Hicks & Inbreds

[star.matrix at verizon.net]

At 05:53 PM 3/16/02 +0000, Cian O'Connor wrote:
>.
>
>You can be inbred without commiting incest. Maybe this
>is a British/European thing, but there are villages
>parts of Britain still where the breeding pool is very
>small and generations of the same family have been
>living there for many hundreds, maybe a thousand
>years. In certain parts of the Fenlands this was
>noticable. Its improved in the C20th - a village that
>a friend of mine grew up near, had an unusual number
>of village idiots, for example - coincidentally the
>majority of the families had one of two family names.
>Inbreeding doesn't necessarily lead to degeneracy, but
>it isn't terribly healthy either.

there is not much of a correlation between incest or inbreeding and 
congential disorders like being a "village idiot" or whatever. iow, this is 
largely a myth.