Inbreeding & Intelligence: Marrying Your Cousin Should be Illegal.

what you have to express to people in no
uncertain terms is there is a 100 percent chance that your child will be born with an intellectual disadvantage that you are producing children below their genetic potential through inbreeding the internet is crowded with compelling excuses for bad behavior there are so many excuses for you to do self-indulgent things so many voices that tell you to think of yourself and think of the short term only and not to think of the long term consequences for your children for your grandchildren for society as a whole not even to think about the long-term consequences for yourself this habit of mind that offers excuses for smoking marijuana drinking alcohol eating red meat it's even more intense when we come to a question like first cousin marriage or in plain english inbreeding it's more intense because our own egos are more directly involved on the left hand side of the screen what you see here is a man who discovered that his own dna is the product of inbreeding he is himself the product of cousin marriage again and again and again throughout the generations in his family tree and what does he uh what does he google around for at the very bottom on the left-hand side you'll see oh he looked up a website called www.cousincouples.com oh he didn't look up this uh peer-reviewed medical research article that states as an established fact that marrying your first cousin reduces the intelligence of your offspring no for some reason he wasn't interested in reading scientific articles of this kind no he turns to the internet and he finds something that's going to confirm his own high opinion of himself oh and just look at it what a great website has a photograph there of albert einstein who married his cousin boy albert einstein sure was a smart guy he couldn't couldn't be wrong couldn't be wrong about marrying your first cousin just looking at this picture doesn't merely convince me that i would never marry any of my own cousins but also that i would not be interested in marrying any of albert einstein's cousins in any case on the hand side of the screen you see this man puts some labor into charting out his own family tree he says at the third generation two of my great-grandmother's grandparents were siblings susanna mariette was a first cousin only anna barbara hertl was related through marriage so he's saying there's this one woman who was only related to marriage who wasn't a cousin of the other people on this chart the fourth generation was more of the same four of the eight were boutiliers who had had the same last name in the fifth generation three of the eight marriages were children from the same couple it took me by surprise initially i was stunned yes this is someone who grew up in an american culture where marrying your own cousin was taboo in some states legal in some states illegal and he was surprised to find that his ancestors in canada had lived in a culture in a country where this kind of inbreeding wasn't illegal at all it was much more common than any canadian today wants to admit to themselves in bradford at the akhtar family home life is unbearably difficult [Music] mauson feels constantly frustrated his two sisters henna and zeleb are unable to look after themselves and their sight and hearing is getting worse their parents find it hard to come to terms with the idea that as first cousins they pass down a gene that caused their children's terrible disabilities what have the doctors actually told you about this you told you that it's it could be anything to do with the fact that you two are first cousins yes they told this is a genetic disease but i don't think this is right but they told us my other my other brother he got to marry with her sisters he got five children all of them perfectly right there's no disability with them some families call it fate however doctors are in no doubt about the cause while an average children's hospital will see 20 to 30 different recessive genetic disorders over a decade in bradford one children's hospital alone has seen 165. usmart helps out in his mum's school and babywear shop when he's not at college he works on the shop floor deals with customers and mans the till i'm very protective of arizona he's like more like a i would say a 14 year old than an 18 year old mentally you know it comes with me um you know he's on holiday he comes with with me to work yeah so can keep an eye on him and things despite what azmat's mom has been told about the cause of his illness she struggles to accept it i don't think there's anything wrong in fiscals and marriages because it's our culture and it's the norm really the thing is though it's not guaranteed it's going to happen or it's not high risk it's one in four but it could be like if it's one in four it's like three could be okay yeah just think it was one of those things because my daughter she's fine this is the part of the equation nobody wants to deal with nobody wants to take this grieving mother aside and say to her no your daughter is not fine this isn't a matter as simple as whether or not your child happens to have down syndrome it isn't a simple binary question of whether or not your child inherited one particular genetic disadvantage inbreeding lowers human intelligence indeed this hypothesis developed in the first place because it was observed amongst farm animals human beings have so much experience raising animals from one generation to the next and you can imagine in medieval times or at least in pre-modern times it would be quite a bit of work to take your flock of sheep some distance to meet with another flock of sheep so that you could get some fresh blood into the herd but people learned to experience observing these animals closely not just in their behavior but also in the terms of their physical abnormalities that would become obvious when they were chopped up to be made into meat or when there were higher and higher rates of stillbirth so on and so forth humans learned that if they allowed animals to inbreed if they allowed animals to marry their own cousins for generation after generation the quality of the animals physically and intellectually would degenerate and yes this is the same simple scary fact we're staring at now who wants to tell this woman that oh you know according to this 2008 study there is a robust negative correlation between iq and con sanguinity cousins marrying cousins makes human beings stupider and no this is not a problem confined to the predominantly muslim parts of the world however if you read the abstract in full you'll notice that part of what scientists struggle with is the difficulty of compensating for forms of social prejudice that creep into the calculus if you're looking at poverty-stricken parts of the united states where marrying your own cousin is associated with being poorly educated and just poor then that's going to prejudice the outcomes whereas as with this paper which is frankly a locus classicus a much cited source from 1977 if you study these questions of cousin marriage within arab societies where it is accepted or even encouraged for a very large percentage of the population then you can look at you can measure the effects of genetically diminished intelligence without having to compensate for those other sources of prejudice let's have a look that's audience all right 156. so it's about five two she's five five two the doctors need to see him once every six months to monitor his health this time the news isn't good can it get better or does it take time what they are yeah yeah i think it's hard to know what we haven't managed to completely explain why you've had this trouble we wouldn't claim at any way to have a complete cure treatment for probiotic acidia by night they still haven't found a cure for it no because it's a genetic disease in a way affects every cell in the body okay you're all right my dream is leaving together i got like a good job and like build something get married lot of family on my own as well it was like if you mind your cousins yet like you can always work out because like if you're marrying someone dick like you could have a disease because you don't you don't know what that would have couldn't scott is it's important safety have kids yet you you don't you don't know if that likes if that cousin's like a disease or something that how that kid could be born because some can be born different kindness i am married for last 25 years successfully with my first cousin and i've got five children and thanks to allah subhanahu wa'ta'ala that they are all fine and well shafka has been married to his first cousin shazia harnam for 35 years his mom and dad farnam begum and ali bahadur are also first cousins shafka's eldest son imran has continued the family tradition and just married his first cousin in pakistan that's three generations of first cousin marriage we haven't seen any negativity in it so therefore we are all for it although between four and ten percent of the children of first cousins are at a high risk of recessive disorders people who support cousin marriages say this means that 90 to 96 percent of the time the children will be healthy a few of you in the audience will now be asking don't these people realize that what they're doing is illegal no in fact marrying your cousin is not illegal in the united kingdom in england scotland and wales in fact throughout western europe they're almost proud of the fact that it's legal to marry your cousin because this was part of the unique historical and cultural experience of the protestant reformation whereas medieval catholicism was very strictly opposed to marrying your cousins even your second cousins and third cousins protestantism beginning with martin luther overturned this tradition perhaps in part just because martin luther was rather fond of overturning and challenging the authority of the catholic church as such on the death of his elder brother arthur in 1491 henry viii had obtained people dispensation to marry his brother's widow catherine of aragon as the marriage failed to produce a male heir henry petitioned the pope for a divorce on the grounds that his marriage to catherine his sister-in-law was invalid under the levitical statutes so in 1533 henry established the church of england with himself as monarch of england the head of the church having embarked on this major religious realignment and wishing to marry catherine howard a cousin of his executed second wife anne boleyn in 1540 henry issued a statute that legalized marriage between all first cousins this tradition whether we think of it as proud or shameful remains strangely influential in western europe and around the world to this day with scientific research showing that first cousins who marry are doubling their chances of having children with rare diseases why is there so little awareness of this in the wider british population sonja and wayne gibbs invited me to their family home they've been together for 16 years wayne is sonya's dad's cousin making them first cousins once removed something that never struck them as a problem their child nicole died of juvenile osteopatrosis a genetic disease that causes the bones to thicken and crush the body's organs they were told it was because they both carried recessive genes so as a parent to sort of go from having what you thought was a perfectly healthy normal baby how did that feel upsetting horrible feel absolutely helpless because you know there's just not a thing you can do did you decide to have a third child was that poor well we went through obviously genetic counselling what they call it because obviously we want to know you know can we have any more children but that test for you was absolutely essential it was vital there was no way we was going to even you know have another child if there was no test out there that could help and obviously i just would have stuck it nathan that would have been it and now you've got two very healthy kids two very healthy boys [Music] and now you've got two very healthy kids two very healthy boys [Music] i've shared with you several short clips from that documentary many of you may have found it meaningful moving or even hard-hitting you might think wow that's a documentary that is going to strike a blow against human indifference and motivate people to really get out and change their ways i'm here to tell you now the exact opposite that documentary took the wrong approach at every stage of the argument and i can guarantee that people will only double down on their commitment to justifying and excusing first cousin marriage and why because the documentary made the mistake of expressing the problem in terms of risk if you tell these couples they have a seven percent chance and this is the number used in newspaper headlines sort of the soft science rounded off factoid of the day if you tell these people that they have a seven percent chance of having a child with a horrible debilitating deformity or disability they'll shrug their shoulders and say well there's still a 93 chance that the child will be perfectly fine even within the documentary people say that again and again again and not merely when the odds are 93 versus seven even when it's a one in four chance when it's a 25 chance of a serious debilitating disability and then only a 75 percent chance of the child being quote unquote okay what you have to express to people in no uncertain terms is there is a 100 percent chance that your child will be born with an intellectual disadvantage that you are producing children below their genetic potential through inbreeding people need to be told in no uncertain terms this isn't a risk this isn't a roll of the dice it's a certainty and that entails for you a very definite moral obligation to never ever reproduce with any of your cousins and that's that's the state's argument always that's why we have these laws because the state has a compelling interest to prevent genetic defects in children and that is really why we have these laws on the books the internet exacerbates the innate human capacity for short-term self-indulgence and excuse making what we need governments to do what we need laws to do is motivate people to look beyond their own selfish short-term pleasure and think about what's best not just for themselves but others not just for themselves and not just for their own children and grandchildren but for society as a whole television in the era of its dominance certainly had this same tendency to encourage people to live as infants who never take on mature responsibilities i confess but on your tv remote there were only so many channels you could flip between and each channel was just identified with a number the remote control for the internet lets us dial in precisely the excuses that we want to hear even for something as barbaric even for something as destructive as first cousin marriage [Music] maybe we can we can practice yes