DNA tests are uncovering the true prevalence of incest (2024)

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.

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

1) grew up and had children

2) don't know much about genetics and the statistics behind it

3) discovered they themselves were born out of incest after they had children

4) blindly assume they will pass on the 25% of duplicate (paternal and maternal strand) recessive genes, i.e. assume their kids also have the 25% of duplicate recessive genes (the percentage mentioned in the article)

That genetic percentage falls off very quickly each generation if these next generations mate with genetically healthy people. So the disease burden decreases very quickly, but is still present for some generations, and doesn't fully disappear, as the rest of us all have some of that happening if you'd trace back the 4 grandparents, the 8 greatgrandparents, the 16 great-great-grandparents, etc.

Also, most victims or people with traumas in general, feel the logical need to understand: how can one (or we as a society) possibly learn from problems if our understanding of these problems is proactively hindered?

To spare you a lot of genetics going in depth into the biological machinery behind genetics, there is a very simplistic way to understand it. Disregarding immune cells, essentially all cells in your body have the same genome, so we speak of an individuals genome when we consider multicellular organism, like humans.

As you are undoubtedly aware human organisms have their hereditary traits stored in DNA molecules, called chromosomes. Ignoring the sex chromosome one usually has one chromosome from ones father and another from ones mother. There is an ingenious strategy nature uses here:

Imagine whenever a child is created, that somehow half the assets of the father and half the assets of the mother are copied and given to the child.

I invite you to literally think of them as devices: thermostats, microwaves, central heating systems. (this is the rough analogy for the homeostasis functions encoded in our genome).

Assuming the parents are unrelated, this means you get 2 typically unrelated types or models of refrigerator (one from your father and one from your mother), and the 2 microwaves, one from mother another from father, and 2 thermostats, etc... all your cells have this machinery in them.

Now consider the 2 different heating systems you inherited work correctly, but for some reason you inherited the defective thermostat from one of your parents, but a working on from the other. When the cold setpoint is reached both functioning heaters turn on thanks to the working thermostat. And like this it goes with a bunch of different toolsets (the "genes").

Everybody has a few defective devices, but there's a backup of the other parent so we don't notice (or not much at least: suppose both thermostats worked, but one of the heaters was defective: it would still turn on at the same temperature and shut off at the same temperature, but it would take a little longer to reach it, having some influence on your procreation chances in life, but not mortal).

Now consider what happens if your father is also your mothers father: consider the grandparents:

Via the father:

PGF: paternal grandfather < makes up half the genome of the father

PGM: paternal grandmother < makes up the other half genome of the father

Via the mother:

MGF: maternal grandfather < the genome of the father, so half PGF, half PGM

MGM: maternal grandmother

So a defective device from the paternal grandfather or paternal grandmother has the opportunity to be passed on to you directly through the father, BUT also has the opportunity to be passed on to you via the mother!

This drastically increases the odds for defective devices to be backed up by ... the same defective type of device!

That is fundamentally what happens...

Now another quantum of solace. Apart from genetics, theres also the concept of memetics. The spread and recombination of ideas. Now this doesn't just come half from the father and half from the mother, as we are exposed to other sources of information as well: educational systems, newspapers, friends, other family, etc. But undeniably parents have a strong sway over the opinions, ideas, etc to which a child is exposed in its most formative years.

It is healthy to have parents who respectfully hold their own differing opinions, so that children learn to make up their own mind. But it is also a fact that differences of opinion may prevent couples from forming...

You are not alone when it comes to being borne of genetic incest, as the article explains, but also, in a weaker but much wider sense, nearly all of us are the result of this intellectual incest, where people grow up hearing identical but flawed viewpoints from both parents for a prolonged period of your life, in its formative years.

Nobody is alone.