The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me. And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.
Most of the people affected may never know about their parentage, but these days, many are stumbling into the truth after AncestryDNA and 23andMe tests.
One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,”
Now I’m not walking around thinking I’m living in a porn movie, but a rate of 0.014% is not what I would call shocking.
And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.
Either way, what number of parent raping and impregnating their child or sibling raping and impregnating their sibling would be shocking to you? Because to most people it’s probably “anything that isn’t zero”.
It’s shocking to you that rape exists? Clearly its a bad thing and shouldn’t happen, and it’s upsetting, but I would disagree that most people would be shocked if you told them “more than zero rapes happened this year”.
While I agree with you in principle, I actually do think that 1/7k is unexpectedly high. If 1/10k people had an incestuous relationship, that would be low enough that I wouldn’t find it surprising. This study, if we take it to be cross-sectional, implies that the rate of incidence is much higher, at least on the order of 1/1k, possibly something around 1%. I don’t know the frequency that people of incestuous individuals have a child as a result, but the idea of it being higher than 1/7 strikes me as unlikely. Of course, multiple children can result from a pairing, so that has the potential to sway the numbers, but I’d hope that incestuous individuals are less likely to desire children from the relationship, and as a result would take a pregnancy as a sign to stop.
One in a Thousand ist still low enough that it is very likely you will never meet a person involved with this in your entire life. In the EU the rate of traffic death per 100,000 people per year is at about 7.5. So for any given person the chance of dying in a traffic accident in 13.3 years is as high as that.
Over a life span of 80 years the probability of knowing one incestous person is as likely as knowing 6 people that died in traffic accidents at current accident rates and assuming independant and random distributions.
I’d be more shocked to lose 6 friends to traffic accidents over my lifetime than one of them turning out to have had an incestous relationship.
One in a Thousand ist still low enough that it is very likely you will never meet a person involved with this in your entire life.
What? If I met only 1 new person every month for my entire life, I’d meet 1000 people before 85 years. If I only met 1 new person a week, I’d meet 1000 people before I turned 20. I’m a goddamn hermit, but I still rarely go more than a week without meeting someone new, and when I meet new people it’s often more than 1.
I’ve already met people who later died in in traffic accidents, so what the fuck are you talking about?
Anecdotal, but I know at least ten people who have died in traffic accidents. I’m only 30. I also work in retail and see thousands of people a day. A whole person a day I see could statistically be a child of incestuous rape. That is pretty shocking and horrifying to me.
But if they say “i was raped”?
1 out of every 6 women in America are survivors of attempted or completed rape. If you’re shocked someone tells you they’ve been raped, it’s because they’re brave enough to say it, not because it’s statistically unlikely.
Whoa, where did all the rape come from?
It kinda comes built in with incest.
You’re overplaying your hand here. Parent/child incest implies rape if the child is underage. Adult sibling/underage sibling implies rape. But incest of siblings who are similar age (whether adult or child) doesn’t necessarily imply rape. Even incest of a parent and their adult child doesn’t imply rape.
Statistically I’d bet this is predominantly rape and you are largely correct, but by saying incest = rape you’ve overstepped a bit.
I’m not doing anything of the sort, you on the other hand, are telling on yourself 🤮
Telling what, exactly?
That dude sounds like he’s projecting. You’re just trying to clear up something that matters when talking about these sort of topics.
That sounds like a hell of an assumption. Any data supporting that?
Love a news article that let’s you read down a while before cutting you off to reveal its a pay to view site.
Fuck those sites.
Firefox reader mode just grabs the text and images and let’s me read the whole article on most of these sites.
And if it doesn’t load it all, just reload the page 😘
You all are awesome. Finding out new features every day with Firefox. Glad I returned.
Unlock anything. I’ve been using it exclusively since 10ft doesn’t always work
I’m holding out for 69ft
Nice
It is the Atlantic to be fair so you might not be missing much. This from a magazine that endorsed the Shakespeare conspiracy repeatedly.
If you can lie about one thing, you can lie about two…
What Shakespeare conspiracy?
That he didn’t write the plays and presumably the poems. It’s basically flat earthers for the literature. The Atlantic ran a piece advocating for it and then ran two other pieces about how great they were for running the original piece.
It’s a good conspiracy they’ve got answers to all the questions, ‘what about all the huge piles of evidence that clearly show he wrote them?’ Is easily answered by ‘just pretend it doesn’t exist!’
Best is when they say Edmund Spencer wrote them or someone, it makes so little sense I almost hope it’s true.