DNA tests are uncovering the true prevalence of incest (2024)

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/03/dna-tests-incest/677791/

by georgecmu • 12 months ago

137 101 12 months ago

toomuchtodo• 12 months ago

zahlman2• 12 months ago

The article doesn't appear to be paywalled and I'm reading it just fine without JavaScript enabled. Is an archive really necessary?

voidnap• 12 months ago

[flagged]

tetromino_• 12 months ago

Paywalled here - can only read 2 paragraphs. Possibly paywall is triggered conditionally, for example if you read multiple articles in some time period?

john01dav• 12 months ago

Many paywalls rely on client side JavaScript to work. My guess is that this has something to do with search engine indexing.

zdragnar• 12 months ago

I got a "sign in or start a free trial" wall that blocked most of the article.

I suspect these sites don't put up that block until articles reach a certain popularity. That encourages early readers to enjoy and share the article, and everyone else gets to think that the person that shared it with them has an account, so maybe they should too.

foresto• 12 months ago

Not everyone can be bothered to disable JavaScript by default.

It's a pity that archive.today walls off their saved pages behind a Google CAPTCHA, which requires JavaScript. I would think avoiding that kind of fingerprinting/tracking would be a common use case for an archive site, but the Google-wall renders archive.today useless for that purpose.

cnst5• 12 months ago

The article doesn't appear to be paywalled and I'm reading it just fine without JavaScript enabled. Is an archive really necessary?

Not every browser has the option to disable JavaScript for a webpage.

Yes, of course archive is necessary, as it helps everyone read the article easily, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html, which points out that complaining about paywalls is not.

arresin• 12 months ago

Wow that was very touching.

bloomingeek• 12 months ago

It really was.

searine3• 12 months ago

This is a tragic story, but I think the bigger issue is some places have high levels of cultural acceptance of consanguine relationships.

0xcafefood3• 12 months ago

It's extremely common in South Asian communities (https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/10yx3va/...). The UK has a large South Asian diaspora.

thelastgallon• 12 months ago

Pakistan doesn't represent all of South Asia.

dismalaf• 12 months ago

You mean it's extremely common in Muslim countries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_in_the_Middl...

I love this site down voting facts if it doesn't conform to preconceived "progressive" notions.

https://wikiislam.net/wiki/Cousin_Marriage_in_Islamic_Law

bakul3• 12 months ago

AFAIK this is far more common in muslims but not in hindus, jains etc. While growing up I had heard/read that as per the Vedas you can not marry someone with whom you have a common ancestor within 7 generations. [My scientifically minded atheist parents agreed with the idea.] Of course, in practice this isn't always followed but in any arranged marriage such proscriptions would presumably be checked.

DoesntMatter222• 12 months ago

I recently discovered that these relationships are legal in France. That's nuts

mr902102• 12 months ago

Same country that banned paternity tests unless authorised by a court.

giraffe_lady• 12 months ago

Could you explain why you think that's a bigger issue than the one raised in the article:

In the overwhelming majority of cases ... the parents are a father and a daughter or an older brother and a younger sister, meaning a child’s existence was likely evidence of sexual abuse.

kulahan• 12 months ago

Incestual children can lead to a pretty significant number of medical issues.

searine3• 12 months ago

Cases like that described are very rare compared to 20-50% consanguinity in some communities. The disease burden from this is huge.

Not saying SA isn't an issue, but if the issue is incest, then cultural acceptance of it is the biggest offender.

coliveira• 12 months ago

This is extremely common in the royal families of Europe. Many of them are the result of incest.

kilroy123• 12 months ago

Not wrong. My Turkish ex's parents were first cousins. Married for 50 years and they had two kids.

No one cared. It wasn't that big deal.

robertlagrant3• 12 months ago

And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.

This might not be logical. If your DNA's in UK Biobank you might be more likely to have had a genetic disease stemming from incest.

HPsquared• 12 months ago

A bit like the high number of negative paternity tests. Selection bias is huge.

AndrewDucker• 12 months ago

Biobank is a voluntary data collection system, I thought. It's not based on whether someone is sick.

(Unless I've misunderstood somewhere)

2dvisio• 12 months ago

Yes. UK Biobank is a voluntary programme.

(I work in Genomic)

taeric2• 12 months ago

I think the assertion is that most people basically don't feel they have anything special genetically. As such, most people just aren't entering these databases that are opt-in.

Contrast this to people that do have a genetic oddity about them. Just having the traits is often enough to get people to find out more about them.

mnw21cam4• 12 months ago

The UK Biobank definitely has a bias, but it's in the opposite direction to that you are suggesting here. It's primarily healthy people who are enrolled only when they reach the age of 40 and still have no significant health problems. So, if you are in the UK Biobank, you are less likely to have had a genetic disease stemming from incest.

novia• 12 months ago

I think you misunderstood what they were trying to say.

They were trying to get an estimate on the prevalence of incest.

So the number of people who have been documented to have DNA showing that this happened is literally the floor on the amount of times incest occurs.

robertlagrant3• 12 months ago

Yes, for UK Biobank's samples. I'm saying that the UK Biobank's samples could in theory have a higher than average rate of incest, making that number not a floor for the overall population.

I'm only making a technical point of logic. It's not a comment on UK Biobank in general.

coldtea• 12 months ago

If the statistics are done on "Incest survivors DNA bank" and show 100% occurence of incest, it doesn't mean they're applicable to the general population.

That's the argument. That this DNA bank has a (lesser than the contrived example, but still true) bias.

nineplay2• 12 months ago

I think we're going to find that a large number of people who were shamed as "town sluts" were actually abuse victims. Every so often I see nasty comments that 'she got pregnant at 15' or 'she had two kids before finishing high school' with follow-ups blaming poor sex ed. I think people are side stepping the implications, especially if the father is otherwise unknown. Even in my day the girl who got pregnant by the volleyball coach shouldered the bulk of the blame.

squidbeak• 12 months ago

What a term to use about anyone let alone people you suppose to be abuse victims. This is shameful.

dang3• 12 months ago

It made me wince as well, but I doubt that the intent was malicious.

nineplay2• 12 months ago

Too late to edit but I meant to say town "sluts". Ah well, a lesson to re-read carefully before posting

Quarrelsome3• 12 months ago

are you unaware of the meaning of quote marks? They are quoting labels that society will place on them, primarily as a consequence of puritanical thinking acting as a cover up for abuse. What's shameful is hiding the horrors of our reality. I thought their comment was particularly poignant and reflects the actual horrors of abuse when it is uncovered in retrospect, compared to how it was perceived at the time.

We see this countless times in our history, abusers lauded, praised, with status, titles, wealth and popular acclaim. Detractors are ignored, slandered and side-lined, and after the abusers die, it transpires all those hushed whispers were true and the detractors were right all along.

ChrisArchitect• 12 months ago

(2024)

Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39765894

fsflover2• 12 months ago

Moore ended up creating a private and invite-only support group on Facebook

Sounds like a thing you would never want to share with Facebook given its approach to privacy.

JimmyBuckets• 12 months ago

I don't think the invite-only nature of the group is due to privacy but rather moderation. It seems the point of this group is to assuage shame

usefulcat• 12 months ago

Moore ended up creating a private and invite-only support group on Facebook

I read GP's comment as being more about the 'on Facebook' part, not so much about 'invite-only'.

sneak• 12 months ago

Entire countries have ceded their b2b and b2c communications channels to WhatsApp.

End users don't give any thoughts to privacy, generally speaking. Either they've "nothing to hide", or they have given up due to an overwhelming sense of helplessness and loss of agency on the matter.

It's not even a decision anymore. They just type their phone number (aka permanent tracking unique identifier) into the new app and smash "agree".

jpc0• 12 months ago

My customers are on Whatsapp, my suppliers are on WhatsApp. I can fight WhatsApp all I like but that won’t change, but they will change where they spend their money and whether I can give them my money.

Mistletoe2• 12 months ago

I don't want to read the article that will just upset me, can someone give a percentage?

qualeed• 12 months ago

One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis

wincy• 12 months ago

That’s pretty low, I’d say that’s a cultural success.

burnt-resistor• 12 months ago

Is that before or after the invention of the automobile?

Mistletoe2• 12 months ago

Thank you, that's much better than I feared.

DoctorOetker2• 12 months ago

A miserably small quantum of solace to people who:

1) grew up and had children

2) don't know much about genetics and the statistics behind it

3) discovered they themselves were born out of incest after they had children

4) blindly assume they will pass on the 25% of duplicate (paternal and maternal strand) recessive genes, i.e. assume their kids also have the 25% of duplicate recessive genes (the percentage mentioned in the article)

That genetic percentage falls off very quickly each generation if these next generations mate with genetically healthy people. So the disease burden decreases very quickly, but is still present for some generations, and doesn't fully disappear, as the rest of us all have some of that happening if you'd trace back the 4 grandparents, the 8 greatgrandparents, the 16 great-great-grandparents, etc.

Also, most victims or people with traumas in general, feel the logical need to understand: how can one (or we as a society) possibly learn from problems if our understanding of these problems is proactively hindered?

To spare you a lot of genetics going in depth into the biological machinery behind genetics, there is a very simplistic way to understand it. Disregarding immune cells, essentially all cells in your body have the same genome, so we speak of an individuals genome when we consider multicellular organism, like humans.

As you are undoubtedly aware human organisms have their hereditary traits stored in DNA molecules, called chromosomes. Ignoring the sex chromosome one usually has one chromosome from ones father and another from ones mother. There is an ingenious strategy nature uses here:

Imagine whenever a child is created, that somehow half the assets of the father and half the assets of the mother are copied and given to the child.

I invite you to literally think of them as devices: thermostats, microwaves, central heating systems. (this is the rough analogy for the homeostasis functions encoded in our genome).

Assuming the parents are unrelated, this means you get 2 typically unrelated types or models of refrigerator (one from your father and one from your mother), and the 2 microwaves, one from mother another from father, and 2 thermostats, etc... all your cells have this machinery in them.

Now consider the 2 different heating systems you inherited work correctly, but for some reason you inherited the defective thermostat from one of your parents, but a working on from the other. When the cold setpoint is reached both functioning heaters turn on thanks to the working thermostat. And like this it goes with a bunch of different toolsets (the "genes").

Everybody has a few defective devices, but there's a backup of the other parent so we don't notice (or not much at least: suppose both thermostats worked, but one of the heaters was defective: it would still turn on at the same temperature and shut off at the same temperature, but it would take a little longer to reach it, having some influence on your procreation chances in life, but not mortal).

Now consider what happens if your father is also your mothers father: consider the grandparents:

Via the father:

PGF: paternal grandfather < makes up half the genome of the father

PGM: paternal grandmother < makes up the other half genome of the father

Via the mother:

MGF: maternal grandfather < the genome of the father, so half PGF, half PGM

MGM: maternal grandmother

So a defective device from the paternal grandfather or paternal grandmother has the opportunity to be passed on to you directly through the father, BUT also has the opportunity to be passed on to you via the mother!

This drastically increases the odds for defective devices to be backed up by ... the same defective type of device!

That is fundamentally what happens...

Now another quantum of solace. Apart from genetics, theres also the concept of memetics. The spread and recombination of ideas. Now this doesn't just come half from the father and half from the mother, as we are exposed to other sources of information as well: educational systems, newspapers, friends, other family, etc. But undeniably parents have a strong sway over the opinions, ideas, etc to which a child is exposed in its most formative years.

It is healthy to have parents who respectfully hold their own differing opinions, so that children learn to make up their own mind. But it is also a fact that differences of opinion may prevent couples from forming...

You are not alone when it comes to being borne of genetic incest, as the article explains, but also, in a weaker but much wider sense, nearly all of us are the result of this intellectual incest, where people grow up hearing identical but flawed viewpoints from both parents for a prolonged period of your life, in its formative years.

Nobody is alone.

jf• 12 months ago

I found found this post to be very interesting and am grateful that you wrote it.

gaoryrt• 12 months ago

If your parents aren't related, nor their parents, the 30th-generation(roughly 600–900 years depending on generation length) ancestor group size is 2^30, which is about 1.07 billion.

hinkley• 12 months ago

Turns out that due to the way genes splice you have ancestors that you have 0 genes from. The mitochondria and Y chromosome are conserved, but even 9 generations back there are good odds that some of your ancestors have been completely spliced out of your DNA, and a few whom you only got a couple genes from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HclD2E_3rhI

"only 72% of these 7th great grandparents will give you some of your genetics"

"over less than 400 years, 97% of your ancestors contribute nothing to your genetics"

DNA tests are uncovering the true prevalence of incest (2024)

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