This article was originally published on Sept. 3, 2019.
Inbreeding, or mating between two closely-related people, is a strong taboo across the world. There’s good reason for this, of course. The potential for sexual abuse and lasting trauma is high, and the odds of inheriting rare genetic diseases goes up exponentially among children who are the result of human inbreeding.
But inbreeding still occurs, if extremely rarely. And scientists have few good sources of data on the issue, as there are a number of difficulties in getting data on human inbreeding. Self-reporting inbreeding is understandably uncommon, and there are ethical barriers to gathering data without permission. It’s made studying the prevalence of inbreeding in humans, and dealing with the consequences, difficult.
Now, researchers using data from the UK Biobank, a genetic database of around half a million people from the country, have scanned for evidence of inbreeding in the participants. ...
