Kissing Cousins

Lab Notes : Kissing Cousins by Sharon Begley, posted 30 December 2008.

I keep teaching and lecturing about the fact that there is no good reason not to marry a cousin and, in fact, humankind has obviously been doing it since our origins. As this article mentions, if you want to know more about how this taboo works, read Martin Oppenheimer's Forbidden Realtives. Anybody who raises livestock knows that back-breeding, or breeding back into a common line, accentuates good genes more often than not if the gene line is fairly clear of obvious genetic defects.