The bases of Western attitudes to consanguineous marriage

Authors

Alan Bittles, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow

Document Type

Journal Article

Publisher

MacKeith Press

Faculty

Faculty of Computing, Health and Science

School

School of Exercise, Biomedical and Health Science

RAS ID

1850

Comments

Bittles, A. H. (2003). The bases of western attitudes to consanguineous marriage. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 45(2), 135-138. Available here

Abstract

There are frequent references to marriages between close biological relatives in the Bible, for example, the Patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah (Genesis 20:12), and Amran and Jochebed, the parents of Aaron and Moses, who were related as nephew and aunt (Exodus 6:20). In both cases the parental couple would be expected to have inherited identical genes from a common ancestor(s) at 25% of all loci and so, on average, their offspring would have been homozygous at 12.5% of loci, equivalent to a coefficient of inbreeding (F) of 0.125.

DOI

10.1111/j.1469-8749.2003.tb00917.x

Access Rights

free_to_read