Zosimo T. Literatus, R.M.T.
Breakthroughs

THER is a strange term in social anthropology, which is “endogamy.”

It literally means internal breeding. It means procreation between close relatives.

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Studies in late 1970s and the 1990s among countries worldwide, the highest inbreeders are southern India, Sudan, USA, France, Japan, and Samaritans living in Israel and Jordan.

Twenty-seven percent among Samaritans in Israel and 24 percent among those in Jordan practice inbreeding.

When you have a crush on a first cousin and your parents tell you that first-degree cousins are no-no, they refer to the negative outcomes of inbreeding. This old belief has found scientific support from research activities as early as the 1980s.

These studies succeeded in zeroing on whether the inbreeding reproduction problem occurs before or after birth.

The latest research on the issue, and the fourth to confirm the same outcome, was performed by four pediatric researchers representing five training universities in Israel and New York.

The seat of the study is the large Arab community in Israel, called Taibe, 30 kilometers from Tel Aviv, and of 610 families.

More than 38 percent (236) of these families practice consanguineous mating, most of which were first cousin marriages. Children of first-cousins marriages show major congenital malformations at 15.8 percent in previous studies.

In the present study, lead researcher Lufti Jaber of Tulene Medical Center (Tulene University, New Orleans, USA) and Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel (Petah, Tiqva) and colleagues, recorded 678 inbred pregnancies, 479 of which are first cousins and 199 are distant relatives. Congenital malformation was highest among first- cousin marriages (19 pregnancies of 382 samples).

Results published in the Journal of Medical Genetics (July 1997) found that overall interfamilial marriages stood at 43 percent, 55 percent of which were first cousin. Death also had been found out markedly higher after birth than before. And the reason is decreased birth weight among inbreed offspring (first-cousin offspring has the lowest birth weight), with confounders controlled, followed by that of distant relatives.

This gives us interesting questions about on the single-parent story for the origin of mankind.

Can you imagine how many deaths occurred due to congenital malformations among the children of Adam and Eve? And those who survived that genetic challenge, like all of us today, may have been so lucky in the twist of faith, or maybe in the greater scheme of things.