[sinanju]

Does anyone out there know if the stricture agains cousins marrying just a nineteenth-century Darwinian hangover or perhaps a wee bit more ancient and universal? These advocates and their fashionable academic enablers seem to want to make it look like the next worst thing to eugenics.

[ChicagoHebrew]

It ain't universal. In most of the world there is no taboo against cousins marrying. I imagine most of us only have to go back maybe 5 generations or so before we run into ancestors who were cousins.

[johnb838]

It's not Darwin, it's Malthus who came up with the charts that figured out the likelihood of a recessive trait coming to the fore. Link to Malthus

[rwfromkansas]

Darwinian hangover.

Now, if a family keeps doing this over and over and over, that is a problem.

But, once or twice isn't going to result in a significantly higher chance of genetic problems.