Darwin's Family May Have Paid a Price for Inbreeding

Charles Darwin may have been right in worrying that the ill health that plagued his family were a result of inbreeding. Darwin didn't only marry his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood--in fact, the Darwins and the Wedgwoods made a habit of intermarrying (Darwin's maternal grandparents were also third cousins). Now a new study, which crunched the numbers on first-cousin marriages over four generations of the two dynasties, suggests that his children had an elevated risk of health problems.