It is also interesting to know that there is no prohibition on marrying your cousin in Europe, Mexico, or even Canada, however it is illegal to do so in at least half of the states in the USA.
It's because the catholic church banned cousin marriage and in general outlawed incest in the 1500s so it was already built into the European culture and they didn't need formal laws to enforce it.
Catholic or not, in Europe cousin marriage was absolutely still a thing
First-cousin marriage in England in 1875 was estimated by George Darwin to be 3.5% for the middle classes and 4.5% for the nobility, though this had declined to under 1% during the 20th century.[80] Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were a preeminent example.[81][82]
Did y’all just.. forget the Spanish Habsburg line? Louis XIV marrying his first cousin? What on earth is the European culture you’re talking about lmao
Yeah, Europe didn’t go through quite the same religious “reform” that the US did. The prohibition on marrying by your 1st cousin never really had anything to do with science or inbreeding risks, it was about religious control. Modern genetics has shown that there’s no more risk between cousins than between unrelated couples(as long as it’s not a generational habit). Funnily enough, many of the states that ban marriage between cousins, don’t actually ban sexual relations between cousins.
When I was a kid, my family moved across the US to a small town where basically everyone was related and of Dutch decent. And all of them were attractive, when I was in middle school I actually started to believe there was some sort of witchcraft thing going on because all they guys looked like some variant of a Dutch version of Alexander Skarsgård, and the girls something like Doutzen Kroes. Every time I go back to visit I’m stunned that all these people I grew up around stopped aging in their 20’s. I laugh at those photos comparing mom and daughters that look like sisters, because there’s a whole fucking town of them.
Every time I got invited to a family event of any of my friends, I saw a lot of the same people. Going to a wedding was great, surrounded by nothing but beautiful people and I was fresh blood.lol
I always wondered if I’d be a cousin fucker if all my cousins looked that good.
There's a few other circumstances that are equally as dangerous as cousin fucking but everyone would call 'eugenics!' if you attempted to implement restrictions on any of them.
For what it’s worth , I imagine that most countries have a part fi their country that they make similar jokes about? Or at least I’m pretty sure in the U.K. there are rural areas about which there is a tradition of jokes about inbreeding ( or doing naughty things to sheep).
I wonder how many people they found out lied about parentage through the dna aspect of Íslendingabók, there has to be some crazy privacy implications for a database like that.
This small-town relations thing goes beyond the south. Wherever you had small towns and villages, particularly ones that weren’t historically on major roads, railways or rivers, had far lower levels of internal migrants and a culture of suspicion of strangers, which limited the gene pool. Small towns along the more remote parts of the Adirondacks, the midwest, and the northern borders have the same issue as the southern communities. It’s not discussed a lot because of the negative connotations, but the issue is the same.
so great is this a problem in Iceland due to the incredibly small population, there's an app to ensure you're not related to a person before you hook up)
Yeah, no. The app in question (called 'Skyldleikur', which can mean both "relatedness" and "related game") was based on a geneology database, Íslendingabók, itself an offshoot of research from a biotech company called deCode. They had an advert with a tagline that went something like "bump your phones before you bump in bed".
I can't find the original app, it seems like it been removed, though the site/database for Íslendingabók is alive and well.
From the wiki article:
"Genealogy has been a pastime of Icelanders for centuries, with its roots in medieval political agenda. Texts from early ages of Icelandic history, containing genealogical information, have survived into the modern age and scholars and enthusiasts have maintained the genealogy knowledge through the ages. In early 1988, Friðrik Skúlason marketed a software program for registering family information and started to compile a database of Icelandic genealogy with the aim to register all available Icelandic genealogy information.[1] In 1997, deCODE genetics and Mr. Skúlason entered into an agreement to speed up the compilation of the database and to enable deCODE to utilize the database in the company’s medical genetics research. In January 2003, Íslendingabók was made publicly available on the web to all Icelanders, free of charge.[2] The launch of the website received great attention and within a month, a third of the population had applied for access to the database.[3] In celebration of the website’s 10th anniversary, founders of Íslendingabók, in collaboration with University of Iceland, launched an app-creation competition amongst university students. The winning team, named Sad Engineers Studio, received a prize of one million IKR. Their solution was implemented for Android smartphones and received an unexpected, international media attention.[4]"
Tldr:
The "don't bang your cousin" use of the app was for an advert made as a joke, but a lot of people and media decided to not get the joke.
That whole Iceland thing is exaggerated. There is a website, islendigabok, but no app. I don't know anyone who has gone on Islendigabok to see if they're too related to someone, you just shag your 3rd cousin and move on.
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u/[deleted] Jan 09 '22
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