> 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.
AndrewDucker · 38m ago
Biobank is a voluntary data collection system, I thought. It's not based on whether someone is sick.
(Unless I've misunderstood somewhere)
HPsquared · 1h ago
A bit like the high number of negative paternity tests. Selection bias is huge.
The article doesn't appear to be paywalled and I'm reading it just fine without JavaScript enabled. Is an archive really necessary?
zdragnar · 2h 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.
bookofjoe · 1h ago
The block is built-in from the get-go.
foresto · 1h 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.
bookofjoe · 1h ago
There are those of us here who haven't a clue what it means "to disable JavaScript by default" — much less what JavaScript is.
boston_clone · 57m ago
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.
john01dav · 2h ago
Many paywalls rely on client side JavaScript to work. My guess is that this has something to do with search engine indexing.
zahlman · 1h ago
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.
tetromino_ · 2h ago
Paywalled here - can only read 2 paragraphs. Possibly paywall is triggered conditionally, for example if you read multiple articles in some time period?
Jtsummers · 2h ago
It used to be 5 free a month when they first introduced it years ago. Not sure the current mechanism and policy.
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 · 1h ago
What a term to use about anyone let alone people you suppose to be abuse victims. This is shameful.
dang · 1h ago
It made me wince as well, but I doubt that the intent was malicious.
nineplay · 1h ago
Too late to edit but I meant to say town "sluts". Ah well, a lesson to re-read carefully before posting
dang · 17m ago
I've edited your GP comment to say what I believe you meant, but if I got it wrong, please let us know.
tomhow · 43m ago
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.
searine · 2h ago
This is a tragic story, but I think the bigger issue is some places have high levels of cultural acceptance of consanguine relationships.
giraffe_lady · 1h 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 · 1h ago
Incestual children can lead to a pretty significant number of medical issues.
searine · 1h 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.
novok · 1h ago
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.
tialaramex · 47m ago
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.
watwut · 37m ago
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.
searine · 53m ago
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.
coliveira · 1h ago
This is extremely common in the royal families of Europe. Many of them are the result of incest.
kilroy123 · 39m ago
Not wrong. My Turkish ex's parents were first cousins. Married for 50 years and they had two kids.
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.
lazide · 52m ago
Southern India has particularly low Muslim populations - and definitely doesn’t follow that guidance.
The vedas have many sections which get widely ignored.
But note that the article is really talking about first-degree incest/pedophila/sexual abuse which is taboo in pretty much every society.
thelastgallon · 1h ago
Pakistan doesn't represent all of South Asia.
0xcafefood · 1h ago
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.
jandrese · 1h ago
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."
DoesntMatter22 · 1h ago
I recently discovered that these relationships are legal in France. That's nuts
mr90210 · 1h ago
Same country that banned paternity tests unless authorised by a court.
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.
(Unless I've misunderstood somewhere)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like a thing you would never want to share with Facebook given its approach to privacy.
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39765894
> 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.
Not saying SA isn't an issue, but if the issue is incest, then cultural acceptance of it is the biggest offender.
What your talking about with 1st cousins is called inbred. Inbred is the superset of incest. You can get that with no incest.
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.
It is not a non issue. The communities where marrying cousins is normal do have this issue and have significantly more severe disabilities.
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.
No one cared. It wasn't that big deal.
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%
But note that the article is really talking about first-degree incest/pedophila/sexual abuse which is taboo in pretty much every society.
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