Category Archives: Inbreeding

I’ve put up a bunch of posts relating to inbreeding recently (1, 2, 3, 4). But I haven’t really defined it. First, let’s stipulate what inbreeding is not: it is not the same as incest. Acts of incest can include individuals who have n…

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Jews, and Ashkenazi Jews in particular, are very genetically distinctive. A short and sweet way to think about this population is that they’re a moderately recent admixture between a Middle Eastern population, and Western Europeans, which has bee…

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The Pith: When it comes to the final outcome of a largely biologically specified trait like human height it looks as if it isn’t just the genes your parents give you that matters. Rather, the relationship of their genes also counts. The more diss…

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In the wake of the post from earlier this week on the inbreeding within the House of Windsor (and current lack thereof), Luke Jostins, a subject of the British monarch, has a nice informative post up, Inbreeding, Genetic Disease and the Royal Wedding. …

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On the heels of my post on cousin marriage, I thought readers might find this article on genetic screening in the United Arab Emirates of interest. One way to tackle the problem of genetic diseases which emerge out of consanguineous unions apparently isn’t to discourage the unions themselves, but dodge the outcomes. So pre-implantation screening […]

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The map above shows the distribution of consanguineous marriages. As you can see there’s a fair amount of cross-cultural variation. In the United States there’s a stereotype of cousin marriage being the practice of backward hillbillies or …

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A few years ago you started seeing the crest of studies which basically took several hundred individuals (or thousands) from a range of locations, and then extracted out the two largest components of genetic variation from the hundreds of thousands of  variants. The clusters which fell out of the genetic data, with each point being […]

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Razib Khan