OT: Are there inbred families in the Ozarks/Appalachians like in Deliverance?
J
I understand this was a major problem in the mining camps of Kentucky in the
mid 1950's; a generation of children were subjected to a life of idiocy.
Very sad but thankfully the issue isn't as great today.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/051028.html
Are there inbred families in the Ozarks/Appalachians like in Deliverance?
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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
--
J Young
jvis...@live.com
walt tonne
automobile and mobility.
mev...@gcfn.org
Much of the inbreeding myth is derieved from that fact that hill folk
do not marry close kin as much as they know their extended kinfolk.
Do you know your family tree well enough to name 2nd, 3rd, 4th & 5th
cousins? And after 3rd cousins you start hitting about everyone in an
area. Another factor is that family lines often croww. I haver
several cousins who are related to me on both the maternal and
paternal sides but not related to each other. It is so tangled that
my sister, who married a 4th cousin on our father's side, was more
closely realted to some of her husband's cousins than he was because
an aunt on our maternal side married into our father's side. (This
also means that my nephews are cousins to one of their grandfathers
and are related to themselves.) However there seems to be no bad
genetic effects other than large feet. (OK, we react badly to being
shot with silver but that is another issue entirely.)
Mark Evans
Tom S
>
>I understand this was a major problem in the mining camps of Kentucky in the
>mid 1950's; a generation of children were subjected to a life of idiocy.
>Very sad but thankfully the issue isn't as great today.
>
<snip>
Now it seems to be centered in Front Royal, VA. That is where you
claim to live, isn't it, Iben?? Or have they kicked you out..........
Tom S.
Sanders Kaufman
news:6a415344-4659-4ff6...@q22g2000yqm.googlegroups.com...
> Much of the inbreeding myth is derieved from that fact that hill folk
> do not marry close kin as much as they know their extended kinfolk.
> Do you know your family tree well enough to name 2nd, 3rd, 4th & 5th
> cousins?
That's one of the problems with right-winger's fondness for isolationism.
It fosters inbreeding - familial and social.
walt tonne
> On Sat, 31 Jul 2010 01:38:01 -0400, "J" <jvisi...@live.com> wrote:
>
> >I understand this was a major problem in the mining camps of Kentucky in the
> >mid 1950's; a generation of children were subjected to a life of idiocy.
> >Very sad but thankfully the issue isn't as great today.
>
> <snip>
> Now it seems to be centered in Front Royal, VA. That is where you
> claim to live, isn't it, Iben?? Or have they kicked you out..........
>
> Tom S.
I'll bet Front Royal now has to contend with a pack of taco-munching
greasers (spics).
Smiler.
How do you feel about garlic and running water :-)
But seriously, I know my wife is the fourth cousin, twice removed, of Peter
Sellers and can trace my family back to about 1650, on my maternal side, and
1750 on my paternal side. I have a distant cousin in Belgium to whom I'm
related in at least 10 different ways, not all of them by direct bloodlines,
there being 'intervening' families and I am my own 3rd cousin...work that
one out yourself.
--
Smiler
The godless one.
a.a.# 2279
All gods are bespoke. They're all made to perfectly
fit the prejudices of their believers.
Olrik
> cousins? And after 3rd cousins you start hitting about everyone in an
> area. Another factor is that family lines often croww. I haver
> several cousins who are related to me on both the maternal and
> paternal sides but not related to each other. It is so tangled that
> my sister, who married a 4th cousin on our father's side, was more
> closely realted to some of her husband's cousins than he was because
> an aunt on our maternal side married into our father's side. (This
> also means that my nephews are cousins to one of their grandfathers
> and are related to themselves.) However there seems to be no bad
> genetic effects other than large feet. (OK, we react badly to being
> shot with silver but that is another issue entirely.)
>
> Mark Evans
I hear banjos !
RapeUGLYkin
--
RapeUGLYkins use incest in a perpetual continuum guaranteeing their
"base" stays intact -lol
mev...@gcfn.org
>
> - Show quoted text -
You are thinking of the folks from Central Europe. Mine are mainly
from the British Isles and Cherokee populations. But them pale
Hungarians,,,,
Mark Evans
Smiler.
Nope. My ancestors were mainly western European or southern European. Dutch,
Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, with a possible Irish link.
> Mine are mainly
> from the British Isles and Cherokee populations. But them pale
> Hungarians,,,,
>
> Mark Evans
--
Father Haskell
>
> - Show quoted text -
You'd prefer I use a mute?
Apostate
Only if he can pick like that kid on the porch in "Deliverance".
--
Apostate alt.atheist #1931 I've found it!
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