balkan endogamy

nick says: “The Balkans had the 7th cousin law, that forbid them to marry anyone closer than the 7th cousin.”

i did a little googling on that and found what i think will probably prove to be a general pattern for balkan populations: a ban on marrying in the patriline, but marrying on the mother’s side is ok and even preferred. so the seventh-cousin law that nick is referring to relates only to paternal cousins.

this is just a preliminary look at the mating patterns in the balkans, btw. i need to do a lot more research on this.

anyway, this pattern of avoiding marriage in the patrline but preferring marriage to maternal relatives seems to hold for bosnian muslims, albanians, and macedonian slavs.

regarding the macedonian slavs: “The genealogical reckoning is primarily agnatic [i.e. through the male line – h. chick]. Kinship terminology distinguishes father’s brother (stric) from the mother’s brother (ujak), as well as using a special word to indicate sister’s or daughter’s husband (zet) and a woman married to a set of brothers (jetrva). On the agnatic side, marriage is forbidden up to the ninth generation, while the matrilineal first cousins could be regarded as possible mates if it was not for the canonical prohibition.“

that’s the christian church’s ban on cousin marriage. but otherwise, marriage to matrilineal relatives is ok — and macedonian slavs would’ve approved of matrilineal first cousin marriage if it wasn’t for their church.

regarding the bosnian muslims, bringa reports (pg. 146) that “there is a preference for marrying agnatic affines.” agnatic refers to the paternal line — so your father and your paternal grandfather and all your paternal aunts and uncles, etc. affines are in-laws. so there is a preference amongst bosnian muslims to marry their in-laws connected to the father’s side of the family.

the most obvious members of that group would simply be one’s maternal relatives, i.e. your father’s in-laws (see?). but agnatic affines could also include, for instance, your paternal uncle’s wife’s relatives.

i know — it all gets kinda complicated. the important thing, though, is it’s all a sort of endogamous mating.

finally, the albanians. i’m going to reproduce a long-ish passage from State Collapse and Reconstruction in the Periphery: Political Economy, Ethnicity and Development in Yugoslavia, Serbia and Kosovo. just skip it if you’re bored already, but it talks about the clannishness or tribalness (the author’s words, not mine!) of the albanians and how their mating patterns have, at least traditionally, been endogamous, including marriage to maternal relatives (this is not strange, btw, since marriage to maternal relatives seems generally to be the most popular form of close family marriage around the world) [pgs. 64-67]:

“A brief description of Albanian society is required here. Albanians are divided into two language or dialect groups, the Gheg and the Tosk, with the Tosk dominating in southern Albania and the Gheg in northern Albania and the highlands (the division is roughly at the Shkumbi river). The Albanians in Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia are Ghegs (with some exceptions in southern Macedonia). Traditional structures, tribal or clan-based, as well as village community-based forms of social organisation remained important among the Albanian population in Kosovo throughout the Yugoslav period. There are notable elements of continuity in traditional loyalty structure and customary law (including the practice of blood feud). The terms ‘tribe’ and ‘clan’ are contested, but we may instead use the Albanian terms. The Albanian term ‘fis’ refers to a large groups which claim descent from one common male ancestor. Each fis is divided into sub-branches. Marriage within the same fis (based on the male line) is considered incestuous even if the ‘actual’ relationship is, say, nine or ten generations back (which does not apply on the maternal side).[12] In Kosovo there are about thirteen fises. A smaller group which traditionally has existed within the fis is a brotherhood or ‘vellazeri’, which is similar to the Balkan form of extended family, the ‘Zadruga’, but differs from it, for example, in that there was not a common budget. A ‘mehala’ is another term for a subgroup consisting of a number of closely related houses. A house, or a ‘shpi’ could itself consist of an extended family — something still existing in Kosovo although they have declined considerably during the Yugoslav period…. It should be noted that within the same fis some members can be Muslim and other Catholic. Among the Albanians there are Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox. The Orthodox prevail in south Albania (among the Tosk), whereas Kosovo is predominantly Muslim….

“The traditional Albanian village consisted of the (often fortified) houses (kulle) of the extended families, but had no public spaces. There were no cafes or inns, or public buildings of any kind. All matters relating to society, or social life, were discussed inside the family houses, and the house was thereby of particular importance in Albanian cultural life…. In contrast to the pattern in northwestern Europe, for example, there were no intermediary associations or public spheres between the individual, or family, and the state and hence nothing resembling what has been called ‘civil society’ in the usage of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century thinkers. Indeed there was neither the social structure nor social infrastructure or type of economy for such an analytical term as ‘civil society’ to be applied; social life was shaped by the extended family (with its house), the clan and the village, and there was no social organisation beyond the extended family apart from the clan. All legal matters were strictly regulated in customary law and applied by the clans, or mediated in meetings by the elders (kuvend)….

“The Albanians … had no aspirations to an Albanian state before the twentieth century, but were quite content with remaining inside the Ottoman state. Although there may have been a growing Albanian identity, beyond the fis, especially in the nineteenth century, there was not really any expression of Albanian nationalism. Several factors made expressions of nationhood unlikely. There were disputes between clans, and the Albanians did not share a single religion, but were divided between Islam, Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism. The lifestyles of, for example, the Tosk in the south or in the coastal trading ports and the Gheg of the highlands were quite different.

“[12] As noted by Edith Durham, the Catholic Church prohibited marriage to the sixth degree, but on the maternal side much closer relatives might enter marriage. See Durham (1909: 22); The practice of prohibiting marriage within the fis remains today.”

previously: mating patterns in medieval eastern europe and invention of the modern world

_{(note: comments do not require an email. why hello there!)}

pathogens and culture

the final point that i want to look at from the woodley & bell paper on consanguinity and democracy is their finding that pathogen load affects consanguinity (which, in turn, affects democracy) in societies. before i do that, though, i want to back up and look at pathogens and culture.

in 2008, fincher, et al., published their findings [opens pdf] of an apparent relationship between individualistic vs. collectivist societies and pathogen load. generally, the more pathogens in your environment, the more collectivist — ethnocentric, conforming — you’re gonna be since limiting your interactions with strangers will help to reduce your chances of catching some lethal disease. and vice versa.

i like it! (^_^)

here’s a nice little chart from the paper showing the correlation between individualism (taken from hofstede 2001) and historical pathogen prevelance (the authors explain how they came up with their pathogen index on pgs. 1280-81):

two of the et al. guys, murray and schaller, expanded the historic pathogen index in a paper published in 2010 [opens pdf]. the index (or, rather, indices ’cause there’s two of them) sums up the historic disease prevalence for 230 nations or geopolitical regions. they offer (pg. 102) a nice table summarizing several different studies which found correlations between pathogen load and things like individualism vs. collectivism, extraversion, openness and democratization (click on chart for LARGER view):

again, in general, the more pathogens, the more cultural/behavioral “restrictions.” (but the spicier the food! mmmmm!)

more on all this anon!

previously: consanguinity and democracy and consanguinity and islam and democracy

_{(note: comments do not require an email. hi there!)}

mating patterns and family types ii

in the interests of k.i.s.s. k.i.s.s., i decided to look again at mating patterns and family types in the murdock ethnographic atlas, but this time looking just at exogamous, agamous and endogamous mating practices without all the cousin-marriage business.

so, what i looked at this time were just what sorts of “domestic organizations” (nuclear/stem, polyandrous/polygynous, extended families) go with different “community marriage organizations” (exogamous, agamous, endogamous). (see previous post for explanations of all those categories.)

i got results for 184 societies. as in the previous post, i collapsed nuclear & stem families, small & large extended families, and the various exogamous & endogamous categories together. this time i left in the polygynous/polygamous family types and the agamous mating patterns. here’s what i found (click on chart for LARGER view):

again, nuclear and stem families just do not go together with endogamous mating patterns. you need exogamous or agamous (not caring one way or the other) mating patterns to get nuclear or stem families. there is clearly a relationship between endogamy and extended families.

also, there seems to be more endogamy in the world than exogamy. and quite a lot of peoples who don’t seem to be able to make up their minds on the issue.

for the record, the two murdock atlas societies that are endogamous AND have nuclear or stem families (there’s one of each) are:

– the ahaggaren tuareg tribe (endogamous marriage patterns with nuclear families)
– the konso people of ethiopia (endogamous marriage patterns with stem families, occasionally polygyny).

previously: mating patterns and family types

_{(note: comments do not require an email. sifaka alert!)}

mating patterns and family types

i keep saying that consanguineous/endogamous mating patterns lead to clannishness/tribalism, but do they really? i think the evidence strongly suggests yes (see the mating patterns series in the left-hand column below ↓), but it would be nice to quantify it. but how?

consang.net‘s data on modern cousin marriage rates would be easy and convenient to use, but where are the data on whether those societies are individualistic, clannish or tribal or whatever? i’m not aware of anything like that (if anyone is, please let me know!). i could, perhaps, sit down and, based on what i know, rate all these nations as clannish, etc., but 1) i might be wrong in some or a lot of the cases, and 2) i’d be worried about introducing my own biases. so that’s no good.

so, i thought i’d try george murdock‘s ethnographic atlas to see if i could find any useful info there. i did! (i think.)

what i looked for: which types and what frequencies of different basic family types (domestic organization) are found in societies with various mating patterns (number of cousin marriage [preferential] and community marriage organization). i got results for 186 different societies.

“domestic organization” equals:

– independent nuclear monogamous
– independent nuclear occasional polygyny
– independent polyandrous families
– polygynous unusual cowives pattern
– polygynous usual cowives pattern
– stem families
– small extended families
– large extended families

i collapsed these categories into: nuclear/stem families, polygynous/polyandrous families and extended families. i figured stem families are practically nuclear families, just with grandma and/or grandpa included. i left the polygynous/polyandrous societies (there were 30 of them) out of the final analysis ’cause i just don’t know what they are. nuclear families? extended families? i dunno.

“number of cousin marriage [preferential]” equals:

– two of four cousins (e.g. paternal)
– one of four cousins (e.g. fbd)
– no first cousins
– first and some second cousins excluded
– no preferential or prescriptive unions

the first four categories are all versions cousin marriage, so i collapsed those together.

for each of the societies that came back as “no preferential or prescriptive unions” (a total of 123), i drilled down into the “community marriage organization” category to see if i could work out if their marriage patterns were generally endogamous or exogamous.

“community marriage organization” equals [for more on what these categories mean, see pg. 7 here – opens pdf]:

– demes (not segmented into clan barrios) [exogamous]
– segmented communities without local exogamy [endogamous]
– agamous communities [no rules about endogamy/exogamy]
– exogamous communities (not clans) [exogamous]
– segmented communities (containing localized clans) with local exogamy [endogamous]
– clan communities (or clan barrios) [endogamous]

i collapsed these categories into either endogamous or exogamous, and then i combined the endogamous societies with the cousin marrying societies from above. i left the agamous communities (there were 66 of them) out of the final analysis ’cause who knows if they’re marrying in or out.

here’s what i found (click on chart for LARGER view):

of the exogamous societies, just about half have nuclear/stem families and the other half have some sort of extended families. of the consanguineous/endogamous societies, those having extended families number nearly double those with nuclear or stem families.

and the ratios of consanguineous/endogamous marriage patterns to exogamous marriage patterns are very different in each of the family-type divisions: endogamous to exogamous in nuclear family societies is about 2:1 while the ratio is more like 3.5:1 in extended family societies.

this isn’t a perfect analysis. a lot of the data in the murdock atlas is quite old, but it is still used frequently. and likely i screwed up along the way somewhere. but i think this is another indicator that, at the very least, there is a connection between in-marrying and clannishness.

update 07/18: see also mating patterns and family types ii

_{(note: comments do not require an email. hi there!)}

eugenics in the news

from the u.k.’s telegraph (links added by me):

“Euroscience Open Forum 2012: DNA gene testing ‘will screen out lovers'”
13 Jul 2012

“Couples will soon be able to choose their life partner solely based on the compatibility of their genes instead of through love, a scientific conference has heard.

“Due to the falling cost of DNA testing Britain is on the cusp of a new era of eugenics, according to a leading British scientist.

“Prof Armand Leroi, of Imperial College London, said that within five to ten years it will be common for young people to pay to access their entire genetic code.

“He told the Euroscience Open Forum 2012, in Dublin, that a desire to have a healthy baby will lead more to request access to the view the genes of any prospective partner.

“Armed with this information, the couple could then use IVF to screen babies with incurable diseases.

“While it was unlikely people will have the ‘luxury’ of using the technology to design babies, by their intellect or eye colour, they would instead focus on stopping genetic diseases.

“Addressing a session titled ‘I human: are new scientific discoveries challenging our identity as a species’, he said the cost of genetic sequencing was falling so quickly that ‘it is going to become very, very accessible, very, very soon’….

“He said eugenics were already available, with tens of thousands of unborn babies with Down’s syndrome and other illnesses being aborted every year.

“He told the conference on Thursday: ‘These processes are very well established in most European countries.

“‘Many of the ethical problems that people raise when they speak of neoeugenics are nought once you offer gene selection or mate selection as a eugenic tool.'”
_____

meanwhile, in tonga:

“Tonga’s Crown Prince Tupouto’a Ulukalala marries cousin”
12 July 2012

“The heir to the throne of Tonga in the South Pacific has married his second cousin in the capital Nuku’alofa.

“Crown Prince Tupouto’a Ulukalala and his bride, Sinaitakala Fakafanua, both in their 20s, waved to cheering crowds as they left church after the wedding…..

“Marriage between cousins is seen as a way of keeping the royal bloodline strong in Tonga….”

felicitations to the happy couple! (^_^) (seriously!)

previously: ivy league selective breeding

_{(note: comments do not require an email. tonga – the friendly islands?)}

evolution likes it hot

i posted about this before, but the topic came up in conversation recently, so i thought i’d post about it again:

“Evolution faster when it’s warmer”
24 June 2009

“Climate could have a direct effect on the speed of ‘molecular evolution’ in mammals, according to a study.

“Researchers have found that, among pairs of mammals of the same species, the DNA of those living in warmer climates changes at a faster rate.

“These mutations – where one letter of the DNA code is substituted for another – are a first step in evolution.

“The study, reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, could help explain why the tropics are so species-rich….

“The idea that microevolution happens faster in warmer environments is not new. But this is the first time the effect has been shown in mammals, which regulate their own body temperature.

“‘The result was unexpected,’ said Len Gillman from Auckland University of Technology, who led the study.

“‘We have previously found a similar result for plant species and other groups have seen it in marine animals. But since these are “ectotherms” – their body temperature is controlled directly by the environment – everyone assumed that the effect was caused by climate altering their metabolic rate….’

“‘We suspected the same effect might be happening in mammals, because seasonal changes affect the animals’ activity,’ Dr Gillman told BBC News.

“He and his team compared the DNA of 130 pairs of mammals, looking at genetically similar ‘sister species’ – where each of the pair lived at a different latitude or elevation.

“They tracked changes in one gene that codes for a protein known as cytochrome b, comparing the same gene in each of the pair of mammals to a “reference” gene in a common ancestor.

“By looking for mutations in the DNA code for this gene – each point where one letter in the code was substituted for another – the researchers were able to see which of the two mammals had ‘microevolved’ faster.

“Animals living in environments where the climate was warmer, had about 1.5 times more of these substitutions than the animals living in cooler environments.

“Dr Gillman explained that, at higher latitudes where environments are colder and less productive, animals often conserve their energy – hibernating or resting to reduce their metabolic activity.

“‘In warmer climates annual metabolic activity is likely to be greater, so this will lead to more total cell divisions per year in the germline.’

“These results support the idea that high tropical biodiversity is caused by faster rates of evolution in warmer climates.”
_____

here’s the original research article: Latitude, elevation and the tempo of molecular evolution in mammals

one of the first things that popped into my mind — right after cool! — when hearing about this a few years ago was: so what could this mean for the out-of-africa (ooa) theory? one of the foundational pillars of ooa is that, because genetic variation is greatest in africans, they must be some of the oldest populations on earth ’cause they’ve acquired so many, many mutations — therefore, everyone else prolly came ooa:

“A 10-year study published in 2009 analyzed the patterns of variation at 1,327 DNA markers of 121 African populations, 4 African American populations, and 60 non-African populations. The research showed that there is more human genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else on Earth….

“Human genetic diversity decreases in native populations with migratory distance from Africa and this is thought to be the result of bottlenecks during human migration, which are events that temporarily reduce population size. It has been shown that variations in skull measurements decrease with distance from Africa at the same rate as the decrease in genetic diversity. These data support the Out of Africa theory over the multiregional origin of modern humans hypothesis.”

but if genetic variation might be increased just by living in a hot climate … well … then what?

more recently, davidski over at eurogenes posted about this paper the other day: An Abundance of Rare Functional Variants in 202 Drug Target Genes Sequenced in 14,002 People. turns out african americans have a lot more rare genetic variants than europeans — and northern europeans have the least of all:

could the differences be related to the fact that these people’s ancestors came from different latitudes/climates and, so, their mutation rates were different? dunno. maybe.

previously: here’s my question

_{(note: comments do not require an email. chillin’.)}

more on consanguinity in england (and scotland)

below is a chart summarizing the findings from various consanguinity studies for england (and a couple for scotland). i’ve adapted catherine linley day’s chart which appears in her thesis [opens pdf] on pg. 245 (basically, i’ve added her findings, fleshed out darwin’s findings, and added a couple of others — i also divided the findings between north and south). most of these studies have drawbacks and lynley day goes through them all in detail on pages 245-250. click on image for LARGER view:

as you can see, and as i mentioned yesterday, the overall pattern seems to be that people in southern great britain have largely avoided cousin marriage since the 1500s (possibly as far back as the 1300s), while the people further north, not so much. if anything, cousin marriage increased in the succeeding centuries, particularly in the nineteenth (a general pattern for much of europe).

the sorts of cousin marriage rates we see for the english from the medieval period to the modern — ranging from 0.00 to 5.30 — are just not even in the same ballpark cricket pitch as other parts of the world like the arab peninsula or even southern europe. and they haven’t been. for centuries. the english, especially members of the southern subspecies, have apparently avoided cousin marriage like the plague.

there are gaps, i know. big gaps. more numbers would be nice, of course. further research is required. (~_^)

let me go through the list.

the first entry for fourteenth century ely. i posted about that here. fifty percent (50%) of all marriages in ely, cambridgeshire, in the 1300s were to people living outside of ely. hard to know if this means people were avoiding cousin marriage or not — people from ely could’ve been marrying their cousins living in other villages — but it’s likely, i think, that this means they were avoiding marrying close family members. at this point in time, the roman catholic church had banned cousin marriage up to and including third cousins, and as lynley day points out with regard to the second entry on the list (1500s england), for whatever reasons, medieval english people seemed to take these restrictions seriously [pg. 246]:

“Marriage dispensations from the reign of Henry VIII were used to estimate consanguinity (Smith et al. 1993). The results produced from these documents were surprisingly low (Table 6-4), with a total absence of 1st cousin marriages and a very low level of 2nd cousin marriages, even compared to modern studies. One possible explanation, as noted by Smith and his colleagues, is that the marriage dispensations may not reflect actual practice, although anecdotal evidence suggests that there was a real aversion to close consanguineous marriage in the mediaeval period (Smith et al. 1993). Another explanation proffered is that marriage dispensations were almost exclusively the preserve of the rich, and that the poor and labourers did not avail themselves of the system (Smith et al. 1993).”

the third item on the list is lynley day’s study which i posted about yesterday. the next is bramwell’s study for shropshire. bramwell used george darwin’s techniques to calculate cousin marriage rates in that county by looking at surnames. his results are not far off lynley day’s and so, i’d guess, are probably fairly accurate. the same can be said for darwin’s results (which i posted about here).

pearson’s hospital study involved checking for consanguinity between the parents of sick children. while consanguineous couples might have more sickly children on average compared to the rest of the population, pearson’s finding of 1.3% first cousin marriages for londoners of the time also seems to fit well with the other findings. he attempted to double-check his results by surveying the readers of the british medical journal (bmj), but he may have gotten a skewed response (only persons married to cousins responding) and/or many of the readers at the time may have been from the upper classes. one or both of those may account for the high (for england) 4.69% first-cousin marriage rate that he found.

the next study, bell’s study of hospital patients across england, had the same methodology as pearson’s, but found a slightly lower consanguinity rate. but the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century (when the study was conducted) is just the point when consanguinity rates started to drop across europe after peaking between 1875-1915, so that may account for the lower rates.

smith’s study of the records of the society of genealogy members probably has a slight bias towards middle-/upper-class folks who, as g. darwin showed, tend to have slightly higher consanguinity rates in england (and elsewhere, too, i think). finally, the study of consanguinity rates in twentieth century reading by coleman can be found here.

previously: consanguinity in england – north vs. south and but what about the english? and cousin marriage rates amongst nineteenth century english and english jews and exogamous marriage in medieval england and invention of the modern world

_{(note: comments do not require an email. cricket anyone?)}

consanguinity in england – north vs. south

in “Marriage Patterns in Two Wiltshire Parishes 1754-1914: Geographical Mobility, Consanguinity and Illegitimacy” [opens pdf], catherine linley day found that the average cousin marriage rates for stourton and kilmington parishes between the years of 1800 and 1914 were (pg. 243 – click on chart for LARGER view):

those are really low rates. the total average consangunity (first- AND second-cousin) rate is just 3.9%. going out all the way to include sixth cousins, the cousin marriage rate is still only 9.2%.

wiltshire is in sw england and is part of the area where hackett fischer’s “distressed cavaliers and indentured servants” came from.

meanwhile (well, not really meanwhile ’cause the centuries are off), in cumbria up north on the border with scotland (from Albion’s Seed):

“In many cases the husband and wife both came from the same clan. In the Cumbrian parish of Hawkshead, for example, both the bride and groom bore the same last names in 25 percent of all marriages from 1568 to 1704.”

so, up north, cumbrians were marrying their paternal kin twenty-five percent of the time — presumably anywhere from first- to sixth-cousins or even farther out, who knows? but that twenty-five percent only includes paternal kin. who knows how frequently they married maternal kin in addition?

i know, i know. the centuries don’t match so these data sets aren’t really comparable. but trust me — this is a general pattern for england — greater inbreeding in the north and less in the south. i’ll have some follow up posts offering more proof for this phenomenon. promise!

previously: but what about the english? and cousin marriage rates amongst nineteenth century english and english jews and exogamous marriage in medieval england and invention of the modern world

_{(note: comments do not require an email. huddle!)}