When Charles Darwin’s daughter Anne Elizabeth (‘Annie’, Photograph 1) died at the age of 10 years on April 23, 1851 her parents were devastated. Charles Darwin was a devoted father and constantly concerned about the health of his 10 children. His concerns were also motivated by fear of the consequences of marriage between relatives: Emma Wedgewood, his wife, was also his first cousin. The possi...

Background. Consanguineous marriage is strongly favored in many regions of the world, despite the prevalent Western belief that the progeny of close kin unions experience developmental disorders and premature mortality. Objective. We outline an alternative perspective on the association between consanguinity and disease, in terms of life history theory and the developmental origins of health an...

The best known example of oblique marriage, i.e. marriage between an ego and an alter in adjacent genealogical levels, involves the marriage of a man with his ZD, to whom he himself is MB. There are a number of discussions of this phenomenon (Rivière 1969, Lavé 1966, Good 1980; also Parkin 1997: 106-8), but in general it is probably best interpreted as a variant of bilateral cross-cousin marria...

Population stratification and its influence on genetic association studies is a controversial topic. Although it has been suggested that stratification is unlikely to bias the results of association studies conducted in developed countries, convincing contrary empirical evidence has been published. However, it is in populations where historical ethnic, religious and language barriers exist that...

WHEN it was observed that the majority of SD-identical unrelated individuals stimulated each other in the MLC test, it was postulated in agreement with earlier suggestions by others that MLC activation might be coded by a locus separate from the LA and Four loci." The existence of such a MLC locus is now generally accepted.^About 10% of the MLC tests between SD-identical unrelated persons are n...

BACKGROUND Consanguinity or marriage between close blood relatives, in particular first cousins is widely practised and even socially encouraged in many countries. However, in the face of fertility transition where the number of cousins eligible to marry declines, how might such constraints on consanguinity develop in the future? OBJECTIVE Numerous studies have stated that the practice cannot c...

We use the patterns of homozygosity at multiple loci to distinguish between excess homozygosity caused by consanguineous mating and that due to undetected population subdivision (the Wahlund effect). Clarification of the underlying causes of excess homozygosity is of practical importance in explaining the occurrence of recessive genetic disorders and in forensic match probability calculations. ...

The north-western populations of Pakistan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) adjoining the Pakistan-Afghanistan border are an amalgamation of native and migrated Pashtun tribes. These tribal populations are in transition due to war conditions and geo-political turmoil on both sides of the border since the Soviet invasion in 1979. Bio-demographic and epidemiological data for these...