Are there inbred families in the Ozarks/Appalachians like in Deliverance?
John Baker
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/051028.html
Are there inbred families in the Ozarks/Appalachians like in Deliverance?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Cecil:
I am wondering if it's true that there are, or were, inbred families or
communities that live(d) in the Ozark Mountains. Was it just the movie
Deliverance that led people to believe that? --Josh from Montreal
Cecil replies:
I hope not, because the Ozarks and the setting of James Dickey's 1970 novel
Deliverance, source of the 1972 movie, are two different places. Much of the
action in Deliverance takes place along the fictional Cahulawassee River,
generally thought to be based in large part on the Chattooga River, which
forms a length of the hilly border between Georgia and South Carolina. The
Ozark Mountains are located mainly in southern Missouri and northern
Arkansas. Though united by the wide belief that the south + hill country =
inbred degenerates, the Ozarks and the Chattooga are separated by roughly
500 miles, several states, and the Mississippi River.
What you're thinking of is the Appalachian Mountains, which extend nearly
2,000 miles from Alabama to Newfoundland and encompass the Chattooga
watershed. Northerners, evidently including Canadians, figure the southern
end of the range is crammed with mental defectives, an assumption worth
examining. If you don't mind, therefore, we'll restructure your question
along slightly more scientific lines: Is southern Appalachia characterized
by an unusually high incidence of (a) inbreeding and (b) mental retardation
and genetic defects, and if so, has (a) led to (b)? For reasons to become
apparent, we'll start not at the beginning or end of this question, but in
the middle.
1. Does Appalachia have more mental retardation, etc? In a 1974 paper
tactfully entitled "The Geography of Stupidity in the U.S.A.," researcher
Nathaniel Weyl notes that the three states having the highest white failure
rate on the Armed Forces Qualification Test in 1968 were Kentucky (14.8
percent), Tennessee (14.2 percent), and West Virginia (13.4 percent). Weyl
attributes the "abnormally large proportion of white mental defectives in
the Appalachian region" to, among other things, "the notoriously high rates
of inbreeding among the Appalachian population." Lest you think Weyl has it
in for Scotch-Irish hillbillies, he blames Maine's high failure rate (8.8
percent, 11th worst) on "the fact that a large proportion of her population
descend from French Canadian immigrants"--and surely, Josh, you know what
trash they are. Weyl's article, incidentally, appeared in Mankind Quarterly,
which publishes a lot of research by the biology-is-destiny crowd.
2. Does inbreeding lead to genetic abnormalities? Time to waffle. Last year
I wrote a column saying cousin marriage wasn't guaranteed to produce genetic
defects. It's not, strictly speaking. However, defects may be more common
than I let on. The problem is "inbreeding depression," the emergence of
undesirable traits when closely related parents each contribute a normally
dormant gene. According to one paper (Jaber et al, Community Genetics,
1998), congenital malformations are 2.5 times more common among offspring of
inbred couples than of unrelated parents. A famous example is the "blue
Fugates," members of an inbred Kentucky hill clan who suffered from a rare
genetic blood disorder that made their skin look blue. (Please see: The
Straight Dope: Is there really a race of blue people?)
3. Is inbreeding unusually common in Appalachia? Here's where things get
murky. Although the public and many social scientists have long assumed that
isolated hill folk often marry their cousins, and some certainly do (ask the
Fugates), research on the subject is pretty thin. The most comprehensive
look I've found is a 1980 paper ("Night Comes to the Chromosomes [etc],"
Central Issues in Anthropology) by Robert Tincher, who at the time was a
grad student at the University of Kentucky. Having dug through 140 years'
worth of marriage records in a remote four-county region of eastern
Kentucky, Tincher argues that (a) yeah, cousin marriage happens in the hill
country, but (b) rates vary widely from place to place and even among
families in a given district, and (c) it isn't conspicuously more prevalent
than in a lot of other places. Point (c) isn't all that persuasive;
Tincher's numbers show that as late as 1950 inbreeding was well above what
could be accounted for by chance--married couples on average were
approximately third cousins. However, the rate had dropped sharply since the
peak after the Civil War, when the average couple were somewhere between
second cousins and second cousins once removed. What's more, the rate fell
quickly after 1950--no doubt due to postwar prosperity, urbanization, and so
on--and by 1970 was no higher than you'd likely find in the general
population.
4. So? So whatever may have been true 50 years ago isn't necessarily true
now. In the recent indicators of national intelligence I can
find--eighth-grade math scores and what all--southern Appalachian states
aren't conspicuously clustered at the bottom. On the contrary,
notwithstanding the blue-state-smart-red-state-dumb malarkey you sometimes
hear, I'd say stupidity in our society is pretty uniformly spread around.
--CECIL ADAMS
--
John Baker
opin...@yahoo.com
" Live and let live "
Meldon Fens
"John Baker" <opin...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1ptqbj....@news.alt.net...
>
> http://www.straightdope.com/columns/051028.html
>
>
> Are there inbred families in the Ozarks/Appalachians like in Deliverance?
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
JB first posts a rally cry against muslims then follows it up with a rally
cry against white anglos.
Jews are the sickest most self-delusional people on the planet without
exception.
--
There is still time to prevent another jewish holocaust.
Help Meldon fight the WAR.
Don Homuth
wrote:
>
>http://www.straightdope.com/columns/051028.html
>
>
>Are there inbred families in the Ozarks/Appalachians like in Deliverance?
>
Fewer all the time, but the answer has been Yes for quite a long
while.
jls
words such as "Ozarks/Appalachians" are generally considered to be
degenerates spawned by incest.
LC
Milledgeville's Mental Midget "John Baker" <opin...@yahoo.com> wrote in
message news:1ptqbj....@news.alt.net...
> Are there inbred families in the Ozarks/Appalachians like in Deliverance?
Many of these types live around- or have families living in - Milledgeville,
Ga. This is convenient, because Milledgeville is home to Central State
Hospital (CSH, which is the state's largest facility for treatment of mental
illness and developmental disabilities.
Often, in addition to mental issues, they are drug addicts, alternating
between methadone and Oxycodone, the famous "hillbilly heroin".
Hmmm....who do we know like that?:
"A.A. has no position on any outside issues but, ask yourself (and only
yourself) why would you want to do these other substances if your goal is to
straighten out your life p.s. I'm a former maintainance man so i'm not just
talking out my ass."
From: jdyo...@volcanomail.com (Jon Young)
Newsgroups: alt.recovery.aa
Subject: Re: methadone
Date: 12 Nov 2003 19:31:53 -0800
Message-ID: <25e1e54f.03111...@posting.google.com>
"I'll be leaving Friday on a short vacation to see the in-laws down in
Milledgeville, Georgia and will be back in about 2 weeks."
From: "Wilson" <wilso...@gmail.com> aka "J Baker"
Newsgroups: alt.atheism
Subject: Re: Signing off
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2007 00:18:04 -0400
Message-ID: <46b00a0b$0$32379$9a6e...@unlimited.newshosting.com>
klunk
"jls" <jls...@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:35dbb36c-d7cc-424d...@u36g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> Scientific studies have shown that people who use slashes between
> words such as "Ozarks/Appalachians" are generally considered to be
> degenerates spawned by incest.
scientific studies have shown that people whom avoid arguing issues in
favour of focusing their attentions on irrelevancies are complete
buffoons....
Don Homuth
wrote:
> Scientific studies have shown that people who use slashes between
>words such as "Ozarks/Appalachians" are generally considered to be
>degenerates spawned by incest.
Studies have also shown that those who make up studies with no real
backing haven't an Actual Clue about much of anything worth
discussing.
Doc Riedenschneider
klunk
"Doc Riedenschneider" <a...@phalt.jungle> wrote in message
news:hvda04ln9nrp3b25g...@4ax.com...
> On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:06:18 GMT, "klunk" is a drooling moron.
ROTFLMAO.... hay doc... i think you've been inhaling far too many fumes from
peeing in your pants... and your rash is making you behave in an even more
pathetically childish manner than before...
Doc Riedenschneider
klunk
"Doc Riedenschneider" <a...@phalt.jungle> wrote in message
> On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:40:51 GMT, "klunk" is aptly named.
lol.... hay doc, i'm glad you've learned to recognize why your brain hurts
when it tries to think.... keep at it and you might eventually learn to
overcome that obstacle... ;-)
SaPeIsMa
"jls" <jls...@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:35dbb36c-d7cc-424d...@u36g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> words such as "Ozarks/Appalachians" are generally considered to be
> degenerates spawned by incest.
>
We;; since YOU did USE it, we'll accept your claim that you qualify
Doc Riedenschneider
stupidity.
klunk
"Doc Riedenschneider" <a...@phalt.jungle> wrote in message
> On Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:39:02 GMT, "klunk" is a sound associated with
> stupidity.
yes... yours...
John Baker
"Meldon Fens" <mel...@meldon.com> wrote in message
news:GJCdnUjYkbmi9ZnVnZ2dnUVZ_qainZ2d@uniservecommunications...
This was not a rally cry against your ethnicity, just an insight to a part
of American heritage ( You still are part of America the last I looked ) I
am not of the jewish faith, but find your anti-semitism disturbing.
Doc Riedenschneider
klunk
"Doc Riedenschneider" <a...@phalt.jungle> wrote in message
> On Wed, 16 Apr 2008 04:19:14 GMT, "klunk" is fucking with a moron
how true...
Phred
"my...my....d.d.d.daddy m.m.m.m.maurried hiz
s.s.s.s.s.sister....b.b.b.b.but it d.d.doesn't....aff.f.feck...m.m.me
t.t.too m.m.m.mmuch...."
Meldon Fens
I find self-delusional jews disturbing.
Lobby Dosser
>
> http://www.straightdope.com/columns/051028.html
>
>
> Are there inbred families in the Ozarks/Appalachians like in
> Deliverance?
Is there Balm in Gilead?