Cousin marriage

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Rules against cousin marriage made sense when people were largely limited to isolated populations. Then, generation after generation of intra-family copulation would result in a horrifically shallow gene pool. See: much of the British Pakistani diaspora, the "village idiot" phenomena. A crude ban makes sense in that case.

However, now  the vast majority of us live in large and non-insular populations, the bans are useless. One pair of cousins marrying and producing offspring are practically just as likely to produce healthy children as non-related couples (OK, we have a slight increase in risk; but that's not enough reason to force the government to "regulate the gene pool", something I frown upon for obvious reasons). It's repeated

(Incidentally, I think it would be gross; but whatevs)

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I'm astounded that anyone could downplay the negative genetic repercussions of inbreeding. Well, maybe not.

http://www.as.wvu.edu/~kgarbutt/QuantGen/Gen535_2_2004/Inbreeding_Humans.htm

http://helorimer.people.ysu.edu/inbred.html

Did you even read the first link?

I did. While the second one is more consistent, there is of course this, which is not really arguable:

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It wasn't the best example, but I was hunting a .edu.

I find it most interesting that there is very likely an evolutionary impulse against inbreeding, which would make a lot of sense.

In any event, no one is going to convince me at this point in time that inbreeding is not harmful, so we probably just won't agree on it.

OK ... so even if you are shown direct scientific evidence you won't change your mind, because you really want not to believe it; to the extent you'll hunt down evidence and shoehorn it to your beliefs? Fair enough, I guess; but pretty much all the evidence suggests that inbreeding is only really dangerous to gene pools if it is widespread and repeated. Even if evolution "doesn't like" organisms inbreeding, nature considers it better than extinction so early humans almost constantly inbred (we are all inbred to some extent, your parents family trees almost certainly cross multiple times).