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 generations1 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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Careful, Razib. We who live in Appalachia, even those of us who just moved here to the eastern edge less than two years ago, aren't going to take too kindly to the implication that our community is characterized by double-recessive throwbacks.
I would point out that several national magazines have recently ranked Asheville and Brevard, two Appalachian cities just a stone's throw from my home, among the top communities in America when it comes to quality of life, availability of broadband, cultural venues and whatnot.
City folk. Sigh.
1) i live in oregon
2) i went to high school in eastern oregon in a town of less than 20,000
3) i live in the most empty part of I-5
so i feel your pain and have changed the title
pacific northwest represent!!!
PNW yo! Is it raining where you are?
For some reason I thought you lived in New England. Was your h.s. full of Chet Snickers'
razib told me that there were only two biracial students at his HS.
Rural West Virginia. OK. That's better.