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The Appalachia rural West Virginia of Asia strikes again!

Explore how a Pakistani family can't feel pain, revealing insights into genetics and the impact of cousin marriage in Pakistan.

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P-eter comments on the Pakistani family which can't feel pain. I remember in a genetics course once seeing the professor chart out a pedigree and calculate inbreeding coefficients and the expectation of the unmasking of deleterious alleles given certain matings. Now and then we would laugh nervously since of course real matings between individuals so closely related would be creepy and unethical...but Pakistan with its culture of cousin-loving down the generations makes the science possible in real life! Let a thousand deleterious recessives bloom across the landscape!1 - Remember that inbreeding is particular problematic in a society where cousin-marriage is normative because the coefficient increases as you sum across recent common ancestors, and in such society cousins are likely to be related by many different paths.

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