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Notes -
If you think this is weird did you know in Iceland, citizens use a dating app that lets them know if they’re related to the person they’re seeing, out of fears of incest? It’s due to the extreme homogeneity of the population, but there’s a twist to it. There was a study specifically on the Icelandic population that showed that the healthiest and most reproductively successful couples there are third and fourth cousins (which only share < 1% of the same genetic makeup).
One argument in support of that reproductive logic is it may reduce a woman's chance of having a miscarriage that’s caused by immunological incompatibility between a mother and her child. Some individuals have a Rhesus factor on the surface of their RBC’s during a second pregnancy and she and the fetus could have incompatible blood cells (which triggers the mother's immune system to treat the fetus as a foreign intruder, causing a miscarriage.).
Still though. The idea is gross. There are a lot of very attractive women in my extended family. I have a cousin in my family who’s a gorgeous girl and we’ve been tight ever since we were growing up, but she was adopted at birth. Even then the idea is disgusting to me.
I think being close since childhood is the factor here? That’s definitely how the disgust evolved, a fourth cousin you only met as an adult is not going to cause the same response as an adoptive sibling.
Pretty much. We knew she was adopted from a very early age and so did she. My extended family is massive and spread throughout the whole US, with concentrations in certain pockets of the country. So whenever there was some kind of get together, we’d all balkanize and split into camps, and we’d whisper and talk “who the people over there by the lake are,” or “who are the kids on the back patio?,” because we didn’t know who these other family members were.
A lot of times the older cousins and adults introduced us all to each other and we became very friendly and open. Large groups of us would run to my grandfather’s game room down the hall or we’d go down to the basement and we’d all play pool or football outside. One time though, one of my very distant cousins comes up to me and goes “Hey, who’s that girl over there?” (Referring to her.) I tell him who she was and he goes, “She may be family, but if I don’t know her, it don’t count right?”
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I think you got carried away with the example here. I'm pretty sure even explicit anti-cousin-marriage laws/norms don't prohibit relations between fourth cousins.
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