People are discovering the truth about their biological parents with DNA—and learning that incest is far more common than many think.

The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me. And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.

Most of the people affected may never know about their parentage, but these days, many are stumbling into the truth after AncestryDNA and 23andMe tests.

  • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
    93·
    3 months ago

    It is the Atlantic to be fair so you might not be missing much. This from a magazine that endorsed the Shakespeare conspiracy repeatedly.

    If you can lie about one thing, you can lie about two…

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
        6·
        3 months ago

        That he didn’t write the plays and presumably the poems. It’s basically flat earthers for the literature. The Atlantic ran a piece advocating for it and then ran two other pieces about how great they were for running the original piece.

        • VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works
          21·
          3 months ago

          It’s a good conspiracy they’ve got answers to all the questions, ‘what about all the huge piles of evidence that clearly show he wrote them?’ Is easily answered by ‘just pretend it doesn’t exist!’

          Best is when they say Edmund Spencer wrote them or someone, it makes so little sense I almost hope it’s true.

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
            1·
            3 months ago

            My favorite is when they say Bacon wrote them. Ok spend five minutes and read New Atlantis and then five minutes reading say the Scottish play. Then look me in the eye while you say that the same author wrote both.

            The style, the words, the handling of dialogue, every single aspect of the two men are different.

            Some will say it is unfair to compare the two but I would say that since the conspiracy started with Bacon it is fair game.

            It just boils the blood of some English lit types that the guy who will forever dominate the language only had a high school education and a bff who owned a bookstore.