Twins who married twins share how their sons are genetically brothers | Hacker News Reader

Twins who married twins share how their sons are genetically brothers

metro.co.uk

16 pointsgmays17 comments

> Josh and Jeremy had vowed to each other that they would only ever marry another set of twins.

> ‘Me and Josh always knew we had to find our twins if we were going to get married — and we told each other that we’ll never be able to unless we find a set of twins that we could fall in love with and marry,’ Jeremy said.

umm... what is going on here? Two male twins vowed to only marry another set of twins and they found two, and married them within six months? And had a TLC show about the wedding?

Something about this reeks of weird incentives. Or maybe they're just cartoonishly one dimensional twin characters.

It's a little weird, but I've heard dumber reasons for people to start dating or have a family.

Who cares?

You care enough to ask, so let's start the count at 1

Huh? They care enough about your comment to ask “who cares”, but does that imply that they care to know the answer to the questions you posed in your comment? I don’t think it does.

Well now we're 4 comments deep just discussing the metadata of this information. Surely it's interesting now.

Literally a brother from a different mother.

I bet they’re Eskimo brothers too

If one cheated with one of the other twins and had a kid, would a genetic test be able to tell?

Sounds like probably yes. tl;dr: by checking the _full_ DNA (every letter) and hoping to find at least one mutation. Standard paternity tests just check a few places which is good enough for non-twins.

https://www.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/paternity-and-ident...

How is this not eugenics?

The problems with eugenics are mostly from it being done in a coercive (and often even violent) way, or from it being done in at a large scale.

People making individual choices which respect the rights of others, with eugenics being part of their motivation, seems not really a bad thing?

Like, if there’s some recessive trait that someone has and wants this trait to continue to be expressed in the population, and they are maybe a bit confused about genetics, and so they take “does this person have this trait” as a factor in deciding who to date, I don’t think that’s a problem?

The problem is when either there is a large societal program trying to implement a specific eugenics plan, or when people use violence or coercion to try to achieve eugenics goals.

Some genes are better to have around than others, and it isn’t so much an issue to promote better ones on a small scale, but due to the risk of being wrong about what genes or qualities are better, it is probably a bad thing for it to be attempted (even if done non-coercively) on a large scale.

I guess another part of that is, on a large enough scale, it is difficult for any such thing to avoid being at least slightly coercive. If you give everyone who acts within some guidelines a reward, then withholding that reward from a small minority who don’t act within those guidelines, could be regarded as a punishment.

Eugenics requires that the offspring is more evolutionary fit than the ancestors. In this scenario, there is no evidence that co-marrying a different twin pair had a eugenic (nor a dysgenic) effect.

We only really call it eugenics when it's something population-wide or being enforced by a government.

When individuals choose their own mates it's just called dating.

Eugenics: the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable.

> How is this not eugenics?

Because it's not supposed to improve the breed. However bizarre, it's merely a personal choice.

Because it’s assortative mating.

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