> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This makes me super curious - could you share how you came to find this site and decide to sign up? It's called "hacker news" with the implication that content posted here is intellectually stimulating for hackers - or, those who hack together computer programs.
If you do already program, have you never been exposed to JavaScript at all? If not, I think you should use that curiosity to find out what JavaScript is and what effects disabling it may have.
Even more odd when I see that the majority of your comments are really just posting archive links to bypass a paywall. Not an issue with me per se, but even more surprising to be ignorant of JS at that point.
1. I happened on HN accidentally in 2016 and enjoy posts both in areas completely foreign to me — like things computer-related — and others more familiar.
2. I never considered that because it's called "hacker news" it's intended only for hackers.
3. I have never written a line of code, much less programmed.
4. I have zero curiosity about JavaScript.
5. "Even more odd when I see that the majority of your comments are really just posting archive links to bypass a paywall." In fact, 99% of those archive links are to primary articles I post which in fact ARE paywalled. Since by being a paying subscriber to a number of publications I am able to provide "Gift Links" as well, as a courtesy to HN readers I go to the time and trouble of posting them as well as archive links.
There is some distaste on your part for this practice — "Not an issue with me per se" implies the opposite.
In your opinion "even more surprising to be ignorant of JS at that point" — I fail to see any connection between being ignorant of JS to posting archive links — I will going forward cease and desist from posting both "Gift Links" and archive links and instead let you do it, since you clearly have knowledge of JavaScript and believe it important for providing such links.
Paywalled here - can only read 2 paragraphs. Possibly paywall is triggered conditionally, for example if you read multiple articles in some time period?
As a test, I whitelisted JavaScript in NoScript for theatlantic.com and the paywall appeared. I revoked it and it disappeared again. It appears to be purely client-side, not reliant on cookies or anything.
So my conclusion is that an archive indeed shouldn't be necessary; people can just disable JavaScript. It doesn't cause issues with the page formatting or anything.
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".
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.
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.
You should be able to edit it now, or email us (hn@ycombinator.com) with an edit we can put in. Probably best to find a different word/phrase to use. It's upsetting to people even if you didn't mean it that way.
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.
Consensual sex between adult brother and sister for example isn't abuse. If it results in a child it is also unacceptably likely to result in birth defects because that's 50% DNA commonality. Consensual sex between parent and (adult obviously) child is more arguable because there's a significant power imbalance which would usually not be present for siblings, but it might not be abuse.
Cousin sex is just not a big deal, and especially beyond the 1st cousins with zero removal, ie the children of your parents' blood siblings. When it comes to stuff like "She's the daughter of my great-auntie's oldest boy" it's negligible. In some societies that wouldn't be tracked, everybody is a cousin and nobody is. Americans are weird about this. Rudy Giuliani for example married his second cousin. I don't even know the names of my second cousins. If I met one in a bar I'd have no idea. But in the US somehow that counts as strange.
When cousin having kids together becomes normalized, you get a lot more defects a generation later - when kids of cousins have kids with other kids of cousins in the same family.
It is not a non issue. The communities where marrying cousins is normal do have this issue and have significantly more severe disabilities.
"Cousin" is a vague claim. A parent is 50% similarity, a simple first cousin is typically 12.5% but may be higher if they're also related on the other side (e.g. Einstein married a woman whose parents were, respectively, a sibling of one parent and a cousin of the other, that's a lot of shared DNA). But second cousins may be only 2-3%.
So there's a huge gap between "Your mum and dad both have twins, and there was a double marriage, so, she's your first cousin twice over" and "She's your great-aunt's child's youngest" and yet you might get told both people are your "cousin" for lack of convenient terminology.
Label it whatever you want. It's still consanguinity and it causes a tremendous amount of disease and the largest offender by far is cultural acceptance if it.
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.
The crazy thing is India has ample population to avoid this problem. It's not some isolated tribe or small island community. The reasons have to be social/political.
Seems so. Or more to the point of how data collected in the UK might reflect this trend (from the article you link): "According to a 2005 BBC report on Pakistani marriage in the United Kingdom, 55% of British Pakistanis marry a first cousin."
> 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.
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.
Biobank is a voluntary data collection system, I thought. It's not based on whether someone is sick.
(Unless I've misunderstood somewhere)
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.
Yes. UK Biobank is a voluntary programme.
(I work in Genomic)
A bit like the high number of negative paternity tests. Selection bias is huge.
https://archive.today/Sgjb7
The article doesn't appear to be paywalled and I'm reading it just fine without JavaScript enabled. Is an archive really necessary?
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.
The block is built-in from the get-go.
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.
There are those of us here who haven't a clue what it means "to disable JavaScript by default" — much less what JavaScript is.
This makes me super curious - could you share how you came to find this site and decide to sign up? It's called "hacker news" with the implication that content posted here is intellectually stimulating for hackers - or, those who hack together computer programs.
If you do already program, have you never been exposed to JavaScript at all? If not, I think you should use that curiosity to find out what JavaScript is and what effects disabling it may have.
Even more odd when I see that the majority of your comments are really just posting archive links to bypass a paywall. Not an issue with me per se, but even more surprising to be ignorant of JS at that point.
1. I happened on HN accidentally in 2016 and enjoy posts both in areas completely foreign to me — like things computer-related — and others more familiar.
2. I never considered that because it's called "hacker news" it's intended only for hackers.
3. I have never written a line of code, much less programmed.
4. I have zero curiosity about JavaScript.
5. "Even more odd when I see that the majority of your comments are really just posting archive links to bypass a paywall." In fact, 99% of those archive links are to primary articles I post which in fact ARE paywalled. Since by being a paying subscriber to a number of publications I am able to provide "Gift Links" as well, as a courtesy to HN readers I go to the time and trouble of posting them as well as archive links.
There is some distaste on your part for this practice — "Not an issue with me per se" implies the opposite.
In your opinion "even more surprising to be ignorant of JS at that point" — I fail to see any connection between being ignorant of JS to posting archive links — I will going forward cease and desist from posting both "Gift Links" and archive links and instead let you do it, since you clearly have knowledge of JavaScript and believe it important for providing such links.
Paywalled here - can only read 2 paragraphs. Possibly paywall is triggered conditionally, for example if you read multiple articles in some time period?
It used to be 5 free a month when they first introduced it years ago. Not sure the current mechanism and policy.
Many paywalls rely on client side JavaScript to work. My guess is that this has something to do with search engine indexing.
As a test, I whitelisted JavaScript in NoScript for theatlantic.com and the paywall appeared. I revoked it and it disappeared again. It appears to be purely client-side, not reliant on cookies or anything.
So my conclusion is that an archive indeed shouldn't be necessary; people can just disable JavaScript. It doesn't cause issues with the page formatting or anything.
[flagged]
Please edit out swipes from your comments. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> 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.
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
> 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'.
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".
Wow that was very touching.
(2024)
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39765894
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.
What a term to use about anyone let alone people you suppose to be abuse victims. This is shameful.
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.
The quotation marks weren't there originally. It read:
> shamed as town sluts
Though it was still clear what the writer meant. I'm surprised that someone ran with an uncharitable interpretation like they did.
It made me wince as well, but I doubt that the intent was malicious.
Too late to edit but I meant to say town "sluts". Ah well, a lesson to re-read carefully before posting
I've edited your GP comment to say what I believe you meant, but if I got it wrong, please let us know.
You should be able to edit it now, or email us (hn@ycombinator.com) with an edit we can put in. Probably best to find a different word/phrase to use. It's upsetting to people even if you didn't mean it that way.
I don't want to read the article that will just upset me, can someone give a percentage?
>One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis
Is that before or after the invention of the automobile?
That’s pretty low, I’d say that’s a cultural success.
Yeah I expected 10x the rate, but sadly those are the "successful" pregnancies.
Also it only would be able to capture cases where reproduction is actually possible --in some cases it obviously is not possible.
Another data source would be STD transmission.
the article gives reasons why its still probably an underestimate.
This is a tragic story, but I think the bigger issue is some places have high levels of cultural acceptance of consanguine relationships.
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.
Incestual children can lead to a pretty significant number of medical issues.
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.
I think incest is usually understood as immediate direct family relations and means SA or something close.
What your talking about with 1st cousins is called inbred. Inbred is the superset of incest. You can get that with no incest.
Consensual sex between adult brother and sister for example isn't abuse. If it results in a child it is also unacceptably likely to result in birth defects because that's 50% DNA commonality. Consensual sex between parent and (adult obviously) child is more arguable because there's a significant power imbalance which would usually not be present for siblings, but it might not be abuse.
Cousin sex is just not a big deal, and especially beyond the 1st cousins with zero removal, ie the children of your parents' blood siblings. When it comes to stuff like "She's the daughter of my great-auntie's oldest boy" it's negligible. In some societies that wouldn't be tracked, everybody is a cousin and nobody is. Americans are weird about this. Rudy Giuliani for example married his second cousin. I don't even know the names of my second cousins. If I met one in a bar I'd have no idea. But in the US somehow that counts as strange.
When cousin having kids together becomes normalized, you get a lot more defects a generation later - when kids of cousins have kids with other kids of cousins in the same family.
It is not a non issue. The communities where marrying cousins is normal do have this issue and have significantly more severe disabilities.
"Cousin" is a vague claim. A parent is 50% similarity, a simple first cousin is typically 12.5% but may be higher if they're also related on the other side (e.g. Einstein married a woman whose parents were, respectively, a sibling of one parent and a cousin of the other, that's a lot of shared DNA). But second cousins may be only 2-3%.
So there's a huge gap between "Your mum and dad both have twins, and there was a double marriage, so, she's your first cousin twice over" and "She's your great-aunt's child's youngest" and yet you might get told both people are your "cousin" for lack of convenient terminology.
I think it's implied it's a lot of first cousin stuff and if you iterate this it starts building up in goofy ways if it is kept self contained enough.
I guess?
Label it whatever you want. It's still consanguinity and it causes a tremendous amount of disease and the largest offender by far is cultural acceptance if it.
This is extremely common in the royal families of Europe. Many of them are the result of incest.
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.
It's extremely common in South Asian communities (https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/10yx3va/...). The UK has a large South Asian diaspora.
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.
Cross-cousin and uncle-niece marriage is prevalent among Hindus in most states of South India (except Kerala). 10-25% of all marriages.
In religion, you can find your reasons for anything. e.g. In Mahabharata, Arjuna and Abhimanyu married their cousins.
Southern India has particularly low Muslim populations - and definitely doesn’t follow that guidance.
The vedas have many sections which get widely ignored.
Edit: HN throttling is terrible. Here is a link to a couple studies [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32641190/], [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-consanguineous...]
AP has the highest rate, around 28%
I has asked friends who would know more about South India. If you have any references about statistics and causes please share. Thanks!
I found one map that may be interest: https://araingang.medium.com/cousin-marriage-in-south-asia-f...
But note that the article is really talking about first-degree incest/pedophila/sexual abuse which is taboo in pretty much every society.
Pakistan doesn't represent all of South Asia.
None of India is looking particularly good, but each state in southern India looks to have 20-25% rates of first-cousin marriages. Pretty high.
The crazy thing is India has ample population to avoid this problem. It's not some isolated tribe or small island community. The reasons have to be social/political.
It’s the caste system + specific social factors.
Southern India it’s even higher
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
Seems so. Or more to the point of how data collected in the UK might reflect this trend (from the article you link): "According to a 2005 BBC report on Pakistani marriage in the United Kingdom, 55% of British Pakistanis marry a first cousin."
There was a recent debate in the UK Parliament about whether cousin marriage should be banned. It did not succeed.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztHyjdyWUOA
But there was a BBC documentary called "Should I marry my first cousin" for which the main conclusion was basically no.
I recently discovered that these relationships are legal in France. That's nuts
Same country that banned paternity tests unless authorised by a court.