Film: Friends From France

Friends from France (a.k.a. Les Interdits) is a multilingual film about two cousins from France traveling to the USSR to help Soviet Jews escape to Israel. The vast majority of the film takes place within the one week they are in the USSR, and centers around their relationship with each other, and with their Jewish identities. I was struck by how, if only some lines were changed, the entire film could be about a sibling couple and there would be very little difference, except for the fact that everyone would be less open talking about it. Both of the main characters grew up together in a refugee camp, and their push and pull dynamic is reminiscent of other types of intense, but frowned upon relationships. The film isn't a thriller, or a mystery, but more of a personal drama about self-discovery and human connection.

The whole film can be watched on YouTube with English subtitles. It's not a fast paced movie, but it's not long either - just 90 minutes, which is rare these days. I liked it, though I'd say I enjoyed some other movies more.

"Genetic testing breathes new life into Israel's Samaritans"

Samaritans celebrating Sukkot

All of these weird eugenic arguments people make about consanguinamory, about people having "too many kids," are not only creepy, but they're based on bad assumptions. When people are given easy access to good information on how to manage their families, they usually use it. The results can be amazing.

MT. GERIZIM, West Bank — When Ben Yehuda Altif got engaged to his first cousin Mazal, there was no problem winning the blessing of their families or the Samaritan high priest, who leads their ancient Israelite sect. Marriage between cousins is common in the religious community. But there was still an obstacle. Like many Samaritan couples today, the pair had to pass a premarital genetic screening to predict the likelihood of having healthy children. Without the green light from doctors, the marriage would be off. "Doctors said OK, and now we have a healthy, handsome boy," said Altif, 33, reaching for his wife's cellphone to show off pictures of their son.

Samaritans, who trace their roots back about 2,700 years, are best known for clinging to strict biblical traditions that have largely disappeared, including animal sacrifice, isolation of menstruating women and, until recently, a ban on marrying outsiders. But after facing near-extinction and being devastated by a high rate of birth defects because of inbreeding, the community is using modern science — including genetic testing, in vitro fertilization and abortion — to preserve their traditional way of life.

"It's changing our blood," said Aharon Ben-Av Chisda, 86, high priest of the 750-member Samaritan community, which is split about evenly between the West Bank village of Kiryat Luza near Nablus and the Israeli city of Holon, south of Tel Aviv. The white-bearded priest said genetic testing was breathing new life and optimism into the once-besieged community. He noted that he and his wife, who is a second cousin, had four children before genetic testing was available: Three are deaf and one can't walk. Most other families at Mt. Gerizim tell similar stories of health problems and handicaps among the older generation, though lately such problems have begun to disappear.

Samaritans are one of the world's oldest religious sects. Similar in practice, beliefs and ancestry to Jews, they follow the Hebrew Torah. But instead of Jerusalem, they revere a temple their ancestors built on this remote West Bank hillside.

Mentioned several times in the Bible, Samaritans are also considered one of the most inbred communities in the world, with 46% marrying first cousins and more than 80% marrying blood relatives, according to research by Israeli geneticist Batsheva Bonne-Tamir, who spent most of her career studying the community. The restrictions against marrying outsiders were less of a problem when Samaritans numbered more than a million in the 5th century. But because of persecution and forced conversion to Islam, their numbers had dwindled to just 146 by 1917. To crawl their way back, Samaritans began having large families of eight to 10 children, and the frequency of first-cousin marriages doubled, Bonne-Tamir found. As the population grew, so did the health problems and genetic defects, including rare blood diseases, Usher syndrome, deafness, muteness, blindness and physical handicaps.

"It was largely a 20th century phenomenon," said Bonne-Tamir, now retired from Tel Aviv University. Over the last decade, the community also relaxed its restrictions on intermarriage, allowing in about 25 women, mostly Jewish Israelis and arranged matches with brides from Ukraine. Samaritan leaders are reluctant to discuss their gene pool shrinkage, but they estimate the rate of birth defects was once 10 times higher than the nationwide average. By the 1960s, the rate of miscarriage was 10% higher among Samaritan women, one study found. But since adopting genetic testing, Samaritans say the rate of birth defects among newborns today is normal, even though most people still marry inside the community, including to relatives.

"This is enabling us to build a better generation for the future," said Ishak Al Samiri, a spokesman for the community at Mt. Gerizim.
Like his father, Al Samiri married a cousin. He has two healthy children, but he suffers from a blood disorder and his brother is crippled, both believed to be linked to genetic defects, he said.
Samaritans have long been the focus of genetic research, initially because of their ancient roots. In the 1960s, Israeli scientists began to study the Holon branch of the community, both to assist with genetic defects and to trace their historic lineage.

Samaritans claim that they are the descendants of northern Israelite tribes that were conquered by Assyrians. Subsequent genetic studies suggested that Samaritan men carry the so-called Cohen gene, linking them to ancient Israelites. For centuries, Samaritans lived in Nablus, but some moved to Jaffa and later to Holon. In 1988, the Nablus community relocated to a village near an Israeli settlement to escape attacks by Palestinians, who viewed them as Jews. Today Samaritans, who hold Israeli citizenship, pride themselves on staying neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

 This can happen if there's a sudden, extreme bottleneck. Moderate levels of consanguineous marriage can have little to no consequence on a population's health stats, as long as the population is large enough and there is still non-consanguineous marriage. If a bottleneck does happen, it can be many generations before all of the deleterious genes from the founder population are eliminated from the gene pool. One of the ways to get around this, as the Samaritans have shown, is to use genetic tests to inform marital and reproductive decisions. If people are worried about children born with disabilities - and I'm assuming they're genuine here, and not just using this as an excuse to attack consanguinamorous people specifically - then a great way to address those concerns is with widespread, cheap access to genetic testing and family planning. As the Samaritans have shown, if you have that, consanguinamory isn't much of a problem.

Another cousin couple arrested

This time in Swaziland:

Two cousins have been arrested for engaging in a sexual relationship, knowing very well that their fathers were siblings. Mbongwa Dlamini (23) and Nomphilo Dlamini (18) have been charged with incest, emanating from their alleged relationship that was first discovered in 2013. The relationship resulted in the birth of a child, and [she] is expecting yet another baby. The first one is estimated to be around two years of age.

The couple has been defiantly staying together at Lebovu area, outside Nhlangano, despite repeated warnings from family members. Community members said the relationship between the two had been consensual and also a source of quarrel at their homestead. They said the couple had been warned on numerous occasions to desist from their weird behaviour but the love birds just decided to pour cold water on the issue. The pair admitted to the police that they were cousins and were also in a relationship.

It was the couple’s unabashed display of affection towards each other that led to their immediate relatives reporting the matter to the police. When the family first became aware of the affair in 2013, the couple was reprimanded but they wouldn’t let go of each other. Eventually they had their first child. Recently, elders were exasperated by the discovery that the girl had conceived again, and the illicit affair was eventually reported to the police. The couple was charged upon arraignment at the Nhlangano Magistrates Court, where they both registered a plea of guilty.

The duo was uncooperative when asked by the prosecutor about their strange behaviour. The magistrate wanted to know if they addressed each other as lovers or cousins when together. However, both suspects were seemingly embarrassed by the question. Instead of giving a response, they just showed long faces and remained silent.

"Kissing Cousins ... and Sisters and Brothers"

This is a good article. The attitude is positive, even if some of the things the author says are problematic.

When Melissa, an administrative assistant in a law firm who’s in her 20s, met an older woman named Lisa a few years ago, it was love at first sight. The two have been in a relationship ever since but know that marriage is out of the picture. And it’s not because they are lesbian. It’s because they are mother and daughter.

Incest is still society’s deepest-rooted sexual taboo, mainly because the word is so often associated with rape and inbreeding. But consensual incest exists, and cases like Melissa’s — who discovered Lisa, a personal trainer, was her biological mother only after the West Coasters had started dating — pose their own host of ethical dilemmas, including some we may finally be ready to discuss.

So far, so good.

It wasn’t that long ago when homosexuality and sadomasochism were also considered taboo. These days, though, Hollywood’s offerings are packed with homoerotic imagery and commuters are happy to crack open a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey on the morning train to the office. So if pop culture is anything to go by (and when isn’t it?), there are some signs that romantic love between family members is slowly becoming less socially outrageous. Look no further than HBO’s Game of Thrones — which explicitly portrays sex between a brother and sister — or scenes of a mother and son going at it in Boardwalk Empire.

Yeesh. I would hardly hold up Boardwalk Empire. It's clearly understood in the show that Tommy's relationship with his mother is unhealthy and not truly consensual. She is emotionally manipulative and abusive. I would hope that people can tell the difference between consent and abuse. Try The Borgias or something.

In many cases, experts warn, incest destroys families and hurts people’s ability to trust others and form healthy relationships. So while consensual incest does exist, “legalizing it would be too risky because it may incentivize it,” says Dr. Karin Meiselman, a psychologist who specializes in treating incest cases.

For people like Sarah, however, the social stigma feels grossly exaggerated. The 27-year-old journalist from London recalls with a smile the time she and her cousin had sex after a birthday party. “Nothing about it felt wrong,” she says. “We were adults, we both wanted it and we are still friends. What’s wrong with that?”

That's a pretty weak refutation of such hyperbole. Yes, I agree with "Sarah's" point, but it's not enough. Where's the broader context? Where's the challenge to the baseless logic of that psychologist's assertions? I wasn't under the impression that Spain or the Netherlands were cesspits of child rape. People talk as though it's never been legalized before. It's been legalized here, in the United States. So, all of these people are supposed to suffer under state oppression because some psychologist thinks child rapists take their cue from the government?

Science doesn’t have a clear answer. Humans are wired to develop a sexual aversion toward close family members to avoid inbreeding, some research shows, but that mechanism is usually triggered by growing up together. So when family members don’t meet until they’re adults, attraction is actually pretty common. “Imagine meeting someone who has your exact predilection for spicy food or music, which is likely since you share that much genetic material,” explains Debra Lieberman, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has done extensive research on incest aversion. “We need to start asking if it’s OK to limit someone’s freedom just because we have a ‘yuck’ response to it.”

The German Ethics Council agrees. Last year, this independent body of experts called for an end to the criminalization of incest between siblings and argued that, even if rare (it touches only 5 percent of siblings), it isn’t appropriate for criminal law to preserve a social taboo. France will soon add the word “incest” back into its penal code to label sexual abuse within the family (French legislators had stopped using the term two centuries ago), but the decision doesn’t change any of the pre-existing laws condemning rape. Consensual incest is still legal in the land of baguettes.

Governments have long used two arguments to criminalize consensual incest — risk of inbreeding and damage to the family — but societal changes may be chipping away at both of these stances. While couples who are close relatives do have a higher chance of having children with severe birth defects, today there are many effective ways to avoid pregnancies, or to get pregnant using a third person’s genetic material. The need to protect the traditional family structure may also become less relevant as society changes. When one case of consensual incest between a stepfather and stepdaughter was brought to the Supreme Court in 2007, the judges ruled it should remain illegal because it harmed the family. But J. Dean Carro, the lawyer who defended the incestuous couple says, “We were ahead of our time, but legalization will happen because such cases will become more common.”

She accidentally manages to make the gradual normalizing of consanguinamory seem somewhat menacing. It throws in consanguinamory with BDSM, and while I'm fine with people doing what they want in their bedroom, consanguinamory isn't just another kind of "kink". (50 Shades of Grey isn't a positive portrayal of BDSM, either.)

I don’t know if the various sibling dynasties throughout history would’ve considered themselves radical or destructive to the structure of the family. And I don’t think there’s any reason to see them as that, if you actually look at what happened. And I don't think any couple now would see themselves that way. Plenty of the long-term consanguineous relationships I've seen are pretty conservative: man and woman, 2.5 kids, monogamous, man works while the woman takes care of the household. Many of them are Republicans. Some are even Christians. (There are plenty of military veterans among them as well.)

They don't see themselves as trying to destroy traditional family, except that they don't care for the part of tradition that demands exogamy. In fact, such relationships are usually hyper-stable (in the absence of ridiculous outside pressure), for the same reason consanguineous mating sometimes happens in nature: two kinds of love equals twice the bond, but still an unconditional one. (In nature, closely related mates treat each other better, and better protect their mutual children.) If it's a threat to "traditional family", it's only because family has recently been defined so rigidly and narrowly that any deviation is perceived as an attack on its foundation. And as far as that last quote, there will be more cases, but only because people are getting fed up with the status quo.

As well intentioned as the whole thing is, I'm not sure what demographic she's trying to convince. I do think it's a step in the right direction, but we're going to need stronger arguments than "the destruction of the traditional family is inevitable." At most, it just points out to people that it is real, and it's an issue.

Anyway, Melissa and Lisa seem familiar. Hmmm...

"My boyfriend is my cousin"

I found a thread on a forum for the girlfriends, spouses, and female family of people in prison. This one blows my mind - not because I find it surprising, but because of how much people’s minds are blown.

I just found out that me & my boyfriend of 4 years are cousins i'm shocked i'm upset i'm sad I don't know what to do i've been having some problems with my roof so I told him that my cousin came out to check it for me he asked me what was my cousins name and I told him my cousins nick name he said that's funny I have a cousin who has that same nick name he said what does he look like and I told him he said how old is he and I told him and he said that's crazy because thats sound just like my cousin so we brushed it off and didn't pay it to much attention

so yesterday his mom called to wish me a happy thanksgiving  so we talked for a while then I asked her if she had a cousin name (BLANK) because I thought my bf was joking around well this time he was serious because she said yeah and i'm like hold up so then I start asking her did she know a couple of my family members she said yes and when I asked her did she know my mom she said yes your mother is my cousin my mouth hit the floor I said let me call you back so I can call my mom

well I called my mom and I told her the situation and I asked her did she know my bf's mother and when i told her my bf's mothers name she said oh my god we are related she said I  never met her children because I haven't seen her in years so at this point my mind is blank I hung up the phone and for the next couple of hours i felt like I was in a daze I don't know what to do he called me this morning and he was sick when i told him everything he is about to come home in a couple of weeks and his home plan is sent to my house we been together for four years but the thought of me sleeping with my cousin is  i don't know what to do I can't believe it

Welp, I understand how it might be shocking, but it’s not a big deal, nor is it so uncommon. They’re not even 1st-cousins; they’re at least 2nd-cousins. Very few places on Earth ban such marriages, let alone criminalize such unions.

People’s reactions, though...

you poor girl!! i don't believe in incest either but if you love the guy it would be really hard to cut those feelings off. i don't even know what advice to give you except to say, i'm so sorry!!!!

Whether anyone “believes” in it, it’s there. It’s already happened (by some people’s definition of “incest”). People need to be reassuring her, not consoling her.

Ok...theres OFFICIALLY nothing that can shock me on here anymore..
Im so sorry this happened to you. I could only imagine it would be hard to just cut it off...I dont know..I just hope it works out for ya!!

Really? This is the most shocking thing they’ve come across? I fear for their future sanity should they come across 1st-cousins kissing.

been there dont that and freaked way out! i went with my cousin 3 yrs before we found out. now we laugh about it.  we ended it when we found out but i can relate to what your going thru!

So she dated a man for 3 years, and after all that finding out they were somewhat related was enough to lead them to end the relationship? God... At least they’re happy and on good terms now. But still! What an overreaction!

I'm sorry for your situations.....it seems like we're all related to someone in one way or another..... Honestly, that's why I date different races...cause there is a greater chance that I'm not related to them.....

That... I don’t even know what to make of that. Are black people who marry other black people more “incestuous” then? To choose one’s partner based on race purely to avoid the small chance you might have sex with a distant cousin? I never truly realized how much some people let the “incest” taboo run their lives.

OMFG. Girl I'm tryna pick my mouth up off the floor....All I can say is girl THAT SUCKS!!! omg. that sucks so bad...Like, how related are you? Blood? 1st cousins?? omg. I'm speechless. I'm soooo sorry b/c girl, that must suck so bad.

I still don’t get why it “sucks”.

WOW!! You poor girl.  That is messed up honey.  The only other thing that comes to mind (sounds crazy) is to determine the blood line in the event you choose to stay together and have a family.  There COULD be issues down the road thru your geneology and yes, it would take a genetic specialist to determine that.  Either way it goes, I wish you the best

I mean, yes, she should, but everyone should see a genetic specialist before having children, ideally. Why is everyone giving their condolences? It’s not like anyone’s died.

I don’t blame people for their reactions here. They’re byproducts of our culture. They’re just trying to be supportive in the only way they know how. I care more about what it says about the kind of distorted thinking our culture teaches us when it comes to consanguinamory - especially for something as benign as 2nd-cousins dating.

Luckily, some people aren’t so ignorant:

I mean it is only "gross" when you grow up with someone as your family member and then say start sleeping with them.  I mean my mothers cousins one raised in Italy one raised here met at ya know 20 years old fell in love and got married.  They didnt know each other as family.  Now I could never think of sleeping with my cousin 3rd or 4th but I grew up with them as family and you shouldnt look at your family that way but...you dont know him and I wouldnt get to upset over it.  I mean I know it may be too late you are upset but try to relax it will all be ok.

I wouldn’t consider that “gross”, but at least she’s somewhat accepting of GSA situations.

It is not incest.  You're second cousins and would be able to marry.  I think it's just first cousins that can't marry.   Don't panic.  I have so many first cousins I don't even keep track of second cousins or "first removed" and all that.

In half the states, 1st cousins can marry, as well as in the vast majority of all countries on Earth. So, even if they were 1st-cousins, it still wouldn’t be “incest” in most cultures, nor would it bar them from marriage.

Her reaction to all of this makes me sad:

Thank you guys for the comments I still can't get my head together I just can't believe it I love him to death i've been waiting a little over 2 years from him to come home and now that it's almost over I get with that wowwwwwwww it's crazy because it's only been a day since I found out but when I talked to him today and he said I love you it was hard for me to say i love you to because I felt like a freak oh my God I just don't know what to do

There’s no natural inhibition for cousins who didn’t grow up together. Cousins of various kinds have never been universally considered off limits. Despite that, society’s crap has gotten so deep in her head that it’s undermining her love for her boyfriend of 4 years, who she’s been diligently waiting for while he’s in prison. To have such a strong relationship so easily and quickly undermined by something so insignificant...

More Research on Recessive Genetics

A great find by Full Marriage Equality. I changed the title because the article’s title is oddly misleading.

Members of the Hutterite ethno-religious group are descended from a small group of founding individuals

Most people carry one or two genetic mutations that can cause early death or infertility in their offspring, researchers report in a study published on 8 April in Genetics. That estimate puts humans on a par with animals such as fruit flies and zebrafish, which have smaller genomes. But it is probably a conservative figure, says lead author Ziyue Gao, a geneticist at the University of Chicago in Illinois.

Gao's team examined recessive mutations that cause lethal disease in people who inherit two copies of the flawed gene — one from each parent. People with one copy do not show symptoms, but can pass the mutation on to their children. The researchers' findings account for only mutations that would prevent a person from reproducing in the absence of modern medical care — excluding recessive conditions that do not always result in early death or infertility.

Scientists have tried to estimate the average number of lethal recessive mutations in an average person by comparing the genes of children from unrelated parents to those from parents who are first cousins or other blood relatives. But people who marry relatives tend to differ in other ways from people who do not, making it hard to separate genetic and environmental factors.

To avoid this problem, Gao's team chose to study a US ethno-religious group called the Hutterites. Members of the group have a communal lifestyle, with shared property and equal access to modern medical care. They keep detailed genealogical records and traditionally marry within the group. These characteristics minimize variations in environmental influences that could skew the researchers' analysis, Gao says.

The analysis involved 1,642 Hutterites living in South Dakota. The study group stretches back 13 generations and is descended from just 64 founders. Gao's team used computer simulations to determine the likelihood that a recessive mutation in a founder would show up as a genetic disease in a Hutterite child born after 1950. The team compared this result with the number of present-day Hutterites who have severe genetic diseases to infer that each founder carried about 0.58 recessive lethal mutations.

The team then adjusted this number because research in mice suggests that about half of offspring who inherit recessive lethal diseases die before birth. From this, they concluded that each Hutterite founder carried one or two recessive lethal mutations. The results suggest that, on average, two first-cousins are 1.8% more likely than unrelated parents to produce a child with a serious genetic disease — a relatively small effect, says Gao.

Alan Bittles, a geneticist at the Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, says that the work adds to a growing body of research suggesting that concerns about marriage between relatives are overblown. “It’s one more study that tends to show, and show quite clearly, that our previous ideas of the ill effects of first-cousin marriage have been grossly exaggerated,” he says.

People always seem to misrepresent what Alan Bittles thinks when they reference his work. He’s actually quite humble about his findings and generally supportive of reducing the stigma associated with “inbreeding”. It’s nice to see him actually quoted here.

Overall I really like this study, but I wish they’d extended their analysis beyond just cousin couples. I suppose we’ll have to wait for someone to care enough to bother with a topic like the children of siblings.

Film: "How I Live Now"

My blog doesn't usually focus on cousin couples, but I can't help but recommend this movie. It's from the same director and the same writer who did "The Last King of Scotland". It's about an OCD American girl sent off by her father to live with her aunt and cousins in England. She falls in love with her oldest cousin... and then a nuclear bomb goes off. It's like a teen romance version of "The Road". I have never seen a movie which makes England look as beautiful as this movie does. I really, really like this movie.

Edit: I'd just like to point out that if this were a case of reunited half-siblings, nothing would actually be different about the story, except that the main character would be possibly even more reluctant to start her relationship. What if instead of her cousins, they were her half-siblings by the same mother, and her father got her in the divorce and took her to the US. What about the story would actually change? You wouldn't even expect the others to react any differently, because they're young and extremely bohemian, and would probably still take it in stride. The film would just lose a little bit of the moments concerning her mother, and so she'd lose a little bit of her driving back story. Her relationship with her mother is only briefly talked about, however, and she never got to know her mother well. So not that much, really.

"'Kissing Cousins' Breed More Kids"

Further research confirms what was already observed across nature: couplings between 3rd- or 4th-cousins produce a greater number of successful offspring than between more distantly related individuals.

While the thought of searching for a potential mate at a family reunion might sound repulsive to some, researchers in Iceland report that "kissing cousins" may produce more children and grandchildren than unrelated couples. A study released Thursday in the journal Science found that marriages between third or fourth cousins in Iceland tended to produce more children and grandchildren than those between completely unrelated individuals.

Researchers at the deCODE Genetics company in Reykjavik mapped out kinship among all known Icelandic couples whose members were born between 1800 and 1965. They then compared the numbers of children and grandchildren descended from these 160,811 couples. Researchers were shocked to find that for women born between 1800 and 1824, marriages between third cousins produced an average of 4.04 children and 9.17 grandchildren, while marriages between eighth cousins or more distantly related couples had averages of only 3.34 children and 7.31 grandchildren. For women born between 1925 and 1949, with mates related at the degree of third cousins, the average number of children and grandchildren were 3.27 and 6.64, compared with 2.45 and 4.86 for those with mates who were eighth cousins, or more distantly related.

"These are counterintuitive, almost dislikable results," said Dr. Kari Stefansson, senior author of the paper on the study. Dislikable, because our intuition is that the more closely related you are to your mate, the higher the chances of passing along the unfortunate traits so often associated with inbreeding. Researchers believe the trend toward a more prodigious relationship with a not-so-distant relative must have a biological basis, though scientists have not identified exactly what biological mechanism could be behind this.

[...] Marriage, it turns out, is not an exact science. For example, a 1991 study also published in Science found that, in Asian and African populations, marriages between related individuals also produced more offspring. However, researchers only evaluated relationships no more distant than second cousins, and the populations they studied showed great socioeconomic disparity. In the most recent study, researchers sought to eliminate some of these confounders by limiting their study to only the Icelandic population — a country of relative socioeconomic homogeneity, where there is little variation in family size, use of contraceptives, or marriage practices. [...] According to Stefansson, these results are particularly striking in their consistency throughout time, even as socioeconomic factors in Iceland began to change.

Results showed that marriages between third or fourth cousins produced more offspring than unrelated couples from the years when Iceland was a predominantly poor and rural country up until the present-day era of a highly urbanized society, with one of the highest standards of living in the world. Now, many gene experts are scratching their heads while trying to explain the biological mechanism behind these results. [...] According to Stefansson, the reason that related couples were more biologically successful may be because these couples have "just right" genes when combined — not too similar, but not too dissimilar, either.

[...] However, Buehler added he "can't think of any genetic explanation for why the third or fourth cousins would have more babies." Instead, Buehler supposed that related couples might shack up more often, simply because of pheromones. "Maybe what we're seeing here is biologic attraction," Buehler said. "If you really look alike, feel alike and think alike, then maybe you have sex more often and have more babies. We do know that there are pheromones which cause attraction, and I wouldn't be surprised if related people have higher sexual desire for one another."

But despite the inability to offer a concrete biological explanation for these findings, Stefansson strongly believes this study has implications on the genetic future of the global population. "The take-home message is that ... we, as a society of [the] 21st century, have basically ruled against the marriages of closely related couples, because we do not look at it as desirable that closely related people have children," Stefansson said. "But in spite of the fact that bringing together two alleles of a recessive trait may be bad, there is clearly some biological wisdom in the union of relatively closely related people."

Consanguinamory Happens, and Sometimes Children Are a Result

Via Full Marriage Equality:

A History Of Incest

Incest is defined as having sexual relations with close family members, and throughout the majority of the world the practice is not only taboo but also illegal. [Yes, but it's a slim majority.] However, just because people won’t admit to partaking in incest does not mean that the practice does not occur. In some circumstances, incest is a necessity  and multiple studies have shown that offspring of distant relatives are actually healthier than the general population.

There is usually more of an evolutionary advantage to diversifying the gene pool, [wrong, it's diversifying the genes of your offspring that counts,] and for this reason incest in not very popular in species who practice sexual reproduction. [That depends as well.] However, in species where there is no natural advantage to genetic diversity, incest still exists. For example, Dr. Nathaniel Wheelwright, an evolutionary biologist at Bowdoin College in Maine who focuses on sexual reproduction, described asexual reproduction to LiveScience  as “the ultimate incest” because an organism is breeding with itself. "You can still see species asexually reproducing, or cloning themselves, in situations where there is no advantage to [sex]," Wheelwright explained, "and you can see species that commit incest where there is no penalty to inbreeding."

Kissing Cousins

[...] When you have an even smaller gene pool, such as two first relatives, the chances of inheriting these recessive conditions may skyrocket to 50/50. Interestingly though, this is not the case for all inherited disease, as many need generations of inbreeding before they can ever be expressed. A 2008 study on 48 cases of incest found that the risk for birth defects is around two percent in the general population but rises to only four percent between first cousins. However, due to the sensitivity of the subject, there was no information available for the children of incest between closer relations.

What Draws Some To Incest

It’s believed that we have a biological defense against close forms of incest, since these are the cases most likely to end in genetically compromised offspring. LiveScience reported that Finnish sociologist Edward Westermarck suggested that growing up in the same house puts people off from developing sexual feelings. This remains even in cases where children are not directly related. When close incest does occur, that is, sexual relations between first relations such as brother and sister or father and daughter, it is more likely due to a psychological phenomenon than a biological attraction. Genetic attraction occurs when two relatives who have been separated for the majority of their life meet for the first time and experience an intense emotional attraction. As reported by The Guardian, it occurs in around 50 percent of reunions between close relatives separated at birth.

[...] It’s when these individuals act on those feeling that GSA becomes incest. Soll explained that this jump to incest is most common in brother-sister relationships, although it’s unknown why. According to one brother and sister relationship, the intense attraction is rooted in their physical resemblance. "It's like kissing myself," a woman who goes by the name "Rachel" told ABC News of her intimacy with her brother "Shawn."

It's known that animals, including humans, have various sexual impulses. Some urge us to seek out more genetically similarity (and thus more closely related) to us, while others urge us to seek genetic novelty. In the wild, usually a balance between the two is optimal. It's also not unheard of for people to experience this in inverse: when they look in the mirror, they see their lover in themselves, a sort of inverse of narcissism. I'd also like to point out that plenty of couples, including GSA couples, do not look similar at all.

The point is, it's complicated.

The Catholic Church, "Incest", and taboo as a political weapon

The Roman Catholic Church's definition of incest is one of the most intriguing features of medieval marriage. Neither the Old nor New Testament provided any basis for it. But in the mid-sixth century, church synods began to denounce as incestuous the Old Testament practice of marrying a brother's widow. Also, during the sixth and seventh centuries bishops began condemning marriage to first and second cousins, stepmothers or stepdaughters, and the widows of uncles. [...]

A few decades later marriage was forbidden up to the seventh degree of separation [...]. This made it illegal to marry a descendant of one's great-great-great-great-grandfather! By the end of the eighth century it was incestuous to marry in-laws, the kin of godparents or godchildren, or a relative of someone you had once had sexual intercourse with. It was also forbidden to marry a relative of someone you had previously promised but failed to marry. These prohibitions were so broad that almost any match could be ruled invalid. One historian notes that, at least in theory, the incest rules prohibited young village men from wedding "all the marriageable girls they could possibly know and a great many more besides."

Whatever the reasons for their breadth, these incest prohibitions became very useful weapons in the power struggles of the age. [...][I]n the medieval period the Church still enforced most of its principles on marriage erratically and arbitrarily. It spent little time investigating the marriages of common folk, although it readily sold dispensations when a conscientious commoner asked for a formal exemption from the rules that most people simply ignored. Even in a royal or aristocratic marriage, the Church seldom inquired into the degree of familial connection unless it was engaged in a power struggle with one of the families involved or was asked to intervene.

[...] In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council narrowed the definition of incest to four degrees of separation. The council's stated aim was to enforce the modified ban more stringently. But popes continued to grant dispensations for political or financial gain. Under the papacy of Boniface IV (1389-1404), marital dispensations were openly available for sale, with a sliding fee scale based on the value of the concession being sought.

- Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History

"The supposed depravity of cousin marriage: a moral panic we'd be better off without"

Amen to that. This is so on point:

It amazes me that so few liberal-minded Americans know this, but in fact anxiety over cousin marriage is a peculiarly American thing, the product of the same nineteenth-century anxieties about supposed backwoods degenerates and “corruption of our racial stock” that led to the early-twentieth-century boom in “eugenics.” First-cousin marriage is illegal in thirty states, and an outright criminal offense in five. By contrast, first-cousin marriage is legal in all of Europe save for Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia, and legal as well in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, and most of Latin America.

[...] There are genetic risks in first-cousin marriage, but they’re fairly marginal, and can mostly be addressed by getting genetic counseling before having children. For marriages of second cousins and the like, the risks are nearly imperceptible. In fact, if the consequences of first-cousin marriage were as calamitous as many Americans seem to think, the human race would have died out tens of thousands of years ago. For most of history, most humans have lived in small communities and not traveled very far from home; cousin marriage has been extraordinarily common, and yet has somehow failed to yield a planet full of shambling six-fingered freaks.

The problem with finding it hilarious that some states ban same-sex marriage but allow cousin marriage is that you’re basically trashing those states for having laws which are progressive. And when you slam a state like North Carolina with this stuff, you’re participating in a long American history of using cousin marriage as a way of imputing that poor rural people, particularly poor rural people in Appalachia and the South, are depraved, terrifying, and other. Their physical infirmities aren’t products of poverty, malnutrition, and abuse; they’re because something’s fundamentally wrong with them as organisms. It’s not a rhetorical tradition to be proud of.

The comments are gold:

"Why Marrying Your Cousin May Pay Off"

Oh my god. This is the strongest academic evidence I've seen to date. This is the kind of research I've only dreamed about. My jaw is on the floor.

In traditional residential societies, couples who were more closely related to each other had more children. By contrast, in migrant societies, related spouses had fewer direct descendants, the research revealed.

[...] "There's this counterintuitive finding that higher spousal relatedness is related to higher reproductive success in several humans societies," said Drew Bailey, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and co-author of the study detailed May 21 in the journal Biology Letters. Even in modern, industrialized society, research suggests that people tend to marry others with similar DNA.

[...] In the new study, Bailey and his colleagues examined 46 small-scale societies to compare the effect of inbreeding on the fitness of foragers and non-foragers. The non-foraging societies included horticulturalists, agriculturalists and herding populations, whereas foraging societies were primarily hunter-gatherers. The researchers defined fitness as the number of surviving children in the family tree.

In line with previous findings, the researchers found that among non-foraging societies, a couple's relatedness was linked with having more surviving children. But among foraging societies, the opposite was true: More-closely related spouses had fewer surviving children. Furthermore, the more family intermarriage in a society, the greater the benefit of intermarrying on the number of children couples had. In other words, in societies in which people frequently married their relatives, intermarrying showed a stronger link to having more children.

[...] There could be many explanations for the different effects of inbreeding shown in the two kinds of societies. Perhaps the best explanation, Bailey said, may be that non-foraging societies are more likely to have heritable resources, such as wealth or livestock, so a tight-knit family group might be more likely to defend each other and their shared resources. By contrast, in a foraging society, it might make more sense to be part of a much larger, interconnected group, since there are few or no resources to be inherited.

It's tempting to think that people in agricultural societies might intermarry purely out of convenience, since they're less likely to encounter new people as often as hunter-gatherers might. But that's not the case, Bailey said. Agricultural societies tend to be much larger than hunter-gatherer ones, so if anything, the reverse might be expected.

[...] Still, it's hard to untangle whether there's a causal link between inbreeding and producing more children, Bailey said. Also, because marriages between two closely related individuals are rare in hunter-gatherer societies, the study was based on a small sample, which could have skewed the results.

Clearly, there needs to be more research. There are several things they're not considering.

For one, notice how in societies that regularly practice consanguineous marriage, such marriages are actually more reproductively successful. They didn't study disease rates, but rates for cousins usually aren't high. However, in societies where cousins frequently marry, they'd share a higher percentage of genes than otherwise. This study shows that we actually see an improvement in the number of surviving children.

One very significant possibility is that, as a result of their marriage practices, these societies have re-engineered their genes, and over time eliminated some of their damaging genes by exposing them through endogamy. The larger a population is, the less dangerous "inbreeding" is in the long run for the whole population. Some pockets have good genes while others have bad, and the higher rate of endogamy gives a selective advantage to those families with few harmful recessive genes. Is this actually the case, that, on average, ethnicities with a long history of consanguineous marriage have fewer harmful genes? Is "inbreeding" less dangerous in the long run for settled societies because they have larger populations?

There's another thing that doesn't get considered by academics: if, for whatever reason, there's a reproductive advantage to endogamy, then those who willingly engage in endogamy, and are more willing to have sex with their spouse, would be favored by natural selection. That means that, in settled societies, we should expect to see a higher percentage of people who feel sexual attraction for family. No-one knows what genes are responsible for the Westermarck Effect, so no-one can do any studies on population genetics to see which mutations are prevalent in which regions. The stereotype is that there's something "incestuous" about Europeans. Is it even true?

And after all, even among wild animals, it's been observed that rates of fertilization are higher when mates are closely related, because of the higher genetic compatibility between the mother and her zygote/fetus. Is this contributing to the findings?

If their hypothesis is true, then the primary difference in selective success for consanguineous couples is determined by social and economic forces. Exogamy is more socially and economically advantageous in small-scale, hunter-gatherer societies, while endogamy is more advantageous in large-scale, agrarian societies. Is this evidence for the mostly abandoned view, that socioeconomic forces are a prime driver for the development of "incest" taboos?

No-one knows.

Looking at Consanguineous Ancestors at Reddit

Via Full Marriage Equality:

My parents are first cousins. My dad's parents were first cousins. [...] When the family began moving to the States, they came to discover that most Americans find (or some pretend to find) cousin [marriage] nasty, so nobody spoke about the relationships to anyone. Well, except one of piece of shit cousins and his bitch mom, who was my dad's youngest sister.

My cousin would publicly mock my brother and I about our parents being cousins because he thought himself to be a special snowflake since his mom and dad weren't related. His mom also would publicly ask my brother and I stupid questions, like "Why don't you guys call your dad 'Uncle Dad' and your mom 'Aunt Mom'?"

In 2012, my cousin ended up marrying his own first cousin! lol I haven't spoken to him or his family since 2010, but I always want to just hit them up and be like, "Hey, auntie, why don't you call your son's wife 'Daughter-in-Law Niece'?" If I ever see them in public, I'm going to make it an embarrassing encounter just like they'd do to my brother and I when we were kids. Let's see how they handle strangers close by looking at them and judging them.

[...] On the Puerto Rican side of my family, my [great great] Grandparents were siblings. It's the only known incest and no genetic disorders expressed in my generation. My [great great] grandfather did have an uncle who had a "blue child" (like as in the kid was blue. Not sure how much to believe it but they insist it's true. Sadly, no color photos in the 1800s) and his brother had extra fingers. But aside from them, no weird genetics.

Unless his great grandfather is the product of consanguinamory too, that information about his great great granduncle is totally irrelevant. That's not how genetics works.

I was looking at that family line, and twice a woman saw her own daughter marry her brother. Yeesh.

How naive people are, to think it couldn't be in their own family.

My daughter was diagnosed at age 18 with mosaic turners syndrome. She has no physical features like webbed hands or feet, but after the doctor told us that, I recalled that my grandfather's sister had webbed feet and hands. She never had children either. So did a little genealogy search, did not have to go back far on that side of my family to find a great - many times back - grandfather who widowed, then wait, what..? wasn't she his sister? You can't marry your sister...Yep.

Once again, consanguinity that far back in a family tree has no bearing on modern generations' health. It's negative effects come from receiving two copies of certain genes, one from each parent. Different negative side-effects can continue perhaps one generation beyond, through the mother, if the mother gained reproductive disorders.

Child of incest here. My dad was my mom's uncle. They met at a family reunion for extra points lol. Haven't really noticed much on my end. No major issues like physical deformities or anything. Mental issues (bipolarism, depression, etc) tend to run in my family, so I deal with some of that. Depression mostly, and occasional hallucinations. Not sure if that's been made worse by the fact that my parents were related or not.

[...] My great grandparents were first cousins AND step siblings. I was shocked when I found out but it seems it was pretty common in small European villages at the time. I don't inherited any genetic disorders from that side of the family, but my father is color blind so I might pass that to my hypothetical children.

No he won't. Color-blindness is carried by the X chromosome. Whether your son gets it or not has nothing to do with how closely related your spouse is to you. He gets it from his mother.

My family history on my mother's side has always been something of a blip in our otherwise 'normal' family. My grandmother was a product of incest, her mother and father also being siblings. It came out during my great-grandmother's pregnancy that this baby was the result of incest [...]. Obviously, my family was not okay with that in the slightest and so my grandmother was raised in a very toxic environment and the effect this had on her was enormous.

[...] [My] great-grandparents [...] definitely did not end up together. My grandmother was brought up by her grandparents (my great-great grandparents) as the incestuous siblings were quite young when this happened, around early 20s. My great-grandmother got married, had two more healthy children and (to my knowledge) never told her husband about her other child. My great-grandfather is more of a mystery, I'm only aware that he moved very far north and had nothing much more to do with the family. 

[...] I wish I could tell you more, but my mother only told me the basics just so I knew about it and she refuses to talk about it in any more detail as she is quite ashamed of it. If you need anything clearing up, don't hesitate to ask!

The thread is absolutely swamped with tales of distant cousin-couple ancestry. The American taboo against cousin sex and marriage is ridiculous. We're one of the few countries that harbors such beliefs. Past 1st-cousins, the probability of genetic defects is no higher than the general population. In fact, 3rd and 4th cousins are less likely to have kids with defects. Why is this even still an issue? The American obsession with condemning cousin-couples is bizarre.

Thin Walls Reveal Consanguinamory

From Full Marriage Equality:

I live in an apartment next door to nice guy who's going to college. He has lived there for almost a year. Friendly guy who is single. He doesn't appear to have steady GF, but he does bring home girls occasionally and has sex. The walls are pretty thin, and I can hear them having sex. One girl that has been there several times has been his sister, and every time she stays the weekend, its clear they have sex several times. I've met her and talked to her down at the pool, and they seem like an affectionate couple when are out in public, but he always introduces her to everyone as his sister.

Its really none of my business so I have not said anything to him about hearing them have sex through the wall, but sometimes I wonder if I should just so he knows. I've not said anything because hearing others have sex does not bother me, and I don't want make him feel he needs to hold back.

[...] I don't know if they are blood related. She did come with his parents to visit once. They kinda look a like a little, but I don't know if that just me looking for anything that's similar, like they laugh the same way, and they both have green eyes. Sometimes I think they act like brother-sister, then other times it seems like they act like couple.

[...] They even have the same last name. He just doesn't know my sister and I can hear them having sex when she spends the weekend. We had not seen her for a while, but she spent last weekend with him, and well, here was some intense bedroom activity occurring while she was here.

[...] I try not to be judgemental about such choices if is a mutual choice\attraction. When I was 14 I had sexual encounter with a cousin who was 16. I was already sexual active, but he had never had sex before. One evening we were alone together and began engaging in foreplay that led to us having sex.

[...] I was willing to have sex sooner than [14], but he was very hesitant and prefered we limit our encounters to oral sex and sleeping the night together. Even though we are cousins, he is always seemed like a brother to my sisters and I, so while technically we were kissing cousins, it was more like of a brother-sister relationship. When we did start having sex, it was pretty intense, and it does remind me of what I hear through the wall when my neighbor has sex with his sister.