically weak. Diseases resulting from the matching of recessive genes were quite common.
Also because many years ago, royalty and commonalty alike believed that royalty were a “breed apart” and those of the royal breed must only be “crossed” with other royalty, lest their heirs be considered less than “purebred,” and thus not eligible to marry other young royals.
(Which did happen quite a bit back in the day. And it’s how some noble houses were established - when royal scions married “beneath” them, and their offspring, instead of taking their rank from their royal father, dropped down in rank to mere nobility.
The Battenbergs (Mountbatten) family had their origins this way, and the Tecks, too.
Without being able to point to an actual cite, I grew up in the southern Appalachians and now live in a western state. :rolleyes:
My observation has been that I have noticed more persons who appeared “feeble-minded” where I live now than where I grew up, despite having a relative who worked in a rehab hospital.
I attribute this, rightly or wrongly, to the prevalence of a religious group whose members were, and perhaps still are, encouraged to practice endogamy within their sect. Not to mention having a (pardon the pun :dubious: ) relatively limited founder population.
I am willing to bet what’s wrong with the Appalachian peoples is poverty and poor education, more than inbreeding.
There’s also serious illicit drug use in that part of the US, of late.
Interesting, MacLir. I am a half-days’ drive from the Appalachians, and believe I’ve encountered one or two folks from a sect similar to the one you mention.
But what you pointed out, makes sense, come to think of it.
Correct me if I’m wrong here … but there’s two results obtained from inbreeding; where two stupid genes combine to make a stupid person and where two smart genes combine to make a smart person … for southern Appalachia to produce more stupid because of inbreeding, it would also be producing more smart … them hollers in Western Carolina aren’t really known as intellectual hot-spots …
Dog breeders do this, but they’re willing to dispatch 3/4’s of their litters … at least the good breeders do …
I grew up in a remote area of Kentucky. Most people made a very conscious effort to avoid marrying anyone to whom they were even remotely related, so by no means were any of the communities inbred. I did know two families where the parents were cousins. In both cases, there was at least one child who was intellectually challenged. (In one of these cases, the father also had a degree of intellectual challenge.) So the possibility of inbred families does exist, even though they make up a very small part of the population. I’m doubtful that this is greater than other areas, and I’m sure that it does not contribute in a meaningful way to Kentucky underperformance on academic and IQ tests.
As to the original question, whether it was just the movie Deliverance that led people to believe that Appalachian communities are inbred: Books about the supposed inbred Kallilaks and Jukes families were published in 1912 and 1916, and those led people to believe that rural areas often have inbred families. In actuality, those families lived in New Jersey and New York State, respectively, but it’s easy for people to assume that people from remote rural areas live in the South, especially southern Appalachia. So, yes, this does predate Deliverance.
Interesting points, watchwolf. And someone more knowledgeable than I, I hope will help me out here . . . but here goes.
I believe as we go through our lives, our genes become disarranged by exposure to environmental toxins, cosmic rays, and random mistakes our bodies make as we copy the same cells over and over and over, replacing the old cells with the new. And this gradually also happens to the DNA stored in the eggs in a woman’s body; and the sperm a man produces can also be affected by these DNA mishaps.
So, if a sperm with a defective section of DNA that codes for healthy tooth enamel, fertilizes an egg with a good section that codes for healthy tooth enamel, then the baby that results still has a good shot at having healthy tooth enamel, because he or she received one copy of that good gene.
But the kid who receives defective DNA coding for tooth enamel from both parents is going to have a bad time with his teeth. Because he has no good genes to fall back on when it come to his enamel.
In a being with as many complex, finely-tuned parts and pieces as we have, it’s not good if something just accidentally changes. Like an orchestra playing a tune; if the first violinist decides to switch, and starts to play another piece, that’s going to mess the entire performance up. Maybe the first violinst has a better idea, but it’s not going to help this particular orchestral performance. So, too, with most changes to our DNA, especially changes to a baby’s DNA, just starting out in life.
In a big population, with lots of genes floating around, babies have a better chance of receiving at least one set of DNA codes that will give them what a baby is supposed to come equipped with.
Unfortunately, in an inbred population, lots of babies receive lots of copies of what may have been the same old defective DNA patterns being handed down generation after generation. Some people receiving only one set of these defective genetic codes, lucked out because they got one good gene from the other parent. But others received two defective genes, and had more or less serious problems. And two sets of defective codes is more and more likely to be the DNA “hand” that gets dealt to youngsters generation after generation in an inbred population.
In general, genetic diseases are much more often recessive rather than dominant, just because if a dominant genetic disease does show up, it’ll be weeded out of the gene pool very quickly. But a recessive gene can hide for many generations, until it happens to be matched up with another copy. And this will happen much more often in a smaller pool than in a larger one.
The older the gametes are, the more chance of transcription errors.
Mutations have a greater chance of being bad than good.
The smaller the gene pool the greater the chance of reinforcement of a gene (good or bad)
Fewer degrees of consanguinity decrease the effective size of the gene pool.
(1º parent-child, 2º siblings, 3º half-siblings or avuncular kin, 4º first cousins, etc.)
Most jurisdictions prohibit less than 5º, but a few allow 4º.
To come back to topic, where I grew up there weren’t obvious cases of kin marriages, but we joked about it, especially in relation to neighboring states or counties.
Q. What’s the hillbilly definition of “virgin”?
A. A girl who runs faster than her brothers.
I’ve been accused of many things on these boards, but knowing anything about biology isn’t one of them … I’m just asking and hoping an actual biologist comes along and answers …
My question is wouldn’t superlative codes also be more likely to be passed on as well … if a dog breeder gets a brother/sister pair with the traits he’s looking for … he’ll mate them in the hopes of getting puppies with these traits even stronger … keeping in mind any puppies with the defective genes magnified will be put down …
The premise here is that inbreeding only magnifies the bad traits, only the stupid is passed on … is there a reason for this assumption? … why wouldn’t the good traits get magnified as well … such that comparing average intelligence scores won’t revile inbreeding, the low scores in southern Appalachia is caused by some other mechanism, say chronic poverty or lack of school attendance …
Well, I hope you get your biologist. I have only a social science background. I can tell you from what I know of science generally, that science is continuing to study and explore what human intelligence is. And to answer many questions: of what factors does it consist? What develops these factors? What reduces them? What roles do learning, experience, memory, physical health, emotional health, social health, other environmental factors play in each of these factors? And what interactions might there be among these factors?
The science on these questions is really only in its earliest stages. For example, scientists across the board can’t agree on precisely what human intelligence is. May someone who is barely able to learn anything in most areas, but excels in one area, be described as intelligent? Think of the movie Rain Man (Hoffman, Cruise) about the idiot savant. Ray was very intellectually challenged, but had almost the ability of a computer in counting and arithmetic. Was Ray intelligent? Some youngsters can barely read or write, but they sing and compose music brilliantly. Are they intelligent? Others can learn and excel in many academic areas, but their ability to coordinate their actions is appalling. Are they intelligent? Yet other people have dropped out of school, failing in nearly all academic areas, but they know how to read people, sense a good business deal, and have built and run multi-million dollar businesses? Are they intelligent?
All these questions matter, because without a generally agreed-upon definition for intelligence, how can you reliably measure it? And if you can’t measure it, how can you observe it in operation? How can you even know that it’s what you’re seeing when you see it in operation? And if you can’t measurably observe it, how can you understand it or reliably predict it? Answers: you can’t; you can’t; you can’t . . . and you can’t.
If you can’t do any of these things, then you can’t hypothesize. You’ve got nothing. You’re dead in the water.
So science has to figure out a comprehensive definition for human intelligence. For starters. Probably won’t happen in my lifetime. Maybe it will in yours.
In the meantime, have you ever watched that reality TV show about the coal miners in Appalachia? The camera goes down into the pits with the men. And stays with the men as they use their brains, experience, and their guts both to meet their quotas and to stay alive. If you don’t already believe that there are many kinds of intelligence, you will after watching a couple of episodes of this show!
Your understanding of inbreeding (increasing homozygosity) is a bit simplistic. As is your idea of how intelligence is inherited.
I know zero dog breeders who are willing to dispatch ANY of their pups unless they have an obvious genetic defect visible at birth. And I know a lot of dog breeders.
You don’t need to kill your suboptimal puppies to cull them. From a breeder’s point of view, it’s just as good to have them spayed/neutered and adopted out as pets. Probably better, if they can sell them instead of just giving them away.
My family came from northeastern Tennessee/Kentucky. I have three generations of first cousin marriages in my family tree, and I don’t know of any retardation in those lines. Well, I did have one great uncle who was strange, but his father was a second husband, and not a first cousin.
Intelligence gets in the way of striking without thinking, picking out the easy meat with your eyes closed … trying to cipher it out takes too much time …
You know that’s all scripted … I think those guys are actors, not miners, how strong is the union these days? …
I agree with everything you said, except I think imperfect measurements can be useful, as long as we understand the imperfections … it’s somewhat common to use a simple measure of a complex system by just leaving out information, and being aware of what’s left out we can evaluate the worth of the measure … hurricane scales are piss-poor at predicting human suffering, but it’s useful warning the general public …
We can’t even test to get hip dysplasia certification until the animal is two years old … puppy mills don’t keep their product that long, WAY too expensive … the analogy holds since dispatch or de-sex the animal no longer contributes the gene pool … the breeder gets his 1 in 5 chance and the rest is disposed of …
We can’t dispose of humans … but will that “1 in 5 chance” still hold? …
