Cousin marriage: Marriage involving cousins.
Everyone carries rare recessive alleles, rare genes that are generally innocuous in the heterozygous state but that in the company of another gene of the same type are capable of causing an autosomal recessive disease. We are all reservoirs for genetic disease. First cousins, as noted, share a set of grandparents. So for any particular allele (gene) in the father, the chance that the mother inherited the same allele from the same source is 1/8. Further, for any gene the father passes to his child, the chance is 1/8 that the mother has the same gene and ½ that she transmits that gene to the child so 1/8 X ½ = 1/16. Thus, a first-cousin marriage has a coefficient of inbreeding of 1/16. The added risks for first cousins depend not only upon this coefficient of inbreeding but also upon their genetic family histories and, in some cases, upon test results (for example, for beta thalassemia for first cousins of Italian descent). However, there are always added risks from the mating of closely related persons and those risks are not negligible.
Facts and myths about cousin marriage including birth defects and statistics.
Note: All states allow the marriage of second cousins. A; Alabama: First cousins, yes. Alaska: First cousins, yes. Arizona: First cousins, yes, only if they are over a certain ...
Cousin Marriage Okay by Science. In an age of sexual liberation, marriage between cousins remains taboo, at least in the United States — and from a scientific ...
In an age of sexual liberation, marriage between cousins remains taboo, at least in the United States — and from a scientific perspective, laws against ...
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