I love this site down voting facts if it doesn't conform to preconceived "progressive" notions.
The vedas have many sections which get widely ignored.
Edit: HN throttling is terrible. Here is a link to a couple studies [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32641190/], [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-consanguineous...]
AP has the highest rate, around 28%
But note that the article is really talking about first-degree incest/pedophila/sexual abuse which is taboo in pretty much every society.
In religion, you can find your reasons for anything. e.g. In Mahabharata, Arjuna and Abhimanyu married their cousins.
> In the overwhelming majority of cases ... the parents are a father and a daughter or an older brother and a younger sister, meaning a child’s existence was likely evidence of sexual abuse.
Not saying SA isn't an issue, but if the issue is incest, then cultural acceptance of it is the biggest offender.
What your talking about with 1st cousins is called inbred. Inbred is the superset of incest. You can get that with no incest.
Label it whatever you want. It's still consanguinity and it causes a tremendous amount of disease and the largest offender by far is cultural acceptance if it.
Cousin sex is just not a big deal, and especially beyond the 1st cousins with zero removal, ie the children of your parents' blood siblings. When it comes to stuff like "She's the daughter of my great-auntie's oldest boy" it's negligible. In some societies that wouldn't be tracked, everybody is a cousin and nobody is. Americans are weird about this. Rudy Giuliani for example married his second cousin. I don't even know the names of my second cousins. If I met one in a bar I'd have no idea. But in the US somehow that counts as strange.
It is not a non issue. The communities where marrying cousins is normal do have this issue and have significantly more severe disabilities.
So there's a huge gap between "Your mum and dad both have twins, and there was a double marriage, so, she's your first cousin twice over" and "She's your great-aunt's child's youngest" and yet you might get told both people are your "cousin" for lack of convenient terminology.
It's harmless if it's occasional, but if it's repeated over and over again problems start building up.
No one cared. It wasn't that big deal.
This might not be logical. If your DNA's in UK Biobank you might be more likely to have had a genetic disease stemming from incest.
(Unless I've misunderstood somewhere)
(I work in Genomic)
Contrast this to people that do have a genetic oddity about them. Just having the traits is often enough to get people to find out more about them.
They were trying to get an estimate on the prevalence of incest.
So the number of people who have been documented to have DNA showing that this happened is literally the floor on the amount of times incest occurs.
I'm only making a technical point of logic. It's not a comment on UK Biobank in general.
That's the argument. That this DNA bank has a (lesser than the contrived example, but still true) bias.
We see this countless times in our history, abusers lauded, praised, with status, titles, wealth and popular acclaim. Detractors are ignored, slandered and side-lined, and after the abusers die, it transpires all those hushed whispers were true and the detractors were right all along.
> shamed as town sluts
Though it was still clear what the writer meant. I'm surprised that someone ran with an uncharitable interpretation like they did.
> I'm surprised that someone ran with an uncharitable interpretation like they did.
I am less so, maybe I'm getting old and falling into elderly tropes, but I feel like there's a growing uptick in society with people seeking a platform to moralise, while skimming the content and not understanding it. The short-cuts that were originally just amber/red flags (e.g. like the casualness of throwing out a harsh label like "slut") are starting to become the offense, as opposed to the actual behaviour (the underlying cruelty) that they originally hinted at.
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39765894
Sounds like a thing you would never want to share with Facebook given its approach to privacy.
I read GP's comment as being more about the 'on Facebook' part, not so much about 'invite-only'.
End users don't give any thoughts to privacy, generally speaking. Either they've "nothing to hide", or they have given up due to an overwhelming sense of helplessness and loss of agency on the matter.
It's not even a decision anymore. They just type their phone number (aka permanent tracking unique identifier) into the new app and smash "agree".
Another data source would be STD transmission.
1) grew up and had children
2) don't know much about genetics and the statistics behind it
3) discovered they themselves were born out of incest after they had children
4) blindly assume they will pass on the 25% of duplicate (paternal and maternal strand) recessive genes, i.e. assume their kids also have the 25% of duplicate recessive genes (the percentage mentioned in the article)
That genetic percentage falls off very quickly each generation if these next generations mate with genetically healthy people. So the disease burden decreases very quickly, but is still present for some generations, and doesn't fully disappear, as the rest of us all have some of that happening if you'd trace back the 4 grandparents, the 8 greatgrandparents, the 16 great-great-grandparents, etc.
Also, most victims or people with traumas in general, feel the logical need to understand: how can one (or we as a society) possibly learn from problems if our understanding of these problems is proactively hindered?
To spare you a lot of genetics going in depth into the biological machinery behind genetics, there is a very simplistic way to understand it. Disregarding immune cells, essentially all cells in your body have the same genome, so we speak of an individuals genome when we consider multicellular organism, like humans.
As you are undoubtedly aware human organisms have their hereditary traits stored in DNA molecules, called chromosomes. Ignoring the sex chromosome one usually has one chromosome from ones father and another from ones mother. There is an ingenious strategy nature uses here:
Imagine whenever a child is created, that somehow half the assets of the father and half the assets of the mother are copied and given to the child.
I invite you to literally think of them as devices: thermostats, microwaves, central heating systems. (this is the rough analogy for the homeostasis functions encoded in our genome).
Assuming the parents are unrelated, this means you get 2 typically unrelated types or models of refrigerator (one from your father and one from your mother), and the 2 microwaves, one from mother another from father, and 2 thermostats, etc... all your cells have this machinery in them.
Now consider the 2 different heating systems you inherited work correctly, but for some reason you inherited the defective thermostat from one of your parents, but a working on from the other. When the cold setpoint is reached both functioning heaters turn on thanks to the working thermostat. And like this it goes with a bunch of different toolsets (the "genes").
Everybody has a few defective devices, but there's a backup of the other parent so we don't notice (or not much at least: suppose both thermostats worked, but one of the heaters was defective: it would still turn on at the same temperature and shut off at the same temperature, but it would take a little longer to reach it, having some influence on your procreation chances in life, but not mortal).
Now consider what happens if your father is also your mothers father: consider the grandparents:
Via the father:
PGF: paternal grandfather < makes up half the genome of the father
PGM: paternal grandmother < makes up the other half genome of the father
Via the mother:
MGF: maternal grandfather < the genome of the father, so half PGF, half PGM
MGM: maternal grandmother
So a defective device from the paternal grandfather or paternal grandmother has the opportunity to be passed on to you directly through the father, BUT also has the opportunity to be passed on to you via the mother!
This drastically increases the odds for defective devices to be backed up by ... the same defective type of device!
That is fundamentally what happens...
Now another quantum of solace. Apart from genetics, theres also the concept of memetics. The spread and recombination of ideas. Now this doesn't just come half from the father and half from the mother, as we are exposed to other sources of information as well: educational systems, newspapers, friends, other family, etc. But undeniably parents have a strong sway over the opinions, ideas, etc to which a child is exposed in its most formative years.
It is healthy to have parents who respectfully hold their own differing opinions, so that children learn to make up their own mind. But it is also a fact that differences of opinion may prevent couples from forming...
You are not alone when it comes to being borne of genetic incest, as the article explains, but also, in a weaker but much wider sense, nearly all of us are the result of this intellectual incest, where people grow up hearing identical but flawed viewpoints from both parents for a prolonged period of your life, in its formative years.
Nobody is alone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HclD2E_3rhI
"only 72% of these 7th great grandparents will give you some of your genetics"
"over less than 400 years, 97% of your ancestors contribute nothing to your genetics"
toomuchtodo•6mo ago
zahlman•6mo ago
voidnap•6mo ago
dang•6mo ago
tetromino_•6mo ago
Jtsummers•6mo ago
john01dav•6mo ago
zahlman•6mo ago
So my conclusion is that an archive indeed shouldn't be necessary; people can just disable JavaScript. It doesn't cause issues with the page formatting or anything.
cnst•6mo ago
It should not be necessary to change the browser to view a website; people can just use archive.today, which works fine in all browsers with JavaScript, and doesn't require a captcha, either, in browsers that don't block stuff. (It only requires captchas in those browsers that do block stuff.)
zdragnar•6mo ago
I suspect these sites don't put up that block until articles reach a certain popularity. That encourages early readers to enjoy and share the article, and everyone else gets to think that the person that shared it with them has an account, so maybe they should too.
bookofjoe•6mo ago
cnst•6mo ago
That's only because the JavaScript is fast.
If you're using the Brave browser, you can click on the Brave logo when on the required site, and toggle the disable scripts button when on the www.theatlantic.com website, then JavaScript would be disabled for the site, and it'd stop requiring the paywall.
Please don't take these complaints personally; personally, not all of my devices / browsers have JS disable buttons, so, some of us do appreciate others posting the archive.today links, even for sites where paywall can be skipped through the script disable trick in some browsers.
foresto•6mo ago
It's a pity that archive.today walls off their saved pages behind a Google CAPTCHA, which requires JavaScript. I would think avoiding that kind of fingerprinting/tracking would be a common use case for an archive site, but the Google-wall renders archive.today useless for that purpose.
bookofjoe•6mo ago
boston_clone•6mo ago
If you do already program, have you never been exposed to JavaScript at all? If not, I think you should use that curiosity to find out what JavaScript is and what effects disabling it may have.
Even more odd when I see that the majority of your comments are really just posting archive links to bypass a paywall. Not an issue with me per se, but even more surprising to be ignorant of JS at that point.
bookofjoe•6mo ago
2. I never considered that because it's called "hacker news" it's intended only for hackers.
3. I have never written a line of code, much less programmed.
4. I have zero curiosity about JavaScript.
5. "Even more odd when I see that the majority of your comments are really just posting archive links to bypass a paywall." In fact, 99% of those archive links are to primary articles I post which in fact ARE paywalled. Since by being a paying subscriber to a number of publications I am able to provide "Gift Links" as well, as a courtesy to HN readers I go to the time and trouble of posting them as well as archive links.
There is some distaste on your part for this practice — "Not an issue with me per se" implies the opposite.
In your opinion "even more surprising to be ignorant of JS at that point" — I fail to see any connection between being ignorant of JS to posting archive links — I will going forward cease and desist from posting both "Gift Links" and archive links and instead let you do it, since you clearly have knowledge of JavaScript and believe it important for providing such links.
boston_clone•6mo ago
A lot of misunderstandings but let’s not have that dissuade any goodwill. Please continue and carry on at your leisure.
bookofjoe•6mo ago
cnst•6mo ago
The benefits can be huge, however. For example, many paywalls would stop working, meaning, you get to see the entire content without it being blocked by the paywall, because many paywalls are implemented through JavaScript, thus, they can't block anything if you don't have JavaScript.
It'd also block all those annoying cookie dialogs, too. You still have to be able to re-enable it per-site, otherwise, you won't be able to use many sites, because some require JavaScript for login/rendering and other stuff.
cnst•6mo ago
Actually, they do not; but I'm not sure what's the heuristics. I've disabled all the protections in Brave for archive.today/is/ph, and not getting the captchas anymore.
I've only started getting them when moving to Brave in the first place.
It's only fair — if you block them, they block you.
cnst•6mo ago
Not every browser has the option to disable JavaScript for a webpage.
Yes, of course archive is necessary, as it helps everyone read the article easily, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html, which points out that complaining about paywalls is not.